Wednesday, July 24, 2013

My Black Mottled D'uccle Project

 In this post I will be writing about how my Black Mottled breeding project is going , as I wrote in my post Black Mottleds a challenging color, breeding Mottleds has been a challenge , mainly focusing on getting good pattern, above is Domino my Black Mottled pullet.
Above are my two black roosters.
This is my black rooster that I will be culling because of the red lacing, the reason red lacing popped up is  because I bred his mom with a Porcelain and since Porcelains came from Mille Fleur's and are basically Mille Fleur's with the delude gene red leakage commonly happens if you cross these two colors together.
This is my hen Milkshake who I used for this project because she has good type for the color, on occasion you will get a blue Mottled which is blue with black lacing and white spots, out of my 3 black chicks only the one above has red leakage the other two are a good quality pair.
This is my rooster Platinum who is the Father of the chicks above I crossed him with the black hen to experiment because I heard that if you breed these two colors together you get a blue mottled with red leakage, the part about red leakage is right but didn't happen to all of my chicks just 1 , as for getting blue mottleds out of these colors I'm not sure.
This is Oreo who I was using for breeding but since he has disqualifications and defects which are squirrel tail and to many complete white feathers he would pass them on as seen in the chick below, there's nothing wrong with them except you can't show them, one way I can tell if their good quality or not is the chicks like the one below grow up to look like Oreo and solid black chicks with a little white are worth keeping , some of you might also be wondering if its cross breeding and that it going off the breed the answer is no  I'm crossing two colors of the breed not two breeds and as long as the bird meets the color and breed requirements  it can be showed.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Ella & Fella ~ My Sebastopol Geese Growing Up

 Ella & Fella, my Sebastopol geese are 4 months old now. I haven't yet introduced them to the big pond, choosing to keep them and my 2 young ducklings, also 4 months old, in the back poultry yard.
 I pen the geese with the ducklings every night to protect them from predators. In the morning I release them and oh what fluttering feathery, splashy joy ! The ducks come out quacking and the geese honking ...
 ...reminding me of frilly ballerinas. After their splashing around and swimming sessions the geese eat grass and sun them selves alongside the ducks. Below are 2 short videos showing the typical morning routine for them. I am loving these geese  ! They still follow me around when I am outside with them and if I sit down they come lay down beside my feet.



 

Monday, July 1, 2013

Bronze turkeys growing quickly

 I thought it would be nice to post some pictures on how much my turkeys have grown in the past few months, above and below is Tomato my tom.
   
This is a picture of the turkeys when I got them.