Poultry Keepers Podcast
Welcome to The Poultry Keepers Podcast
Cluck, Chat, and Rule the Roost! One Egg-cellent Episode at a Time!
At The Poultry Keepers Podcast, we’re building a friendly, informative, and inspiring space for today’s small-flock poultry keepers. Whether you're a seasoned pro with decades of experience or just beginning your backyard chicken journey, you’ve found your community. Here, poultry isn’t just a hobby—it’s a way of life.
Each episode is packed with practical, science-based information to help you care for your flock with confidence. From hatching eggs and breeding strategies to flock health, nutrition, housing, and show prep—we cover it all with insight and heart.
Hosted by Rip Stalvey, Mandelyn Royal, and John Gunterman, our show brings together over 70 years of combined poultry experience. We believe in the power of shared knowledge and the importance of accuracy, offering trusted content for poultry keepers who want to do right by their birds.
So pull up a perch and join us each week as we cluck, chat, and rule the roost—one egg-cellent episode at a time.
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Poultry Keepers Podcast
Rhode Island Reds, An American Classic-Part 1
This episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast features experts discussing the history, breeding, raising, and showing of Rhode Island Red chickens.
Topics include the breed's origin, contributions by notable figures like Lester Tompkins and Maurice Wallace, visual and breeding characteristics, and strategies for maintaining their iconic dark red color.
The script emphasizes key breeding traits, such as tight feathering and proper comb characteristics, and how hens influence these attributes. It provides practical advice on egg size for optimal hatching, balancing color traits, and maintaining production capabilities.
Personal anecdotes highlight the breed's charm and the breeders' dedication. Concluding with a nod to lineage preservation and invitation for further episodes, it encapsulates the passion and expertise driving the legacy of Rhode Island Reds.
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Hi, and welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast. In this episode we'll be talkinmg about one of America's truly clasic poultry breeds, the Rhode Island Red. Carey Blackmon, Sue Dobson, Jessica Bryant, Jeff Mattocks, and Rip Stallvee will be sharing the breeds history, and breeding, raising, and showing Reds. So let's turn it over to them and dive right in.
Rip Stalvey:I thought it would be neat, to do a little bit of a history on Sue Dobson's birds and where those birds came from and how they came to be. So we'll start with that Schilling Rhode Island red print, which is just absolutely stunning. One of the best ones out there to me.
Sue Dobson:I'd love to have a tail like that on my bird right now.
Rip Stalvey:Isn't that the truth?
Yeah.
Rip Stalvey:A lot of you may not know, but there is a monument to Rhode Island Reds in Little Compton, Rhode Island, where they were created up in that general area. It's in a little park there in New Compton, and it was actually deeded over to the Rhode Island Red Club of America, and I wish I could get it large enough to where you could read that inscription on there, but I really couldn't. But there's a gentleman in the neighborhood that keeps it up for us and just does a tremendous job. I don't know too many breeds that can say they've got one of those. And, I always get asked, where did Rhode Island Reds get their dark red color from? The story has it that they used a red melee cock bird and crossed him on the resident just mongrel hens. And, they noticed that the red pullets were laying. Eggs better, and they were growing better bodies. And so those red colored birds soon became the most popular birds to own up there. For it was a lot of market for those birds. And one of the early founders was Lester Tompkins. And this is a picture of some of the Lester's birds here. He was in Concord, Massachusetts, but he was, he worked a lot in making RIDs possible. And then later on his son joined him, Lester Tompkins. This is some of his rose comb reds. Rose reds come in two comb varieties, single comb and rose comb. And this is where Sue's Birds all started with, it was from Mr. Tompkins. And then there was a gentleman by the name of Maurice Wallace that got birds from him. Maurice worked for Owen Poultry Farm. And he had them for a number of years. And then a lady up in South Georgia I shouldn't say South Georgia, but up in Georgia, up around Atlanta, Miss Susie Donaldson got reds from Mr. Wallace. And she had them for a number of years. This is some of her birds back about 1919. And you can still see, you can begin to see that early type brick shape that we still have today. Relatively tight feathers long horizontal backs. that we strive for today. This is probably one of the nicest pictures of a Rhode Island red male I have ever come across. And this is one of Ms. Donaldson's birds. This was at the first prize Rhode Island red cockerel out of the pen and from New York State Fair, September of 1932. And not too long after that, Mr. E. W. Reese got birds from Ms. Donaldson, as did his some hawk. breeding partner and his good friend Buddy Day. Buddy actually bought the last of Ms. Donaldson's Rhode Island Reds. This is a bird that has just impressed me from the day I first saw it. It's not the sharpest picture, but this is one of Dennis Meyer's birds. And Dennis got his birds, got his start from Mr. Reese sometime in the 80s. And this is one that he produced, and I told him one time, Man, that was the nicest bird I ever saw. He said, yeah, I wish I hadn't sold him. And then from Dennis, they went another gentleman got some and Sue eventually got some from him. This is one of Sue's birds and you can see. The same body type going through all these birds. Horizontal back, deep bodies, a well put together bird. These are not short legged birds by any means, but they're not really long legged. They're well up in their body carriage. And that's so important for good feather quality and for good reproduction.
To give people a little understanding, a regular dinner plate, a regular dinner plate. One of the upper legs the drumstick, if you will go from side to side of that plate. That's how big they are.
Rip Stalvey:Yeah, they've got some nice leg on them. This is an image a lot of folks ask how big are they? Today they're bigger than what the ones back in the 60s and 70s and 80s were, and even into the 90s. These birds were only about two feet long front to back, and I can remember the males I had could easily fit in a single large fowl coop with plenty of room, didn't need a double coop. And then they got carried away with the tail length, got it a little bit long, and that's when they started to have to go to double coops. But they were trying to get the impression of body length through longer tails. That really never worked. Our females were only about 20 inches long, 14 inches high, and the males were about 15 and a half inches tall. And if you want some of these images, I'm going to put this slide presentation in the file section on our group so you can pick it up there. This shows you a color. One of the hardest things to get is a good wing on a Rhode Island red. Now the picture on the left is a this is a bantam wing, and it's an immature red. You can see down at the bottom, it's still got a pointed wing. Primary feather. When all of the tips of the feathers are rounded like those up above it, then the bird is mature. That's really what you want it to look like. You want red on the upper edge of the primary feathers and on the lower edge of the secondary feathers. And that way when the wing is folded, you don't see any black. It's all red. The image on the right gives you a little bit better example. But what I want to point out here is that the female's hackle feathers, the one on the very left, should have, you should have a little row of black ticking on the bottom of that hackle. That's really hard to get, I'll be honest with you. You either get none or a lot of times you get too much. And if you've ever bred reds for very long, you know what I mean by too much and how hard it is to get. One of the secrets to keeping a dark red color, and that's hard to do, but this feather, second feather from the left, see that little black spot on there, dark spot, that's called smut. You don't want it in show birds, because they'll cut you for that, but I always tried to use males in the breeding pen that were free of excess black, and I would put one or two females in there that had just a little touch of smut, just a few feathers on, that carried that bar of smut. The old timers used to say that the black fed the red color. It will help keep that color dark. The other thing to look for to help keep your color dark is the color of the feather shaft itself. The feather shaft should be really dark, rich red all the way to the skin, no tendency to go light. When you start getting a lighter color red, you probably got color color problems in the feather shaft. And the same way on black in the tails. You see some males that aren't bred very well and they get, after they get older, they start getting a little white in their tail. Pay attention to those feather shafts and get those feather shafts in the tail, main tail feathers, black all the way to the skin. You won't have that problem and you'll still maintain a good rich red color. Okay, Kerry, that concludes this video. Concludes my visual aid. I'm going to turn it over to you and let you ask your questions, bud.
Carey Blackmon:All right, the first question I have right here is from Rob. It says, has the breed confirmation changed over time? If so, how? And
Rip Stalvey:was it better or worse? The one change has been, everything has been the same long horizontal back brick shape, whole nine yards, but the angle of the tail has been decreased. It used to be 30, 30 degrees on males and it's been lowered to 20 and it used to be 20 degrees on females and that's been lowered to 10 degrees. Gotcha.
Carey Blackmon:The smut in my pullets would be tighter feathered. They fix the color. Yes. All right. So a question that I have is, has, I have several that have to do with genetic traits. When breeding poultry, you taught me in the past that the comb traits primarily come from the hen. What other traits come from the hen primarily? So when you're looking for. Ideally breeding in a pair is probably one of the best ways to do it. So if you were wanting, if you did not have a perfect pair, what would you look for in traits, from a hen that you would want to breed forward?
Rip Stalvey:I would want the female to be fairly tight feathered. Reds today are getting too loosely feathered and they're starting to look more like Orpingtons than red should be. And when you come to color breeding, if I'm going to use excess black in a mating, I'm going to do it on the female side, not on the male side. And like you said, you pay attention to the female's heads. The comb, if you want a five foot comb, Five point comb on your males, make sure your females have got five points. And you really have to look at the female's comb, because it's a, red females don't have a very large comb, so you've got to look at it very closely. They can hide things like thumb prints, like side sprigs, all these little things you have to look at very closely. It's what I call learning to sweat the small stuff, because if you don't sweat the small stuff with reds, it can come back to bite you in a heartbeat. Can I add up? Yes, very much
Carey Blackmon:what are some other traits that are primarily dominant in the hen?
Rip Stalvey:In my line, okay, the line that I had and now have. I got more influence and type from the females than I did with the males. I don't know Sue if you've noticed that or not.
Yes.
Rip Stalvey:But you see some reds being shown today that have a top line or top of the back that goes from the shoulders, it goes up to the tail, and that's not right. You want it level and horizontal. Yeah. A female has a lot of influence over that. The females has a lot of influence on, birds today, and this one just really makes me nuts, that have a hump in the middle of the back. That can be caused by two or three things. If it's, if you run your hand along the back and you feel a bump there, that's a skeletal deformity. And that's called a roachback and that's a disqualification, but if you don't feel a bump and you still got the hump there in the feathers, then it's probably, I would look at the feather length when it gets too long, I've seen him pop up a hump there. And also in the ratio of the feather fluff to the feather web. I'd like to keep my ratio to less than half. I want a little bit more feather web than I do fluff in there. You start getting that feather, the fluff in those feathers, you get a lot of that. You start getting this coaching style feather and it's we all have probably seen coaching the very loose puffy feather birds, which is what we don't want in our reds. And it's a constant fight for us because there is Coaching blood in our birds. They were part of the founding. So if
Carey Blackmon:there's a hump in the back, and if you're somebody that, which you should be somebody that feels your birds and handles them regularly. If you feel that hump and you notice that hump, that probably should go into the crockpot pen, essentially.
Rip Stalvey:Yeah, you'd never want to breed that problem. It's one of those problems that will get worse over time. It's, the old adage, the more you tolerate something, the longer you'll have it.
Carey Blackmon:As far as like the physical part of the bird, the stance, The leg, the legs, length, the flat back, the tail, the comb, the wide bodiness, that sort of stuff is a lot of what the traits from the hand that you're going to see in breeding, correct?
Rip Stalvey:Yes, Males can also influence the width of body pretty well. I think in my birds, I would have to say that the male and the female have about equal influence on body capacity. Okay, but a little more influence from my females on body type, overall body type.
Carey Blackmon:Okay, what about that color? You said that you'd want a little bit of the black on the hand. But when we were talking about where the birds started, the deep red came from the cock bird. Is that what you typically would see? To pair together,
Rip Stalvey:the red color came from the cock bird. It has been fine tuned quite a lot over the years. They were not always as dark as the birds we have now. Okay. It's been with careful selected breeding use of excess black that they've been able to darken that color. And while we're on color, a lot of folks refer to that as mahogany red. Yeah. It's not mahogany. And I had somebody argue with me and he said it's in the standard. I said, it's not in my standard. The standard calls for deep, dark, lustrous red. That's all it says.
Carey Blackmon:Yeah. I've seen the birds and that's definitely what they are.
Rip Stalvey:When you start getting them too dark, I don't know what it is when you get them too dark, you start losing egg production. The
black, it tends to want to become dominant, doesn't
Rip Stalvey:it?
Carey Blackmon:All right. So we have a question here that says, is there anything about the breed conformation that works against production capability? As far as it relates to meat and eggs?
Rip Stalvey:Not really, because that's what the breed was created to do in the first place. I was going to say they were created as a dual purpose bird. Yes probably better known as an egg layer. They don't have the depth of body that you see on a Plymouth rock. But Sue can tell you she's been processing some of her birds. There's a lot of meat on those birds.
Yes, there is. Yep. They're meant, to, for meat and for eggs and for hardiness where they can go out and forage for themselves. And the bad part about it is that we've gone so much to the show bird and gotten away from the utility part of the bird. And I'm not talking hatchery. I'm talking what these birds were bred for. Right now they're slow to mature, slow to produce eggs, When you're selecting next year's breeders, who's laying the eggs first, who's getting their body capacity in first. And those are the ones to choose for next year's breeders. But there again, they've got to make the type, they've got to make the color. It's, there's a lot of check boxes.
Carey Blackmon:If I was going to select a breeder for next year, And I'm looking, I'm talking about hens right now. When would I want to see my first egg?
Rip Stalvey:That's a loaded question, bud.
Carey Blackmon:I know, but it's something that's, it's an important part to me of keeping the whole reason the bird was originally created for the dual purpose. When would I want to see an egg first? And obviously I wouldn't want to hatch out a pullet egg. So at what size would I want to wait until the eggs were before I started hatching to make sure that I got that wide bodied bird?
Rip Stalvey:I would want a bird, a female, to lay at about 7 months, between 7 and 8 months. I think if you're pushing them, To lay much more than that, you're going to wind up shooting your overall growth and size in the foot much longer than that. You don't want that because they're going to start eating you out of house and home. Reds will eat you out of house and home as it is, without, who's laughing cause she knows it's true.
The new group that you're working with now, when did they start laying? How old were they?
Rip Stalvey:They were actually laying when I brought them home. I, how old were those birds Sue?
You had some since then, right?
Rip Stalvey:Yeah, but the ones I hatched were all males.
They
Rip Stalvey:were poor layers, I'll be honest. They're
never going to lay an egg, yes. How did you get all males?
Carey Blackmon:Look, Jennifer and I was talking about one of the, if anybody could do that, it would be me, We were talking about one of the projects that she's got going on and she said if she hatches 10, nine of them are gonna be males.
Rip Stalvey:Some years you get more males than you do females.
Yeah. This year I only got six males. The rest of I've got 22 females.
Rip Stalvey:I'll tell you what, you need to go buy a lottery ticket.
Yeah, because that's,
Carey Blackmon:That is the poultry lottery right there.
Yes. And there's some nice birds. The interesting thing will be next year whenever I breed them back to their daddy, because the ones that really are showing the best are from the old bird, the original bird Big Earl. And they're showing the flat back, the, the tail more up where it ought to be. Width. They're not as heavy as the birds out of the other bird. SSEs
Rip Stalvey:Are they in standard weight?
Yes. Every one of them. Yeah. So
Rip Stalvey:there you go. No problem.
Yeah,
Rip Stalvey:but breeding reds, everybody thinks okay, you got a red bird with a black tail. Not a problem. To breed a red bird with a black tail. Ho, ho. Sherry, to
answer your question if everything is done right, you should see first egg at 6 months, 24 weeks, 6
Rip Stalvey:to 7 months for red.
I would expect, if they were grown out right, developed right, now, the other thing is you should have ascending light, right? If they're hitting 6 months in March or April, you're going to get that egg, at that 6 month mark. It's going to be a little slower to bring them into sexual maturity this time of the year.
Carey Blackmon:You got people like me that like to hatch out in the wintertime. Then you need a
late program.
Rip Stalvey:And Kerry, to answer your question on what size egg to set, Mr. Reese told me never set an egg that's smaller than large.
Carey Blackmon:That would be 55 ish grams? Something like that?
I would think 58 65 grams. Okay. You can do just as bad if your egg size is too large. Yes. Yeah. You need a tight window on your egg size and breeders don't do that, which is frustrating for me. But. I never have stood that.
Rip Stalvey:They want big eggs, but they don't ever realize you can get them too big at the same time. That's a double edged sword.
You really want large and extra large only. Or just at the upper end of medium for some breeds is actually proven to have the best hatch rate.
Carey Blackmon:I know Mandy has a gram scale out in her barn and she weighs every egg before it goes in the incubator, before she even preps it.
That's what Mr. Reese did. You realize Mandy's a unicorn, right? Yes.
Carey Blackmon:I understand that not everybody does that, but Jennifer, she and I have been working on another Top of Bard, and we're,
Jessica Bryant:I have a gram scale and I weigh eggs, yeah,
Carey Blackmon:We're gramming it out,
Jessica Bryant:so just what would be too large of an egg,
yeah yeah, when you start pushing over that 65, 66 grams, now, and it depends on the layer because believe it or not some breeds were never designed or never bred to have an extra large or jumbo egg, Meanwhile, some breeds, they do their best at extra large and jumbo. It's not always a perfect number, but I would say 55 to 65 is your optimum window for hatching eggs. Others will hatch, but I think you're going to, you're going to bring out genetics that you don't really want to bring forward.
Rip Stalvey:And Jennifer, you start getting a lot of double yolk eggs, then your egg size is probably getting too big because those things are we all know they're not going to hatch.
Jessica Bryant:No, I don't sit double yolk eggs.
Carey Blackmon:No, I and I've tested that theory because when I first got the reds that I have, I was excited. Beautiful birds. I got them from a great person that does really well with them. So you're just going to sit there and smile. She's good as that. Yeah. I was excited. I was like, Oh, I'm gonna hatch everything and see what happens. But what I did do is. I noted the size of the egg and note how like I grouped them in when I put them in the hatcher. So I would know roughly what size and I call it the peep test. When you come out of the hatcher, when you give the bird the peep test, the ones that were below that 55 gram weight, They failed, and so they weren't going to be a wide bodied bird or I was going to have to do a lot to get them there because they were struggling. And so that's why I guess I learned that lesson the hard way to wait, when you're excited, it's really hard to wait about anything because, yes, we're all adults, but when it comes to poultry, we're little kids. Yes. When it comes to getting excited. So yeah, I did that and I noticed that. My next question is going to be for Sue first and then we, somebody wants to hear from Rip too. But Sue, what, what made you decide to show Rhode Island Reds? What attracted you to that breed?
First thing is the gentleness of the bird. They're like big puppy dogs. And the fact that whenever the sun hits them out on the green grass, There's not a prettier sight in the world. And people would ask me, what are you spraying them with? I don't spray them with anything. What are you washing them with? All I did was wash his butt and his legs. I didn't wash the body of the bird. The body of the bird's natural and that shininess. It's the brilliance that is in those feathers is natural to that breed. They're just, they're showstoppers to me.
Carey Blackmon:Rip, what's you, what got you started to that breed?
Rip Stalvey:Oh, when I first started showing, I was really into buff coachings, large valve, and I soon decided you had to be a really good laundry operator to show those things. And I said, man, I think I'll pass on those. And then I got into bantam wind dots and I was at a show, the first show I went to, and they talked me into clerking for an old judge by the name of Bob James and Bob was a hoot and a half, but. When he got to the Rhode Island Reds, and I had never paid a nickel's worth of attention to Rhode Island Reds. I was like Sue, I was dumbfounded. I'd never seen a bird quite like that. Rhode Island Red to me was those little orange things you got from the hatcheries. Yeah. Not these.
That chase you across the yard.
Rip Stalvey:That's right. With death in their eyes. But I I really came to love them real fast and I ditched everything else and switched over to Reds. I can see that,
Carey Blackmon:and when my granddaddy, When he had them, he had some that were pretty and dark and when I first decided that I wanted some, I just looked for the best ones I could and I looked at a lot of hatcheries and that was before I even found the Rhode Island Red Club and I, that was not the bird that I was used to and, the best thing that I found locally was still probably a five to eight year project. And, that's actually how Rip and I met was when I was trying to figure out that and, he basically told me that I had something that went really well in a crock pot. And I had, I needed to hatch out everything I could and cull hard,
Rip Stalvey:and see, I was nicer about it than Emmett Rachels would have been. He'd just tell you to take that bird and mix him with 16 grains of rice and have a meal.
Carey Blackmon:Essentially, when, the more I've learned about it, the more, You can either do that and cull hard because, Jennifer and I, we talk about vicious culling and ruthless culling. You either cull really hard or you start with a great foundation stock. Jennifer, you got questions? You look like you have questions.
Jessica Bryant:I do have a question about color. So if the color were to start lightening on your bird, would you pick more of that black ticking you were talking about in the hackle feathers to start darkening it back up?
Rip Stalvey:Jennifer, first thing I would do would be to check the feather shaft color, okay? And you want to get that as dark as you can. The second thing I would do, and like I said, I always tried to keep one or two females in each breed pen that had just a few smutty feathers across their back. No more than maybe 10 or 12 all over the whole bird. And that was what, and, but you don't use excess black on both sides of the mating. Okay. You use it. I found it worked best with my reds if I used excess black through the females and used clean males. In other words, males that did not have any excess black to them.
Can I say one more thing about having the reds? Yeah. Rip reached out to me over a picture of a bird I posted, on Facebook and said, where'd you get these birds? And I told him, and then he sent me a Message outlining that he knew these birds, he knew where they came from, he knew the history of them, and he started telling me that, and I had to sit down. I had to have a moment of get, catch my breath because I had no clue. The way I got these birds was circumspect and I was not informed on any of their background and when he told me where they came from and their history he admitted he cried a little bit and I did too. It was overwhelming to find out that they were, went back to the foundation of the bird itself. It's a little overwhelming in a person's head. Yeah,
Rip Stalvey:I thought that line of birds was long gone. I hadn't given up any hope whatsoever of finding any.
Yeah.
Rip Stalvey:And the line of birds you have is one of the purest, most unadulterated lines of Rhode Island Reds that I'm aware of. There may be others, I just, I'm just not aware of.
But I know,
Rip Stalvey:Ms. Donaldson, Mr. Reath
line bred them for 30 years. Both of them. Longer
Rip Stalvey:than that. Mr. Reese had them 80 years. Wow. Wow. But they never brought in the outside blood to speak of.
Alex:This concludes part one of Rhode Island Reds-An American Classic. Thank you for listeningn and we hope you enjoyed todays show. Next Tuesday we'll bring you part two of this series. Until then we hope you enjoy your birds and continue to listen to the Poultry Keepers Podcast where we're always talking about poultry, from feathers to function.
