The script is a comprehensive discussion from the Poultry Keepers podcast, covering various aspects of poultry evaluation including body conformation, feather quality, color, and breeding. The hosts stress the importance of referring to the written standards and seeking mentorship for specific knowledge, and conclude by seeking feedback for future podcast topics.
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The script is a comprehensive discussion from the Poultry Keepers podcast, covering various aspects of poultry evaluation including body conformation, feather quality, color, and breeding. The hosts stress the importance of referring to the written standards and seeking mentorship for specific knowledge, and conclude by seeking feedback for future podcast topics.
You can email us at - poultrykeeperspodcast@gmail.com
Join our Facebook Groups:
Poultry Keepers Podcast -
https://www.facebook.com/groups/907679597724837
Poultry Keepers 360 - - https://www.facebook.com/groups/354973752688125
Poultry Breeders Nutrition - https://www.facebook.com/groups/4908798409211973
Check out the Poultry Kepers Podcast YouTube Channel -
https://www.youtube.com/@PoultryKeepersPodcast/featured
Hi, I'm Mandelyn Royal and I would like to welcome you to another episode of the Poultry Keepers podcast. Joining me are John Gunterman and Rip Stalvey, the rest of our podcast team and we're looking forward to visiting with you and talking poultry from feathers to function.
Rip Stalvey:Another thing I think a lot of people don't do, and they should be doing, is weigh your birds. I see a lot of birds in shows that are too big and some that are too small.
John Gunterman:And I've also seen birds that I thought looked great. And I picked them up and like, where is this thing? It's all fluff and feather.
Mandelyn Royal:I've seen as much as three to four pounds discrepancies from bird to bird within the same breed, same age, same environment with huge discrepancies.
Rip Stalvey:The standard specifies weights for cockerels. Weights for pullets, weights for cockbirds, and weights for hens. Now, you're allowed 20 percent over or under, okay? But anything outside of that disqualifies that bird from competition.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah. I thought it was one pound up or down, but it's 20%?.
John Gunterman:If you do the math, it's pretty close.
Rip Stalvey:We talked about wings and tails. We also need to address feather quality, and Mandy, you Almost got there when you were talking about the shape of the feathers in the wings.
Mandelyn Royal:Now, isn't it like, for example, with a wing feather, you want as much feather material on both sides of the shaft of the feather, right? You shouldn't see no,
Rip Stalvey:the leading edge of the primaries will be naturally narrower. Then the following edge, or the back edge, the edge closest to the body. Oh, okay. Now, secondaries are much more even, but on the primaries you get this variation. But, the standard will prescribe feather quality to an extent. It's, they'll say it should be broad, some will say narrow, and some of it depends on the breed, like your harder feathered birds that carry those feathers closer to the body tend to have a slightly narrower feather structure than birds like Asiatics, Orpingtons and some of those.
Mandelyn Royal:Oh, that makes sense. And then you add in that fluff factor and how fluffy they are or are not and the length of the feathers.
John Gunterman:Stop picking on my birds, Mandy. I didn't. I didn't even say your name. I know. I know I'm just sensitive about my fluff factor, but that is specified in the standard and it actually has pictures of how far up the shaft the fluff should extend. And your breed is going to be specific though.
Rip Stalvey:The more fluff you have on a feather, the more loosely feathered it makes them look, just because it provides that. Extra little bit of loft to physically lift and separate those feathers a little bit.
John Gunterman:Yeah, and it prevents them from being able to tighten it down.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah. And that's how you can achieve type through feathers.
John Gunterman:I want a really nice hard outer shell to ward off wind and any potential snow in my case, or rain.
Rip Stalvey:I'll actually look at feathers from the breast area or the very top of the back up between the hackles and the saddle feathers and get an idea for feather width, feather shape and feather quality. If you'll take the back of your hand and start at the bird's hackle and just slide it down on top of the feathers from the neck to the tail. You can really feel the feather quality, if it feels very slick and smooth, like silk cloth, that's good feather quality. If it feels rough, not so much. And you can also pluck a feather out and hold it up to the light. If you can see through it, you don't have a very substantial feather.
Mandelyn Royal:That makes sense.
John Gunterman:And that all goes back to genetics and nutrition.
Rip Stalvey:Yes, exactly.
John Gunterman:Should it be thick? And if it's not, why not?
Mandelyn Royal:And I noticed new this year in some of my pullets, they're developing a cushion. And when you see a cushion on a female, that's where it's real fluffy and bouncing up off the back in front of the tail. And the saddle area and it, there's varying degrees. Cause normally my birds are pretty well tightly feathered and it's all smooth. There's no jumped up fluff or what do you call it? Volume. They don't have any volume, but some of these that I'm seeing this year are getting a pretty well defined cushion, which is weird. I don't even know where that's coming from.
Rip Stalvey:So I tell you what you do, pull out a feather. From that cushion area on a bird that has it, and you pull out a feather from the same location on a bird that doesn't have it. Look at the amount of fluff between the two.
Mandelyn Royal:Ah, is where that extra volume's coming from. So somehow I added more fluff than what they had before.
John Gunterman:And how much of that can be a response to local environment and just epigenetic development.
Mandelyn Royal:I wonder if for the time of year they were hatched.
Rip Stalvey:I don't think so. I'm seeing cushions on Rhode Island Reds that I never saw before. It's just not paying attention to the fine details. When you're evaluating your birds. You've got a lot more ratio of fluff to web of the feather. In some instances, you have a longer feather, which will give you a looser look. I'll go back through my adults again for the 1, 000th time and see if I find somebody with a long saddle feather on a female that may be producing cushion.
John Gunterman:So if you've got three or four birds lined up next to each other and they're all of equal conformation and you're looking at those finer points, feather quality is for sure one of them.
Mandelyn Royal:It's on the list just not the top of the list.
Rip Stalvey:Feather quality is also directly related to the sheen of a bird, the shininess of the feathers, and when you start losing your feather quality the feather surface begins to take on a slightly duller look and not as shiny.
John Gunterman:When you described that feel earlier, Rip, that's something that you're not going to be able to change for a show by putting a show sheen or shine or whatever they call it on your bird. You'll, even if the feather is shiny you'll still be able to feel that. Little roughness of the feather versus the silky quality underneath. And you'll probably be able to feel that it was sprayed with this juice. Anyways, you have to go wipe your hands.
Rip Stalvey:I have literally seen people put so much of that stuff on the birds. It's hard to hold them. I've nearly dropped birds before because they were so slick from having that show sheen sprayed on them.
John Gunterman:And then it's on your hands the rest of the day. Yeah. Hand wipes.
Rip Stalvey:I've had to go stop what I was doing and go wash my hands. And when they're spraying it, particularly on concrete floors, it gets on the floor and it makes the floor slick. It's like being on ice. You can put a great shine on a bird with nothing more complicated than a silk cloth, just rubbing the feathers with it.
John Gunterman:Or a garden hose on a nice warm sunny day.
Rip Stalvey:Yeah, it doesn't hurt your birds to get wet.
John Gunterman:I think the birds that have access to the environment and get rained on regularly look better naturally. They also learn to preen take care of themselves, I believe, versus a just a coop kept
Rip Stalvey:bird. I know one Sumatra breeder. That he would regularly go out there and spray his males down with a water hose. And he had some of the best sheen and best quality on those birds I've ever seen.
John Gunterman:I've been definitely guilty of, I would call it rinsing my birds. I don't wash them cause any natural oils that are there. I don't want to. Take away by using anything that's detergent based.
Rip Stalvey:Just a light misting is all it takes.
John Gunterman:Yeah, garden hose, spray'em down and on hot days, my Chantecleres definitely appreciate a nice little misting with a garden hose or just a sprinkler going back and forth. Oh my gosh. There. If you want some entertainment on a hot day, put a sprinkler out and put it on oscillation back and forth, and watch your chickens chase the water. It's really quite fun.
Mandelyn Royal:I've done it for ducks, but I've never done it for chickens.
Rip Stalvey:Oh yeah, they love it.
John Gunterman:Mine will actually walk under it and hold their wings out as it sweeps back and forth. It's like the undercarriage wash on a car wash. And then after it goes by, they shake like a dog. I think it's funny and cute, if you're not out there observing your birds and just getting joy and, having fun with them that don't bother keeping them. And that's part of chickening is just watching your birds and knowing them. I can just based on the way they walk or run, I can tell which one of my birds is which one of my permanent birds. If I've got a big grow out of, 60 or 80 birds on the ground, that's not happening, but the big ones.
Mandelyn Royal:It doesn't take me very long to find my individuals and be able to find them again, without any sort of. ID or label, like I have this one pullet right now, and she, I will spot her out of a flock of 100.
John Gunterman:The way she moves and the way she interacts, you're like, there she is.
Mandelyn Royal:She's a door greeter, she comes running up to the front of the pen and stands there. And I could just reach down and pick her up. And I don't raise them to be that way. We're a dual purpose flock. I'm not trying to have them be that way. But she has decided, you know what? I'm special and you're going to treat me like I am special. So I'll give her a little handful of a snack. So now she does it reliably.
John Gunterman:It's those birds that are the first ones out and want to go explore. They're the natural leader of the cohort where everybody will be like, okay, no, you go, he'll go. And then, they'll go and they'll check it out and be like, okay, it's cool. And then everybody will run over. They're the special birds.
Mandelyn Royal:She's first or second out the door every morning. And it's either the cockerel ahead of her or behind her.
Rip Stalvey:You guys were. Just lead me into my next thing that I want to talk about and you're doing it naturally and you may be doing it with intent or it may just be what you learned to do. But when you're evaluating birds, to me, one of the easiest things to do is to compare one bird to another bird. Bird A and bird B. Is bird B better overall? Then the other one set him aside till you find one better than him. And you can sort through a lot of birds in a hurry like that.
John Gunterman:Sometimes it's real helpful to have somebody who doesn't even know anything about chickens come by because they're like, Ooh, what, that, that bird right there what's going on with that bird? Or if the, or if, visitors compliment you on your turkeys.
Mandelyn Royal:A question that I get from a lot of people is if they've never really thought about doing breeding selection, they'll ask, how do you even start? Let's say I have 20 birds in front of me. How do I even begin? And I'm like, we'll start by catching one. Don't think about who it is. Just the first one you can put your hands on, bring that bird out, evaluate it, and every single bird after that is going to be better or worse in different things, different qualities. And that's where you develop your goals from is what you're finding, what you have, and what you want them to do what the standard wants them to do and going through them systematically. But you begin just by picking one. It doesn't even matter which one.
John Gunterman:You have your notebook and you score them.
Rip Stalvey:If you try to sort through a whole flock of birds as a group, you're going to wind up making mistakes. You got to take them one at a time. And just like Mandy says, compare the next bird to the one you just looked at. Is he better or worse? And go through them that way, much faster process.
Mandelyn Royal:Cause then you end up with a much smaller group of who was better and you can ignore everybody else and do it again with what was better.
Thanks for watching!
Mandelyn Royal:Hi there, poultry keepers. This is Mandelyn Royal, one of the voices behind the Poultry Keepers podcast. We're on a mission to create a larger, more vibrant community of poultry enthusiasts, and we need your help. If you enjoy our poultry conversations and insights, here's a simple way to support us. Just spread the word and share the Poultry Keepers podcast with your fellow poultry lovers, friends, and family. By recommending us, you're not just helping our show grow, but you're also connecting more people with the joy of poultry keeping. So hit that share button, post it to your socials, or tell your chicken loving friends about us. Let's grow a larger community together. Thanks for being a part of the Poultry Keeper's family. Now, back to our show.
Thanks for watching!
John Gunterman:Yeah. I know you and Karen Johnston, especially put a ton of work in on the poultry keepers 360 selection tool, where you can have all the different categories that you're looking for and weigh them. Against each other and have a, change your scale on the fly. You know what this year breast width is more important to me. And you change that and it changes your selection criteria for your birds. So it takes, it puts a lot of objectivity into the selection process. It takes a lot of subjectivity out of it. Once, once you come up with in your mind, what a 10 out of 10 is for fleshing, then you can input that score for each bird. And add them up and your natural winners are going to be the ones with the highest scores, so to speak.
Rip Stalvey:And if somebody wants to get a copy of that spreadsheet, if they're members of Poultry Keepers 360 on Facebook, it's in the file section. If you're not a member, join and go to the file section and you will find the selection tool in there. And it's simply a spreadsheet. And it's just scoring for different kind of qualities, is what it amounts to. High score wins.
John Gunterman:Yeah, but you can change the weight of each individual score overall, which is really helpful for when, if you want to focus on two or three traits this year and not, maintain the other traits you can do that, or not. You can do whatever you want, but I find I get overwhelmed easily if I don't have a very good inventory and tracking system. So all my birds get wing banded no later than day three. And their permanent record starts actually well before hatch. Their permanent record starts with the date, time, and temperature that I collected their egg.
Mandelyn Royal:That's a lot.
John Gunterman:I just write right on the shell when I take it out of the box. At times I've got infrared thermometer. It's cold. records temperature. If it's 72 out and the egg is, still above 70, it's irrelevant. But if it's negative 30 out, if that egg is under really 40 degrees for a shell temperature by the time I collect it, I'm not gonna consider setting it.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, that reduces the chances pretty far underneath those refrigerator temperatures, I guess you could call it.
Rip Stalvey:Guys, we've talked a lot about body shape, body form, which we should because type is far more important than color.
John Gunterman:Type is everything. Build the barn, then paint it, you say all the time, right?
Rip Stalvey:We do need to address color, and It's hard to do on a podcast because each parti colored breed or variety, and parti colors means more than one color
John Gunterman:P A R T I.
Rip Stalvey:Yeah, P A R T I. But the standard will tell you what that color should be, where it should be on the individual feathers. Some standards will even tell you Laced breeds. It's a let's take a silver laced bird, which is, it's a white feather with a black edging around it. It'll tell you whether it's supposed to be oval shaped or is it supposed to be almond shaped. They can get that specific.
Mandelyn Royal:Patterns are tricky. I dabbled in patterns and realized, you know what, I think I want my birds to be white.
John Gunterman:My old English pheasant fowl had a silver spangled pattern, which was just So intricate and delicate and gorgeous, I thought. And I'm really glad that somebody who had better resources than I took over that project, because they are very special and rare here in the States.
Mandelyn Royal:I did try some double silver lace barn welders, and those were fun. And that pattern, it was so pretty, but so tricky too. Yes. I only kept them for about two years and then I moved on to birchen, black silvers, and some other simpler patterns that still carried their own complexities.
John Gunterman:That's where attention to detail and having an eye is really going to pay off. And why I ended up with whitebirds.
Rip Stalvey:Y'all, Mandy was talking about she wanted all her birds to be white. But there's even problems in white color varieties, am I not right?
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, but it's a little easier to worry about removing like yellowing and finding all the different contributors to that and that can go all the way back to the base color that's underneath the white because the white is always covering something. And what it's covering is what you might be up against, especially if there's anything red in there that's going to come out as yellow.
John Gunterman:I'm always selecting silver downed chicks. My chicks come out gold, but they'll have a silver down, and those are the ones I
Rip Stalvey:want. Oh yeah, you bet. The standard doesn't refer to it as yellowing. If you're looking it up in the standard, it's going to refer to it as brassiness. That makes sense. The light color of brass. Other solid colors. Buff, for example. You would think, pretty straightforward, right? No. Because it should be the same shade of buff in each section of the bird. Hackles should match the tail should match the breast should match the wings should match the back. That's not easy to do. And then you throw into the fact that they are sensitive to sunlight. I'll just put it that way because it can bleach them out and turn them patchy looking.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, that's true. And you can start seeing the visual difference between an old feather and a new feather.
Rip Stalvey:Same thing with blues. You can get patchiness and a not a good even surface color.
Mandelyn Royal:The solid colors. Do you want to have an ever so slight lacing especially in some of the blue varieties? The blues yes. You want to see the lacing in
Rip Stalvey:there. Should be slight blue laced in a fine edging of black.
John Gunterman:Can you touch on briefly what you mean by blue?
Rip Stalvey:Blue is a gene that dilutes black to a slaty blue color. And if you get two copies of the blue gene, you get a splash bird. Now, even though it splashed, it's gonna have blue splashes. It's not gonna have black. If it's got black, you got something else going on there. It's not blue. Because a splash bred to a black gives you all blues.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, I've played around with blue black splash and a couple different varieties and they are fun to play around with. It'll start teaching you a lot about color expression and how those genes can affect each other and for example, if you take a splash and you breed it to a splash and you do that repeatedly, you start losing that good depth of blue What do you call those little blotches?
Rip Stalvey:Splotches.
Mandelyn Royal:I feel like there should be another term for the blue bits because they're random. They're not in a set pattern, but then subsequently through the generations you start losing that depth of the color there unless you put them back to a black or a blue. It's just neat watching it go from one generation to another and who you choose. If you notice your blues are getting Washed out and pale and the lacing is not that great, breed them to a black. In that next generation, you'll see a whole new color of blue come through.
Rip Stalvey:Okay, now you've opened up another can of worms for me to talk about.
Mandelyn Royal:Great. We're getting off topic now. We're straying off the topic. No, we're
Rip Stalvey:not. No, we're not. No, we're still in. We're still in. We're still talking about color. Okay. If you breed a blue to a black, do you breed it to just any black, or do you breed it? From a black that came from a blue and blue mating.
Mandelyn Royal:I've always done it from blacks that came from the blue being in there. Like I never went to a black bird that was from. Straight black for multiple generations.
Rip Stalvey:And that's the way you should do it. It's the way you were doing it. Always use a black that came from a blue and blue mating. What happens if you don't? You can lose the lacing on the on the bluebirds. Really? Yeah, because those blacks are carrying that lacing gene. You may not see it because of the black feather background. Yeah.
John Gunterman:But that's, it's underlying and that's, it's these other genes on top of it that's allowing it to come through.
Rip Stalvey:Exactly.
John Gunterman:Oh. So it's like a diluter gene? Yes. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. I've been playing with quail, and we bandy these terms around a lot, and they go really fast, which is really nice. I've been playing with polygenetic inheritance requiring something on, from all four grandparents before it's going to express, fun stuff. Goes fast, and quail are delicious yeah.
Rip Stalvey:I've got a few points I want to hit because we're getting here towards the tail end of our show, it's going to take you some time to build your confidence in evaluating birds, and it's nothing wrong whatsoever about getting a friend of yours that raises birds who may be more experienced than you to help you do that, because that's how you're really going to learn. So just remember, it's going to take you some time, and it's going to take a lot of practice to get it down right, but you will get there. For Trust me, you will get there. And, another thing I want to remind folks, and we talked about this early on, if you will go back and read that first 39, 40 pages in the Standard of Perfection, it has all the definitions. It has, they talk about defects, disqualifications, a scale of points. They divide a bird into different sections, and you get so many points for the head, so many points for the back, and right on down. So all the things we've already been talking about, it will give you a very systematic way to evaluate your birds if you follow that.
John Gunterman:And the amount of points that they deduct for a comb is a lot different than what a breeder may, the importance of a comb. Whether it has five or six or seven points.
Mandelyn Royal:I was just going to say that the point system really shows you which trades are more important than others. The comb is, what, a max of 5 points, but the back is 10?
Rip Stalvey:The combs are very insignificant in the overall scheme of the bird. But most people, and Mandy, I know you've seen it working with folks with Bresse, get so stressed out if they have 6 or 7 points on the bird. When I'm judging, I'm only supposed to deduct one half point for every point of the comb over or under the required number. If they have a seven point comb, that's only one point off the whole bird's overall score.
John Gunterman:If the rest of the bird is there, your carriage is right, your heart, girth, and depth, and everything. And you're disqualifying a bird because it has, seven points. Maybe you need to reevaluate.
Rip Stalvey:Another thing that's in those first few pages of the standards, there's illustrations that can be so helpful answer a lot of your questions. And the last thing I've got, and then I'm going to be quiet because this is something that really. Lights my fire here. If you have questions about your bird, go by the written standard. Don't go by what somebody tells you, because so many information gets passed on from person to person, and it's just like telling jokes. One person can tell me a joke, and by the time I tell it to somebody else, and they tell it to somebody else, and they tell it to somebody else, not even the same joke anymore.
Mandelyn Royal:It's a game of telephone. So just start with the book. You can ask your questions. And get a response. And you can ask five different people, hopefully at least three of them give you the same answer. But you might get five completely different answers that are subjective based instead of factual from the book based. Based on something that they heard, and on down the chain. And there's a lot of knowledge out there that is going to be almost bloodline specific, especially with how certain traits or even how colors play together when you're doing the breeding for a pattern. That kind of stuff isn't going to be in the book and you do absolutely want to mentor for that. But for the technical data, keep it by the book.
John Gunterman:And that's where some of these really good resources online, if you find them, like the Chanticleer Fanciers International has a Facebook page. It's a private page and there's only 52 members. But they're all the people who are basically lifetime members of that organization. And if I have a question about my Chanticleers, I will post videos and pictures up there and let the members help me sort it out.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, having a small group like that is helpful because then it reduces some of the noise.
John Gunterman:We'll get into some pretty heated discussions over esoteric points in the standard. You have 52 people read the same paragraph or even the same sentence, and you're like to me this means this, and here's a picture, and this is why I think so, and somebody else says, to me this means this, and it, It can get good, but it eventually gets sorted out in a good club. That's how they should run. And the president. Of our organization as an active member. We get good steering and that's the important thing is qualifying where your advice comes from. And you touched on that. There's some great breeders who don't even know what a standard is. And I don't know how they do that, but they have their
Mandelyn Royal:hands.
Rip Stalvey:I hope everyone's enjoyed the show. We've covered a lot of territory. Just talking about, I think we spent more time talking about. Understanding and applying the standard than we have any other topic we've covered so far.
Mandelyn Royal:We only touched on the surface of it. And I think we could dive into it even deeper and get even more particular if we wanted to.
John Gunterman:We could do a whole year on just the standard of perfection, just the first. 38, 39 pages do people even, are they going to stop by and listen to that?
Mandelyn Royal:You guys can email us and tell us what you want
Rip Stalvey:too. Yeah, please do. Please let us know what you want us to talk about. All right, folks, thanks for listening. We've had a great time as always and we hope that we have been able to add a little value to your poultry keeping experience and help you improve your birds in the long run. So until next time, we will see you later. Bye bye.
Mandelyn Royal:This brings us to the close of another Poultry Keepers podcast. Until next time, we'd appreciate it if you would drop us a note, letting us know your thoughts about our podcast. Please share our podcast with all of your friends that keep poultry, and we hope you'll join us again when we'll be talking poultry from feathers to function.