Love the One Your With and leg bands

Well, I have had chickens for a little over a year. I got my first Seramas in September, 09. I have learned a whole lot about chickens since then and I am still learning. I am pretty successful at hatching eggs. I have about 50 chickens now, most of them I have bred myself. I am now doing selective breeding. I purchased three more roosters and one hen, breeding for type of course and also size since my original chickens which had good type, are very large. I was going to enter one of my hens in a show but she weighed too much. At the time I was breeding her and feeding her very well. I could try to get her weight down by being very careful about what she eats but the shows are over for a while.

There are several good articles on the web about the sex life of chickens. "Chickens Complicated Sex Life." in particular. Apparently the hen can expel the sperm of an unwanted rooster, which explains why many of the eggs I get from planned breeding are infertile at first. Then I guess things settle down and the hen accepts the sperm of the rooster she is with. You remember the words to that song ? "If you cant be with the one you love, then love the one your with."

I have a silver wheaten rooster that is very attractive. His daughter was the hen I wanted to enter in the show. I bred them together to see if I could get the same color - the father as well as the daughter, and I got nine chicks. They do not have adult plumage yet but it will be interesting to see what comes from this breeding.

I also bred two of my smaller chickens: Charlie chicken, a 9 ounce rooster, and Ms. Butterscotch, a small A type hen. The chicks did not seem to be smaller chicks, so we will see how they grow. I did get a few very small chicks, but not necessarily from the smaller chickens. One of my original hens, Belle, does not produce good type chicks but she seems to produce the smaller ones, I think. Gathering eggs at random from the big chicken yard - at the time I believed she was the only hen to lay as the others were young pullets - I have gotten some very small chicks. Singer, the singing chick pictured above with his or her purple leg bands , is about three weeks old now and the size of chicks about three days old. I am keeping a pictorial record of Singer, a Belle-Cocopop rooster cross, and several other chicks, primarily for color development from chick to adult.

It is really important to be able to identify the chicks parents, and if you have a small breeding program like I do, all the chicks go in the same brooder. How can you tell them apart? Most all have similar color groupings, and the colors change rapidly. They are so tiny, it is impossible to find a leg band or other marking device that you can visually identify at a glance. After many trials I have found that using 1/4 colored rubber bands, and placing four on one leg (one color identifying each parent or parental couple) works. You need four because one or more will fall off until they are about two weeks old, and you have to put them back on. The ones remaining on the leg will give you enough identity to replace the ones that came off. After about two weeks they stay on.

It is winter here now. Freezing temperatures! Have you tried the Thermo- Cube? a small plugin that turns on heat lamps, etc at 35 degrees and turns them off at 45 degrees.? A very helpful device.

Well, I have to check on the chickens now, on this very cold morning. Brrrrr!

You Mite Think About This!!

To increase the hatchability of your eggs - feed your breeding chickens a really good diet. I added fresh greens,wheat grass and sprouts, some fruit and vitamins, mayonnaise and applesauce. Everyone has their own recipe for adding nutrients to their chickens' food. I know some people use buttermilk or yogurt, and some chickens prefer certain things. I give all my chickens mealworms, and have been raising mealworms for a while, just to have a good access to them. So along with handling the eggs with care as I mentioned in September, a good diet is essential for a strong viable egg.

Mites! As I was reading information on breeding and care of chickens I glossed over the mites section. How can my chickens have mites? I asked myself. they have never even been outside, since I received them in October. Now that I look back on this, I laugh at my ignorance. You MITE ask yourself, Which came first, the mite or the chicken? Anyway, the sad story is that disregarding the suggestion that you should spray or dust your broody hen for mites at the beginning of setting, caused me to lose all my first meager hatch of about five chicks.

What happened was, I brought my little hen Queenie, who is so very tame, into the house with the two she hatched and the few that I hatched out of the incubator. I put them all together and she was a good mother. I did notice however that her body movements were very pronounced and sort of overdone, and she was scratching a lot. Her little chicks tried to stay out of her way when they were out, sort of like they were afraid. I had put her on a small blanket on the floor of my computer room with food and water and she did not leave the blanket or her new chicks and the new chicks stayed mostly under their mother venturing out for seconds at a time. At night, for some reason I placed her in a box with her chicks, I don't recall why I did this. But on the third day when I went to take her out of the box , all the little chicks were dead and I could see little bugs crawling all over them. You can imagine how bad I felt. I really was responsible for the death of my first chicks.

There is a lot of info on blogs about chicken mites. Just pay attention to this fact. Unless you do something on a routine basis, you will have problems, and you don't want the care you put into hatching a new flock of chicks to be ruined by mites.

Successful Hatching

I got my first Seramas in October. They started laying in November. I was so thrilled. I didn't know anything about broody hens or hatching eggs in an incubator, but I had purchased a Styrofoam incubator in advance with a automatic turner and a circulated air fan. There were some directions with the incubator, and some in other books I had bought. But to cut a long story short, of those I tried to hatch, only five chicks survived for a few days, and then they all died. I felt so low. A real gloom settled over me.

Then I heard about a book called "The New Incubation Book" by Brown and Robbins. Described as the hatchers bible. Apparently it was out of print, I tried to find one, and eventually got one from a used book store. It is a wonderful book with lots of pictures. many of candled eggs showing chick development. And tons of information about breeding chickens, etc.

So what did I do wrong? The hens laid every other day most of the time, some times they laid eggs every day and sometimes three or four days went by before they laid an egg. At first I picked up the eggs and put them in my pocket to carry back inside the house, but after breaking one I carried a small ceramic cup to put the eggs in where they rattled around until, back in the house, I put the eggs in an egg carton to hold until I got enough eggs, about four, to put in the incubator at once.

What did I do wrong just gathering eggs? Eggs are porous. They are vulnerable to bacterial infection when the shells come in contact with any object. How can that be , you say, when the hen is sitting on them in a chicken pen which is definitely not the most aseptic place to be. Well, good old mother nature has supplied the hen's feathers with an antibiotic which protects the egg, all the while she is setting on it! I should have, and now I do, wash my hands before handling any egg, any time. Before I did this I had to throw away a lot of eggs that when candled, showed a definite bacterial infection.

What else did I do wrong? Jiggling and jarring the eggs as I transported them from the shop to my house. Serama eggs I think, are really sensitive to being shaken and knocked about even mildly. Now I take an egg carton with kleenex liners in each indentation so the eggs are held stable while they are being moved.

Storing Eggs. The longer an egg is stored, the less its chance of hatching. The optimal storing temperature is 55F. The optimal humidity 70%. Luckily, in the winter, my back bathroom has just these conditions if I block the heat duct, and I did. An egg in storage must be turned every day, so I turned them pointy side up - pointy side down until more reading told me that was wrong - you turn them on their side. So I would turn them half way clockwise every day until I read that that was wrong, you turn them half way clockwise then turn them halfway counter clockwise - the reason is that there are two suspensory ligaments, one on either end of the egg - the pointy end and the wide end that keep the yolk from floating to the top of the egg and sticking to the shell. These two coiled ligaments are coiled in opposite directions. turning the egg in the same direction every day will wind up one side and unwind the other which will disrupt the structure and cause the death of the embryo. So I learned how to store and turn eggs correctly. I would store eggs until I got four and then put them in the incubator.

So you see, there is plenty of things that you can do that effect the hatchability of the egg. Everything you do right just increases the chance that you will get a good hatch rate.

What's in that egg?

I was reading the Poultry Press the other day and in one column the writer was confessing that she has NES or Next Egg Syndrome - Each egg is sort of like a little gift or surprise - you never know what might pop out - so you just keep putting them in the incubator. I have next egg syndrome too, especially since the Seramas come in an endless variety of colors and patterns- but I really have to stop collecting eggs for hatching because I can really only handle about twenty new chicks at a time. And my hens are starting to set. One after the other. I have a D'uccle hen setting on six Serama eggs in the shop. I have a wheaton Serama hen sitting on three eggs in a separate pen, and Queenie, one of my first Serama hens, just plopped herself in a nest and started sitting on one egg. I saw her there in a nest today and then I found two more eggs in a seperate nest and stuck them under her.

Thats it! so help me. I have eight hatched out so far. 15 in the incubator, and 12 under hens. I don't expect all to hatch

.

I bought three new roosters this year, and two new hens. I wanted to try them out before fall just to see what they might produce. I had to throw out at least two dozen eggs that were not fertile, and I was beginning to wonder what was wrong.The new small black /silver rooster didn't produce any fertile eggs, so I gave up on him and moved him to a pen by himself. He is the only black Serama I have. I have never had a black chick so far, but the other day, SURPRISE! a small black chick, with a black bill and black legs hatched. Where did he come from? Good thing I write on each egg as I collect them- the date I pick the egg up, the parents - if I know -the date it goes in the incubator- the 18th day -the 21st day- and the slot where it is placed in the incubator. Each egg has written on it all the info I need in case it gets misplaced. And this chick hatched from the only fertile egg that this black rooster produced - I didn't even know he had a fertile egg. But his name is on it! So he can do it. So thank goodness for next egg syndrome. YEA! I was beginning to wonder. A real surprise popped out of that egg!

Do you subscribe to the poultry press? Helpful articles and nice pictures and lots of advertising in that paper. I look forward to mine every month.

Starting with Seramas

The purpose of this blog is to be encouraging and supportive to those who are just starting out in the "I think I'm going to get some chickens" mode. I read poultry blogs and get a great deal of information from them and I think it is a good way to solve some problems that eventually do come up. I have had chickens for about a year and a half and made a lot of mistakes until I set myself right and so perhaps I have some information that may help you. So this blog will be about chickens, mostly Seramas. I may have some to sell eventually on the web. Actually I have sold almost all of the cockerals and pullets that I hatched out this spring. I have two cockerals left- no hens and am keeping one rooster and one hen out of this batch for myself.

Buying Seramas. If you want to show Seramas, you want good quality good type Seramas. A lot of points are given for type, and a lot are given for temperament. so those are the two main things you should keep in mind when looking for Seramas. Perhaps you live in an area where there are a lot of good breeders. Florida? Lousiana? in that case you can just search for a pair, perhaps in the newspaper ads, or on line, and you have a chance to see them before you buy. Always the best thing to do. A fellow called me this spring wanting to start breeding and showing Seramas - he previously bred and shown dogs. So I told him the best thing to do, and this is what I would do If I could ,would be to go to the big Serama show in Lousiana in the spring, The Cajun Classic, meet all the breeders, look at all the chickens and buy a really good trio. And save yourself a lot of breeding steps along the way. But that option is not available for everyone. If you can't do that watch out - there are people who will take advantage of you. So always require a picture of the Serama, ask for age and weight. Tell the seller you don't want a wry tailed chicken and ask if the chicken has guaranteed fertility. Unless you just want a pet and then all this doesn't matter.

There is a new book out called "The Serama" By Sigrid van Dort. It is a small book and a really good one. It was available on the Serama Council of North America (SCNA)web site, but it sold out. Perhaps they will print more - I expect so. It will tell you all about the Serama and a lot of other things you should know if you are going to breed these tiny chickens.

Thats all the advice I have for this day.