Poultry Central - The New Zealand Poultry & Chicken Forum

Marina wrote:Nice to see the progress you have made.

Initially I had thought you were after a mottled frizzle - black with white feather tips? Did you pursue this as well?

Yes, I have a fair few of those running around. Those are the ones where I'm working on the dumpling factor.

They're going well. Spots are slowly taking over our chook paddocks! The Original Motzles are breeding well and we're getting plenty of those. Time to work on the Dumpling Factor now as quite a few of them are rather skinnier and leggier than I'd like (and way too good at ignoring fences). The Mille...

Voila, the first frizzled mille fleur type bird from the project.

sewren wrote:She's lovely - hurrah for probability roulette! Great if you can get a roo to put with them. How big do you reckon she will grow (compared with other breeds)?

I'm expecting similar to a White Leghorn or Ancona, possibly a touch larger.

I'm currently running three drakes to eight ducks. These boys are pretty heavy and slow which may help reduce how much they can chase the girls. My ducks don't seem to be hassled much by them. I've had some in-fighting between drakes around sexual maturity and briefly at the start of spring. Seems t...

We've worked with our vet and had samples taken and sent to various labs for diagnosis. Primary symptoms in these birds are tumours - internal and external with weight loss and eventual starvation with the green faeces typical of that.

It's been a while since I posted anything from Project Motzle (if you don't know what that is, go hit the search button up top searching for 'Project Motzle'). The main goal was to produce a non-broody, heavy, with no to limited flight, black bird with white spots and frizzled feathers that laid a d...

In my experience the appleyards get their dark green head in the breeding season and then they fade back to almost (but not quite) indistinguishable from the girls during the off season. I'd keep the large guy with the thin straight neck line (left most in the group photo) and eat the other two.

With added drawing-fu.

With the runners I had, I would fold the bottom joint (hand and lower arm in human terms) correctly, then used vet wrap to wrap around just that part, pretty tight, but not so tight as to lose circulation. Then next I'd fold the elbow joint correctly, and vet wrap the upper arm to the previously wra...

With the larger strain, bright yellow beak = girl. The greener the bill the more likely it is to be a boy. With the smaller strain they're all pretty green, but the boys more so than the girls on the whole. The larger strain, the ones that look more white than brown have so far ended up being girls....

Boy haven't they grown! Some lovely looking duckies in there. The smaller darker ones will be from my first lot of appleyards. While they lack in size compared to the other guys, they can't half output lots of big eggs. Hopefully not too many boys, but looking at the picture - a fair few look boy to...

sewren wrote:Ha, I just re-discovered this thread when searching for angel wing (which I think one duckling has). You turned out to be somewhat the enabler, rather than the dissuader, seatil, when it came to ducklings!

Some people can only be persuaded/dissuaded by first hand experience.

sewren wrote:And this reminds me that I should get some more duckling photos now they are starting to feather up....

Dead keen on seeing these. Especially as the last two "broodies" I gave duck eggs to said "**** this" to the eggs and started pacing around.

I've got Pekin bantams & if you want to get fertile eggs you have to 'crutch' them - I trim, as I am pretty sure it hurts when you pull the feathers out - the trouble I have is to make sure they don't end up with prickly bums! Oh man, I soooo have this mental image of "hedgehog bantams&quo...