October and Autumn.

I love this time of the year, but don't look forwards to the first frosts of the year.Months of frozen drinkers and cold fingers and trying to give the birds as much comfort as I can till new grass and longer daylight brings spring.

I have had a very good breeding season and the sheds are bursting with growers.Every time I get a chance to sit on an upturned bucket and watch the birds interact the pleasure makes all the work involved worthwhile.

As yet I haven't had a chance to select the birds for next season or at least birds that may be good enough to go into the breeding pens.
I have bred a lot of Indian Game, both dark laced and Jubilee and some of the growers look promising.

This season I ran about 80 growers from 5 pens all together in the granary.These birds were from different hatches and different ages and as soon as they feathered they were allowed to run out of the runs and follow the older growers outside.They seemed to do very well on this and spread out around the farm and fields.No real problems they all seemed to get on well and only 2 birds (both splash Marans pullets) had any tail feathers removed.Oddly enough these 2 were from different batches a month apart and they stick together everywhere they go and even more oddly they have teamed up with a group of Black Sumatra growers and where they go the Marans go...even managing to roost high in the granary how they manage that I don't know.

The ongoing trial for a table bird goes on and this season I mated a Welsh Black to Welsh Black Cock to pure Indian Game hens.
The results are a number of very large birds with good width but a bit high on the leg as yet they hopefully will fill out as they grow.

I bought in 2 lots of Copper Marans eggs this season after searching ebay for some quality looking birds.Out of 24 eggs I managed to get 2 from 12 and 4 from 12 and they turned out to be rubbish...I think I'll stick with the lines I have.

Out of 6 Mottled Cochin eggs, again from ebay I got 1..a pullet.She looks ok at the moment,growing away well and hopefully will come in better next spring.

I bought another 6 Black Cochin,again via ebay and 5 were clears and 1 early dead in shell..Very disappointing considering they were from a member of the Cochin committee and supposedly won lots of shows.

It is around this time of year I start winding down the breeding pens.
I have sold about 30% more hatching eggs this year than last and shows just how many new keepers are getting the chicken habit.
I get about 3 mails a day from people just about to get their first birds and it's grand when the mail starts 'I have bought the housing and would like to know more about a certain breed I keep'.

Traditional breeds and there are many and varied types are the backbone of the poultry kept around the world.
A huge amount of time, money and effort has been put into massed produced hybrids.The research has been on-going for around 40 years into hybrid trails, mainly on egg layers to breed a bird that gives as many eggs as possible for the amount of feed given or taken by a bird.

Breeds like the Warren and loman brown replaced all but a handful of the flocks throughout the UK and abroad, as they were bred to lay and utilize the amount of food given in return for eggs.
Laying numbers were published and compared to the traditional laying flocks of Leghorns,Sussex and Rhode Island Red they laid more and give a better return on the capital invested in the poultry unit.

Numbers bandied about were 260-300 eggs a year in a pullet year in some cases but fell off in the second year and in between the end of the first season and the start of the next they went into a moult and stopped laying.
Not a lot of good if you had a supply contract to fill,so on an all in all out policy millions of birds are culled every year and new birds brought in as POL.
This has always been the commercial answer to egg production.

Up until the introduction of the commercial hybrid almost all flocks were made up of pure breeds and a poultry farmer that was unfortunate enough to fill his sheds with poor layers suffered the prospect of losing his income and in some cases worse as the whole project rested on the money from the egg cheque.A wrong choice was disaster.

In the days when Leghorns,Wyandottes,Rhode Island Reds,Anconas and Sussex were the top laying breeds there were breeders up and down the country hatching chicks and in some cases selling them on to people who reared them on to POL (Point of Lay) It was a massive industry and still is and even in those days breeders made claims of wonderful egg laying numbers to tempt the farmers to buy their birds.It was a shambolic situation and laying trials were set up all over the UK to take in and test the claims of breeders.

Government backed laying trials were set up to test the numbers claimed by poultry breeders and a group of birds were kept for around 16 weeks from point of lay and every egg was recorded and the birds from breeders laying the most eggs in the different breeds were published in the farming and poultry press.

If you could advertise that you had a strain that laid 250+ eggs a year (pullet year) in the breeds that suited the climate and locality and choice of a farmer you were on the road to profit.

It was a very big business and tens of thousands of birds were sold as day old chicks from hatcheries all over the country.I remember as a boy the boxes of chicks coming in by rail and road.
When the hybids started showing up across the country the pure bred Leghorn flocks along with other breeds were changed for the better short term laying types like Warrens.

Some farmers held on to a few flocks, but when they died or retired the breeds that had taken so much work to keep pure and productive died with them.

It's a sad fact that these breeds will never return and nearly all the pure bred birds of today are shadows of the old strains and lines of 50 years ago.

more to follow.

Growing on.

The birds are getting stronger everyday and ready to face the world outside the brooder room.I usually move them into an outside run after dark, so that when they wake up in the morning they are already in the new coop and run.I shut the pop hole for the first night and after that leave it open for them to get up and out into the run when they want to.They have got used to the warmth in the brooder room, so don't put them out if the forecast is for a night time temperature drop until they have got used to it.
For the first few days I put the feed in a flat dish,a terracotta flowerpot saucer that is heavy enough to take the weight of them standing on the edge of it after that I scatter on the ground to give them something to do.You must make sure you move the run to fresh mown grass before it gets to dirty from the birds or they may pick up a bug from the dropping they are picking through.
All poultry has a certain amount of immunity to the nasties they tend to have and putting birds under stress will trigger a reaction and before you know it birds start going down with symptoms.
These usually start by the bird being inactive and hunched up,by the time you find them hunched it's 99.9% certain it's a goner and a trip to the vet is in my opinion totally pointless and that's if you can find one that knows anything about poultry, as most vets haven't a clue.

Isolate asap into a hospital cage with a heat lamp,but be prepared to lose it.
It's down to stockmanship and seeing that the birds want for nothing.

Clean fresh water everyday with Cider vinegar in it.If the birds have messed in it throw it away and refresh, not just tip the tray and clear the crap out as it contaminated the water and the other birds will be drinking it.

After a few days settling in I enlarge the run with some 8ft x 4ft weld mesh panels framed by 2 x 2in timber to give them some extra space and avoiding crowding and the stress that causes.

Keep your eye on them, as there will be a pecking order and make sure those at the bottom are getting a fair deal if they are not remove and house in a separate run.

The youngsters soon get the hang of living outside and every night or at most every second night after they have gone into the coop to roost I move it and the run onto fresh grass.
This grass is fresh to them but has had adults free-ranging over it for a number of years.
It still has a very good covering of grass, as I mow it on a regular basis to keep it short.

The growers are subjected to low level contamination by the other birds and build up an immunity to any virus or bugs that the ground holds from the other birds.
This is why it is vital that any birds brought into your place are separated form what birds you have there.
The new ones will have a different tolerance to different strains of virus and bugs and will pass those they have to your birds and vice versa.
You can be lucky and get away with it, but I run a closed flock system here and never buy or bring in any birds from outside..I buy in hatching eggs now and then, but always hatch them in another incubator from my own eggs..Although saying that I have put bought in eggs under broodies as they seem to carry an antiseptic in the brood patch next to the eggs they are sitting on.

After a week or so I let them all out as by then they know where they live and return to the run and coop at night.The last evening feed put into the run helps to get them in.

To see them ranging across the area of ground around the yard is always great to watch.I find poultry fascinating and within a few days find them working away in some corner looking for titbits.
The adults are still in the outside breeding pens and it's interesting to see the reaction of the youngsters to the alarm calls of the cocks whenever a hawk of aerial threat comes over.

Even the chicks up in the granary brooder room from a few days old react to outside alarm sounds and usually freeze or flatten when they hear it it makes you wonder sometime how wonder full nature is.

more to follow.