Washington Feather Fanciers Winter Brisk 2014

 This last week we went to the Winter Brisk (put on by the Washington Feather Fanciers ) to enter, sell, and look at poultry.The weather outside was cold but nice and warm inside the barn with lots of sounds of different poultry. This was an impressive Bourbon Red turkey displaying for us.

 This little Modern game bantam looked like he was walking on stilts.

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 There were lots of different kinds of poultry there this year and some that I have never seen, including these frizzled Belgian D'anvers  .

 I entered some birds as well, although I  didn't manage to get photos of them at the show. ( I took some pictures afterwards.) Overall my birds did good. They got Reserve of Breed , Reserve of Variety and some firsts, pretty good considering there was a lot of good competition this year.

 One of the Mille Fleur pullets I entered.

 Her dad Copper.

 My Black Mottled hen . I managed to sell almost all my chicks at the show, and also picked up a new bird from the breeder with the winning Porcelains to add a new bloodline to my birds.  Overall my birds did good. I sold 12 birds ,got a new one and met some other good breeders, and I look forward to going next year !

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.

Black Mottleds a challeging color

 This color variety, seen at its best on Anconas, has progressive more, and larger, white spots with each successive moult. Most Anconas have the correct amount of white in their first adult year and are too white in future years.  Some birds have too few white spots first time round. Expert exhibitors know that if a few carefully selected body feathers are removed as soon as they have grown their first adult  feathers, the replacement feathers should come out with proper white spots.  So a fresh show team must be bred annually . Above is my mottled rooster Oreo who was born with too much white.

 This is my Mottled hen in 2012 who in this photo has good pattern for her first year.

 This is the same hen from above who this year has an over all too white appearance which is considered a disqualification in the breed.

Above is Oreo. Only Anconas can be relied upon to produce a whole batch of uniformly spotted youngsters . Other breeds with this pattern like Belgian d'uccles ,are usually very variable.  Breeders of Black Mottled d'uccles , Japanese or Wyandottes will be lucky if they breed a uniform showable trio. This is why I have decided not breed black Mottleds for exhibition , but black Mottleds are still as good as any color when it comes to other quality's besides exibition. Info is from Exhibition Poultry Keeping by David Scrivener.