Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
breed you're raising. It's best to weigh several dozen over several weeks to get a more
accurate average egg size. Carefully keep track of these weights and take note if they
decrease in weight.
Egg productivity, hatch rate, and growth rate of the offspring are the other traits to
monitor as measures of inbreeding. If hatch rate declines from year to year, you are be-
ginning to have a problem. Keep detailed, accurate records of egg numbers per hen as
well as annual egg weights. Weights of adult breeder birds are another important meas-
urement to record.
Health and vigor of the offspring are also crucial qualities to monitor. If you notice
that your chicks are not growing well, or seem to get every disease that comes along,
you are likely entering a problem zone of inbreeding.
Invigorating Your Stock
When health and vigor start declining, it's time to start seeking new bloodlines and de-
termine the best strategy to invigorate your stock. Often a new male from a different
strain will do the job.
You may have to
outcross
— mate your hens with a different, but similar breed —
and
select back
, which means seek out through several generations of offspring the
birds that have the proper, desired traits of the breed. It is best to outcross with a dif-
ferent breed only if you have reached a bottleneck. When you only have breeding birds
from the same inbred strain to choose from and no source for new bloodlines, you have
no other option but to use other bloodlines from a different breed.
Outcrossing with a different breed is not a beginner's project. Wait and take on a pro-
ject of this nature after you've had some experience with breed improvement using dif-
ferent lines of the same breed.
Maintaining a Breed
Proper breed traits can be found in the APA standard, or the recognized description for
those breeds not yet recognized by the APA (see Resources). If you're setting out to
maintain the traditional traits of a breed, start with as diverse a population as you can
while still selecting birds comprised of all of the traits that typify the breed or variety.
Finding birds from distinct families can be difficult if you're interested in rare breeds,
as their numbers are already limited.
You can't always count on getting chicks from two different hatcheries, as many
places
drop ship
, which means that one hatchery ships their chicks on behalf of any
number of other hatcheries, so that the babies of one breed are all a single strain of
chicks from the same place and the same breeding pens. Some breeds of poultry are so
rare that the larger hatcheries don't maintain their own flocks. In that case, even if you
