Of chickens: hatching, merging flocks, sexing, breeding...and roosters that don't crow

We've had fifteen baby chicks hatch so far, and that plastic crate / homemade brooder is getting pretty crowded.


It's getting to standing room only in there! And they haven't all hatched yet!

So I've been busy converting our cucumber house into a larger secondary chicken brooder / coop.

We've currently still got our original chooks, who are laying...a little bit. And they're in our big chicken coop out the back. But you can't put baby chicks in with older chooks - the older chooks would attack the littlies, and kill them.

Chickens are very territorial. Even when introducing a full grown hen, you have to be very careful putting her into an established flock.

You do it at night, when they're sleeping - slot her into amongst the others on the roost, and then they'll accept her - they wake in the morning, and figure that the newbie has "always been there"! But if you put a newbie in while they're awake, they'd attack.

With our chickens, we intend to keep a few of our older chickens from our original flock. Our "easter eggers", who are still laying nicely, and our Barnevelder rooster and hen, who are only a year old.

So we'll be merging flocks.


Get ready...one, two three - MERGE!


Setting up a secondary brooder

So what I've been busy doing, as the plastic brooder crate is getting too crowded, is fixing up electricity in our old cucumber house. It only has a few cucumber plants in it at the moment, and they're not as important as the chicks.

So I've sorted out electricity there, put up a heat bulb, and it's ready to do. There's already a watering system - I just needed to try it off, so no water went anywhere near the electricity, and instead just into a waterer for the chooks.

We have fifteen birds hatched so far. We've had four purebred barnevelders, one rhode island red, and the rest are our own "mutts". Most of the eggs still waiting to hatch are rhode island reds (they were due after the others, so I'm not worried yet), plus a couple of light sussex.

After this round, we may consider hatching out another brood, for friends and to sell around Dunedin. But we've been really happy.

If you're ever going to "turn a flock over" you really have two choices. One is to cull the old flock before the new flock are laying, as they'll soon get too big for most brooders.

The second choice is to have a really big brooder, and only hatch out a few chicks.

We're lucky, and have the space and facilities to be able to hatch out lots of chicks at once.

Culling your old flock before the newbies arrive would mean, of course, that you're without eggs for half a year while the littlies get up to laying age. Hatching out only a few chicks means you wouldn't have to have a secondary chook facility, but if you get a majority of males, you might be in difficulty, depending on how many hens you need to replace.

For us, we want a rolling flock stock of about 6-8 hens plus a rooster or two (ideally we'd like a barnevelder rooster as well as a rhode island red rooster). To get those numbers, we needed to hatch out 16-20 chicks (because half of them will likely be roosters), which means incubating about 30-50 eggs (depending on how lucky you feel).


Hatch rates

So far our hatch rates have been:

• Our own eggs: 11 chicks from 15 eggs.
  
• Barnevelder eggs from Appletons: 4 chicks out of 6 eggs (one egg was infertile, one is still unhatched but shows signs of life)
  
• Mix of eggs from Kennerleys: 1 hatched so far (one rhode island red). 2 infertile when candled, and thrown out. *9 still due to hatch and show signs of life.
  

Sexing chickens

The breeds we've chosen (Barnevelder, Rhode Island Red and Light Sussex) are easy to confirm gender with from quite an early age, whereas some breeds (like white leghorns) are really hard to tell.

I think there's an advantage in choosing breeds that are easy to sex. With white leghorns, for example, even experts have been known to be fooled by accidentally keeping a rooster, thinking it was a chicken!


Breeding for a purpose

The breeds I'm interested in particularly are Barnevelders and Rhode Island Reds. Both are dual purpose birds (good layers and good meat birds), and they're heavy birds, so they don't fly around a while lot.

This means several advantages. It means the males we breed are useful - as meat birds. As heavy birds that don't fly, we don't have to build coops, tractors and fences so high either.

But I'm especially interested in crossing the two breeds. Rhodies are noted for excellent egg laying, but it does drop off quite a bit through winter. Barnies, on the other hand, are excellent winter layers - it's what they were bred for.

I'm hoping to breed dual purpose birds that lay really well right through the winter.

Well, that's the theory ;-) You'll see how it goes, over time!


Is that a rooster or a chicken?

Some white leghorn roosters (and certain other breeds of roosters) don't crow. Saying that, this could be an advantage if you live in the city, and want to slip past the authorities!

Many cities and councils don't allow roosters because of the noise, but I figure if there isn't any noise, what they don't know can't hurt them!

Our young birds will be old enough and big enough to go in with the oldies at about ten weeks. We'll do the neat trick of putting them in with the old flock one by one, at night.


Turning the flock over

We should be able to tell for certain how many females we have in about six to eight weeks from now. Then the hens should begin laying from about 16 weeks.

Once they're laying, we'll get rid of the last of our old chooks that we're not keeping.

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Have a lovely day!