Re: Chickens not laying

Jill wrote:
pecan wrote:
No, Jill, the new Mom is a silky, under which we hatched normal
chicken eggs.

Ah -- they have a better reputation for being good Mum's
She may just have been taken unawares by the weather
Are there cooler times of the year you can hatch when they are laying?


I just left them to do their thing, and when they sat, I swapped the silky eggs for normal eggs. Hell, I've learned a lot from this experience, I'll do a whole lot of things differently next time.

The eggs have a 90% chance of having come from one of
our hens that was battery-bred, and the last 10% was a pet-shop bird
which I had been told was male so was probably also battery-bred.

I would be surprised at the latter as usually the sexing is VERY accurate ! <grin>

I must be one of the very few in the world who bought a male and it turned into a female.
Mind you, that happened with my parrot too. I called him Solomon, and when he was about 13, he laid me a couple of eggs!

This may explain why the chicks are so weak, though.

Indeed so.
They are not designed to be parents either.
The breeding goes into craeting the grandparent and parent stock with them as the culmination - not as part of a forward process
That is one of the reasons I am so cross about the "fashionable" hybrids being produced in this country these past few years. They are mimicking pure breeds but all based on production leghorns and similar hybrids. There is NO vigour in them at all yet they are targeting the domestic market who will inevitably breed from them.
All they will create is weak sickly dilutions of our national flock.
Its understandable if someone buys a sussex-like hen to breed it to a Sussex cockerel -- the offspring will look sort of okay but be contaminated with the production stocks. The more it happens the further and further we get from a healthy national flock of good birds
I fear that in many ways we have probably already lost the battle.
The modern magazine publishers are not interested in quality breeding. Like everyone else - they are interested in fashion -- its what pays the bills


This is scary!
I'm more pleased every day that I found the five that I now have. The one is glossy black (that's the one sitting now), one is a dark grey, almost charcoal, and three are a sort of grey with dark speckles - they look as if they're wearing pyjamas. They are pretty damned big, although they're more feather than meat, and when they run they look like handleless feather dusters, rolling in the wind!
lol

Catherine
--
== Not nuts, just a little eccentric ==
http://www.africanbush.co.za
African Bush Tours and Safaris
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