Monday 20th March 2017
Cockerels
So, we are talking cockerels today – as promised yesterday – and of course also announcing that we have NO new lambs or kids.
We check the barn roughly every 2 hours from 7am (ish) to 2am (ish) and pretty much always find the same: Mrs Brown and Lamorna chewing the cud, Onion up and about, Garlic lying down groaning. It is going to be a massive shock when we go down one day to find one of them has given birth!!!!
Back to the cockerels: on the left we have our new Indian Game. We swapped him for our cockerel in order to get a new bloodline and so have a cockerel that was unrelated to any of our five females. He is 2013 born (as was ours) so we hope has a fair bit of fertility left in him. Indian Game chickens are mainly bred for meat as despite their small size, they are very broad-chested and fabulously stocky and dense birds weighing in around 3.5 kg (the males). Many people cross them with larger breeds such as the Light Sussex (average male weight 4kg) in order to produce larger dense carcasses. They are not prolife egg layers (around 60-90 a year). Leghorns lay 180-250, Sussex 180-210! Indian Game chickens make great broodies and are, in our view, very pretty (see 11th August for a picture of a female).
On the right is our latest acquisition: a Welsummer. The Welsummer cockerel weights in just over 3 kg and these birds are bred for their eggs which are a beautiful dark red-brown colour. There are various types, this one being a Partridge Welsummer!
We are VERY happy to report that introducing this chap into the flock was a lot more successful than when we introduced the Indian Game and after a couple of very mild skirmishes between him and the IG and then with the turkeys, peace reigned and has pretty much done so ever since. We are not sure which cockerel will become ‘top dog’ or even if one will, there are enough ‘ladies’ to go round after all.
Our plans are still to pursue only having IG cockerels and so it may be that the Welsummer is only with us for a while. In the absence of being able to get hold of another IG male now, Plan B is to source some eggs and then hatch our own ready for next spring...
We check the barn roughly every 2 hours from 7am (ish) to 2am (ish) and pretty much always find the same: Mrs Brown and Lamorna chewing the cud, Onion up and about, Garlic lying down groaning. It is going to be a massive shock when we go down one day to find one of them has given birth!!!!
On the right is our latest acquisition: a Welsummer. The Welsummer cockerel weights in just over 3 kg and these birds are bred for their eggs which are a beautiful dark red-brown colour. There are various types, this one being a Partridge Welsummer!
We are VERY happy to report that introducing this chap into the flock was a lot more successful than when we introduced the Indian Game and after a couple of very mild skirmishes between him and the IG and then with the turkeys, peace reigned and has pretty much done so ever since. We are not sure which cockerel will become ‘top dog’ or even if one will, there are enough ‘ladies’ to go round after all.
Our plans are still to pursue only having IG cockerels and so it may be that the Welsummer is only with us for a while. In the absence of being able to get hold of another IG male now, Plan B is to source some eggs and then hatch our own ready for next spring...