I have sorted my birds into two breeding pens for this year, one which has my best male and my best female, and the other which has the rest of the decent pullets and their father.
The first pen is my main brood pen for this year, they are the fowl which (as long as they prove themselves in the brood pen) are going to be very important to my breeding program.
These two birds are siblings, which is necessary at this point as I need to fix/lock in the good traits and weed out the bad ones.
Out of this pair I plan to hatch about 50 chickens this year, this is because when you are inbreeding you need to hatch as many chickens as you can. By the time I also hatch 50 or so pekins, some meat chickens, and some birds from NZFF pen 2, I realistically cant afford to raise any more than that this season.
The cockerel in this pen is a very impressive bird indeed, although he isn’t finished feathering out yet (he’s 9 months old, probably won’t properly finish until after his first adult molt) I can already tell he is going to be stunning when he does.
He has a really good head on him, he’s not bad in terms of colour, he’s got excellent type and conformation, pretty good temperament, but most importantly he’s an amazing forager.
This bird has been free ranging since about April, right up until last month, in that time I have not fed him, and he’s not gotten hungry, all he has been fed in that time is the odd bit of spilt feed, and whatever he could find.
I know he wasn’t hungry as whenever I would spill feed he wouldn’t run over to it, and when he did eat it he would do so in a normal manner. Also when I picked him up I could feel his condition, he was clearly getting enough feed from his environment.
The really amazing thing about that is we live in an ex-forestry block where there is very little green-stuff, so he really is foraging for it.
The pullet in this pen is also an excellent bird.
She is very well balanced in the hand, has beautiful type and conformation, a very good head, she is a good egg producer and a good forager and has decent temperament, and she has pretty good colour.
Most importantly both of these birds are better than their parents.
Pen 2 is made up of the father of the birds in pen 1, and the sisters of the birds in pen 1, the purpose of this pen is to produce some more egg laying hens for me as my current flock are getting older and therefore less productive, and I figure its best to replace them with birds that are of this breed just in case my main lines ever fail.
I do not expect to get any bird worth breeding from this pen, though there is always the chance there is one.
Over all I’m very happy with the way this breed is progressing, although I would like to see improvement in:
– Cockerel maturity age
– Fullness of breast
– Broodiness
– Earlobe colour (I currently have a problem with the earlobes going from white to red in a matter of months)
– Better combs
– Better colour
As well as a few other things, otherwise though they are looking pretty good.
I have the first chickens of the season due to hatch on the 21st of September which will mark the beginning of the 2025 hatching season for me, fingers crossed that they develop into excellent fowl. I am also hoping that this year I have better hatch rates as last year I was struggling with humidity problems which caused me to have low hatchability amongst all the breeds.
Anyway that’s it for now, I may do another update this year, or not, who knows, I just thought I better do one now that the breeding season is under way.