Mary Allen
If you want fluffy chicks in spring, you should now match the rooster to the right hens. Which hen goes with which rooster is a science in itself. Anyone who pays attention to the most important points when keeping them has a better chance of having more fertilized eggs.
Without a rooster, hens lay eggs, but chicks will never hatch from them. However, if you put the rooster next to the hens, not all of the eggs are automatically fertilized. It takes 24 hours to make a chicken egg. So, a fertilized egg is laid no earlier than a day after the chickens’ marriage.
Most of the time things don’t go that fast. In a group of hens, there is a hierarchy and the roosters prefer certain hens. For example, flowering hens are much more popular than other hens. Often the highest-ranking hens cannot be mated with the rooster. If mating is successful, the hen can conserve the sperm. This means that a fertilized egg could still be laid around ten days after the last stroke – as the mating is called in chickens. Good fertilization is ensured if the rooster fertilizes the hens every fourth day. Certain sequences are part of the mating behavior of chickens. The rooster lures to the food, stumbles over the wings, and emits lure calls.
At a specialist lecture at Rassegeflugel Schweiz, Hans-Joachim Schille explained that the breeding group is best between three and fifteen hens, depending on the breed. In principle, a young rooster fertilizes better and earlier in the year than an old rooster. This is because the cockerel courts the hens more and takes his job seriously. Fertilization by an old rooster only takes place later in the year when temperatures rise again. The best fertilization rate is in autumn, the amount of sperm is highest during a stroke in the afternoon.
Mating with a Goal
The spurs of young cocks from the spring are not that big, but the spurs of perennial cocks should be ground off or even shortened before they are put together with the hens. Long and pointed spurs on the rooster can injure the hens on their backs. The spurs are made of horn-like fingernails. Therefore, they can easily be shortened in length.
Only healthy animals with high vitality should be used for breeding. In the case of pedigree chickens, the animals should meet the requirements of the breed. This includes, for example, the body weight prescribed in the standard. Animals with serious faults are not suitable for breeding because these faults are passed on to the offspring.
Diligent breeders set a goal for each mating. This could, for example, be the strengthening of the good comb cut on the offspring, in that the rooster and hen show very good characteristics here. Another variant would be to transmit the strength of the rooster if the hen shows this trait only averagely. For this purpose, a studbook is kept, in which the ancestry of each animal is recorded. This is the only way to record the most important breeding processes. Later, this also includes checking the fallen nest, so that it can be determined which hen laid which egg, as well as labeling the chicks so that the parentage can also be proven in the adult chickens. Anyone who leaves the result in chicken breeding to chance is much more likely to be a breeder than a serious breeder.
Basically, if animals of the same breed from two completely independent herds are mated with each other, the inbreeding coefficient value is equal to zero. But as breeders report, the offspring is very divided and there are many animals with very different characteristics. It is therefore advisable to mate animals that are not too closely related but come from the same breed.
This is reflected in the different breeding methods that Horst Marks describes in the book “Our Breeding Poultry”. Inbreeding is the mating of chickens that are related. Inbreeding is practiced to obtain homozygous animals. The longer this form of breeding is used, the more similar the animals become in their appearance, and the more balanced are their characteristics and certain characteristics such as shape, crest, or plumage color. If inbreeding is too intensive, inbreeding defects such as infertility or susceptibility to diseases can also occur. A neatly kept studbook helps to avoid this. There is commercially available software for this.
Inbreeding Without Sibling Mating
Linebreeding is another method. This is inbreeding without sibling mating. The descendants of each line are closely related to each other. Through line breeding, it is possible to build almost uniform animals with one cock and one hen after a short time. It starts with two non-blood lines. From the offspring of the first year of breeding, the best son is mated back to the mother in the second year of breeding. From this one line develops and at the same time, the same crossing takes place on the paternal line. Horst Marks also writes about family breeding in his book. A high-quality dam forms the starting point of a breeding line.
In poultry breeding, one speaks of blood refreshment when, for example, foreign blood is crossed with a new rooster from a completely different breed. It may be that the offspring will show exactly the desired traits. However, it could also be that the opposite is true and the offspring are very different in appearance. Interested newcomers to breed poultry are recommended to join a small animal breeders’ association because existing members have a great deal of specialist knowledge about chicken breeding.