Meet Content Creator Maleah Thom

In this episode, we introduce Mia Thom, one of our new Poultry Keepers Podcast content creators. Mia shares her inspiring journey raising Black Silver Marans and Silver Cuckoo Marans in Southern Oregon. From her first $10 hen that sparked her passion, to carefully line breeding, selecting for dual-purpose traits, and overcoming challenges like egg color, heat stress, and hatch rates, Mia offers practical insight into the rewarding world of project varieties of Marans.

She also discusses how she uses peat moss bedding, feed enhancements, and careful breeding strategies to strengthen her flock and improve both egg quality and body type. Whether you’re new to poultry or a seasoned breeder, you’ll love Mia’s dedication and the lessons she’s learned through five years of hard work.

Listen in and learn how thoughtful breeding and management practices can transform your flock and help you succeed with rare and project poultry varieties.

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Transcript

Alex: 0:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast.You're in for a real treat today, I'm pleased to announce one of our Poultry Keepers Podccast guest contributors, Maleeah Tom, will be introducing herself and teling you about her poultry experiences with Marahns. Maleah is in Oregon here in the United States and brings a new geographic perspective to our show. Now, Here's Maleeah! Hi poultry keepers. My name is Mia Thom. I am from Southern Oregon and I raised two project varieties of Marans, the black, blue silvers and silver cuckoos. We also have just for fun breakfast layer flock, rainbow egg, layer flock. Yeah, it's really nice to be able to talk to you guys today. I got my first silver Marans in 2019 after graduating from college, my husband and I moved back to the valley and decided we wanted to get chickens again. I knew that I wanted some nicer chickens than what I had grown up with. I had gotten my first chickens when I was 13, and before that I had turkeys that I raised for 4- H starting when I was 10. So I knew I wanted some purebred quality chickens. I had been doing livestock judging in college. Got a little bit more into the purebred and well-bred animals had started showing dogs. And so I knew I wanted some nice chickens. We had found a local lady who bred a couple different breeds, but. We were interested in getting some salmon favres from her. So we went to get the favres and while we were there, she asked if we wanted to see the parents stock. So we went back to where she kept all them, saw them. She had a grow out pen of some birds that were probably six, seven weeks old. Mostly leg bars, some Americana, some black copper morans. And she had asked if there were any other birds that caught our attention. And there was one pull in the group. She looked like a morans. She had the body type of a morans, the feathered legs but where a black copper is copper, she was white in the hackles. And I did not know that there was any such thing as then what I would've called a urchin Morans, but she caught my eye and so I asked if she was possibly available, and the lady said that she was the only one that had hatched from some eggs she had bought on eBay and. Because she was the only one and she didn't have anything to breed her to. She didn't really need to keep her, so she ended up selling her to me. I think she was like$10 and that was the first one. She, we brought her home. She was nothing really special. In hindsight, she was a pretty poor specimen, but she was the first one and she was the one that got me bit by the bug and after a year in 2020, we bought our house and I decided I, I wanted more. And I started looking into. Breeders and I just, I couldn't find really anything. I knew that the best way to find birds is the same way you would if you wanted to find a well bred dog, would be to go to a show and meet breeders. But that's not really something we have in this area. Oregon has very limited poultry shows, really just county and state fair. Wasn't really in a position to go drive down to California, at that point so I started Googling and found one person with Birch and Morans in Oklahoma that had hatching eggs available. And so I sent her an email, got information, she sent me some more pictures of the parents stock. I didn't really know what I was looking for. Looked up the Moran's standard of perfection. Went through it. There's not a lot of information on the silvers because they're not an approved variety, but going through the breed standard, looking at the basics and they seemed fine to my completely untrained eye outside of just having. Show grown up showing animals and doing some livestock judging. They seemed okay, decent enough. So I ordered some eggs'cause they were the only thing I could find. And I had this little tiny, really cheap incubator off of Amazon. It fit nine eggs. And so I got the eggs. She sent me a dozen. I picked the nine darkest eggs of the dozen, which now thinking back like I should have pulled the money together to buy another incubator because throwing away those three eggs was, yeah, that's a bummer. But I put nine in the incubator, the nine darkest that she'd sent. Seven of them hatched. And so that was the beginning of what we have here, which would later turn into basically a trio. Everything I have now, five years later is from two hens of the five hens that hatched and the two roosters. Two hens. Every, everything down came from two hens. I do have some birds that came from Rooster Bee. He ended up producing in the time I had him, one pull that I kept. Everything else came from the other pear pear A and everything I have now comes down from pear A with the exception of two birds who are from pear B, and so well, one bird from pear B, the other being the hen bee. So that is where I started. Very tight population, very small group of birds. Basically two pairs and really have worked spiral breeding, heavily line breeding on pear A, and now starting to work a little bit more on the B side. Bringing that side back in, looking at what I can do with those birds to incorporate those two hens that are not so tightly bred. Because for a long time all of my nice birds were coming out of that a pair. They were way outproducing, the B pair. And so for the last several years, that's where my focus has been doing a lot of mother to sun breedings. Really doing a lot of mother to sun breedings. To and I, as a result, I've gotten a pretty nice rooster line established and now have a rooster. I'm really happy with. I wish there were shows around here'cause he's very nice and so now we're breeding using him on some more of the birds. Not just mother, not just half sisters and aunts and that side, because you work with what you have and that's what I had. But now going to that B side that I hadn't used as much, which has resulted in some really nice pulls. This year we got his first daughter's. By out crossing to that B group. And they are prob, I mean they are, they're the best birds I have produced at this point and it's year five. So I know from listening to the podcast, that's what you guys have talked about being, when you start seeing what you have, being year five. And so I'm really happy, I'm really excited about these birds. We're seeing silver expression. Clean silver expression on the puls in a way I hadn't seen previously over mein has been a huge challenge for me. Autosomal red in my females. My males have been very clear, very clean from the start, but my female's autosomal red has really been a tough challenge. So that's something I have been really working to clean up. We have six pulls right now in my grow out pen of 24 who are very clean. They have silver all the way down from the top of the head, down the hackles. Really beautiful, clean, black, that beautiful beetle, green sheen. They're really everything. Everything I was hoping for. That's not on the color spectrum. There's still obviously a ton of work to do. I would love to get broader frames. They're a little narrow. Really trying to focus on that dual purpose body type, which these birds have always been a little on the smaller side. So trying to really select now to get the size where we're wanting them to be and getting them to where. They can put not only laying because they have done very well laying and I've been selecting towards getting four to five eggs a week from them. I really, with the Morans, it's hard because I find that if you push those hens to produce five or more eggs a week, you lose that egg color. The those dark moran's eggs really do need that time to put that pigment on that egg. So you don't wanna push too hard on the egg side because you do lose the color, which is already so hard to get, especially if you're selecting to the standard as well. So I really had to think about how we were gonna keep egg color, body type, get the body color correct. And it's a lot of pieces. It's a lot of pieces to the puzzle. I was able to find a couple Facebook groups the Morans Club of America the Morans Breed Club, Morans Club, USA. There's a couple groups specifically geared towards project varieties and specifically a group for Black silvers. That I was able to get plugged into and then really learn about this breed, meet some really amazing people in the Morans breed and community that have been able to give me a ton of constructive feedback that I've been able to run with and apply. And then finding this podcast has really opened a ton more doors. This year we started implementing a number of things. We changed the feed and got ahold of Jeff and. Figured out how we could enhance the feed we were feeding. We don't really have a mill here that can produce the feed that we're looking to feed, to mix our own feed. After looking at ingredients and things, it would be really cost prohibitive to do after looking at some recipes. And so got a hold of, Jeff got some feedback on how we could enhance. The feed that we were feeding to optimize it, we implemented a Molt ration for the first time ever and the birds are currently molting. So it'll be really interesting to see next year how those changes are going to affect the birds and hopefully optimize them. We started. Bedding the coops with, and the Brooder Brooders with Pete Moss. After listening to the podcast where you guys talked about that and I love it. I absolutely love the pea moss. It's amazing. It's clean. It's dusty, but it's cleaner. I don't smell ammonia like I did after. Not very long, a week or two with shavings, you smelt it so quickly. I felt like I could never get ahead, especially with two small children a toddler and a baby. Trying to keep up with that and keep the coops clean with shavings was just a constant battle. The Pete Moss has like completely changed that. Being able to deep bed. Do a deep litter method with the Pete Moss and I'm really excited to put that back into our gardens this fall. Which is gonna be really nice'cause that's gonna break down way nicer in our gardens than shavings. So that's exciting. That kills two birds with one stone, which is really nice. So we implemented that, we changed the feed. We have a pretty toasty dry climate today. It's 104 and it is dry. It feels, the weather app says it feels like 108. So Morans are not a heat hardy breed. That first Morans hen I was talking about at the beginning of this recording, I unfortunately lost her in 2020. I had chicks in the brooder. That next group, that group that I had got so excited to add her to, we had 116 day hit and I lost her to heat stroke. Terrible thing to lose a bird to heat stroke. So I learned the hard way. You have to be on top of it. And here we really have to be on top of it, especially if we want to pursue a breed that is not. They do great here in the winter. They lay all winter long. It's absolutely fantastic. They're super cold, hardy because we also have really intense winter nasty winters. They do great. They're, we have a little bit of a problem with frostbite with the roosters, but otherwise very few issues. But for those probably 20 over a hundred days every year. It can be very problematic. So to counteract the heat, we've done the ice blocks in the water. We have a drip system for water for our birds to keep water clean. We have misters installed in the runs to keep the air cool to, we've got'em down near ground level, so it's misting the ground. So we're taking advantage of evaporative cooling. We have a big coop that is more like a shed that the birds, the bulk of the birds go into. We have a couple little breeding and grow out pens, but the vast bulk of the birds, if they're not actively in a breeding system, which currently no one is, they're in the big coop. That coop has a window AC unit in it set to 75 degrees. That seems crazy, but it works and it's what we have to do because we chose a breed that does, is not heat tolerant. And so we have to do everything we can to make an environment that is safe for them. So our chickens get ac, which is it? It works for them. It keeps them cool if they need to go inside. Looking out my window. Still the majority of the birds are sitting under the misters, but if they need to go inside and cool down, they can go inside and cool down. And it's notable that the leg bars and some of the cross breads and the leg hern and some other things are outside. The more cold heart or heat hearty breeds, they're all outside and I don't see many Morans outside right now. The majority of them are inside, along with the bras staying cool. So that's something we've had to do for countering the heat here. So that's one challenge. I'm really curious to see how enhancing the feed is gonna affect the birds. The other big challenge we had, which fortunately appeared to be a very easy fix, was we had really low hatch rates for the last, like three years. It started right around the time I got new incubator that I got for Christmas, and I'm not gonna name the brand or throw the incubator under the bus, but it was definitely a lemon. I was getting, I would set, I would fill it all 20 some eggs and I would get no, or maybe one or two chicks. Really sad. Pitiful hatch rates. Sometimes we might get four or five. That would be a good hatch. I, if I got half a dozen chicks out of 24, that was exciting. And first hatch of the year. I put, filled it up. I was gonna try to do I did. I tried to do the hydrogen washing with hydrogen peroxide because I read that could enhance hatch rates, increase hatch rates, and one chick hatch. And I, and it wasn't just Morans, I had some leg bar eggs in there too. The chicks were all of Eggers, but leghorn eggs from leghorn or leg bar hens and none of them hatched. I had a gal three weeks later buy hatching eggs from me, and I sent those eggs to Indiana from Oregon, and she had a 100% hatch rate on shipped eggs. I could not believe it. I have. A screenshot with a picture of all the chicks, all 24 chicks that I sent her, 24 eggs, a hundred percent hatch. So that told me it's not the birds. Like I had warned her that I had a really bad hatch that eggs were, they were fertile when I candled them, but for whatever reason, we were dying off at lockdown. And so I decided to buy a new incubator, and since doing that, we've had amazing hatches. I have had four 100% hatches on the olive acres, which are leg bar moran's cross, so leg bar eggs, a hundred percent on all four. On all four hatches, which is insanity. I cannot believe it. That is a hundred percent of what I put in that is fertile. I think over the course of four hatches, I've removed two eggs for not being fertile. Out of 40, I think 45 chicks. 45 eggs, so very good. And on the Morans, it's been above 90. I've done three hatches on the Morans. Each time I've removed, we've had a few eggs, not be fertile, usually two or three, and then I've had one egg each hatch, not finish. Hatching it's pipped, but not completed out of, I think we've hatched 60 now. We've got 60 some Morans chicks that we've hatched this year. So really good. I'm really excited about that. It thrills me to know that it wasn't a fertility issue with the birds, even though we're as deeply line bread in bread, however you want to call it, as we are having started with such a tight population to begin with. Fertility's still great. So that is really exciting. I'm really thrilled about that. We just had a great hatch of the Silver Cuckoos, which was my first hatch of the Silver Cuckoos. They just arrived last year. Co. The cuckoo Morans was what I always wanted. That's, I always wanted the cuckoo morans because I felt you never see good cuckoo morans. When my husband and I met, he had a couple hatchery cuckoos that were pets. And it's I, you can't even call them morants. They don't have feathered feet. They don't lay dark eggs. They look like really muddy, blurry. Sad bared rocks. They're like, they're not, they're just not a morans. And so I always, I had always felt that if I got Morans, I wanted to work on the Cuckoos.'cause I felt like that was the variety that was lacking and had been done so dirty and needed so much help. It just so happened that we fell into the silvers. And it took me a very long time to find cuckoos that had the feathered feet, laid dark eggs like that were a starting point above hatchery stock. And so they arrived last year and we have, again, just a trio. We've got a rooster and two hens, and we just hatched their first eggs. And so now we'll be making some selections to go from there. And so starting over on them, that's gonna be a big task. But at this point, really my focus is really on the Black Silvers. They're finally getting to a point where I'm really excited about them. I feel like we're finally making some progress, and now I can really focus on getting. the width the body, the fleshing characteristics and continue building on the bird that we've already built, and maintaining that nice, clear silver in the presence of the silver in the females while still holding on to a decent egg color. We probably average a five. On the Marans egg scale, and I would love to get to a point where we average a six that would thrill me and I think that's a realistic goal when not breeding strictly for egg color. And that would make me very happy. I would be totally satisfied with an average of a six for our Morans. Especially if. Wanting to focus on them being dual purpose and having those table traits that make a really nice bird. That can be a good layer, be a joyful addition to any backyard flock but still be useful whether it be as a layer or as a utility breed for the table. So that's where we're at right now. I'm really excited for the future. We have a bird that I'm really excited about. As far as the silvers go. The cuckoos are gonna be a big project. There's a lot more things with them that we'll be working on probably a little more slowly. I not quite as intensely as the black silvers. I want to get them to a point where they're more consistent. Now that we're starting to see the birds that we want to see really working on now, homogenizing the flock and making that a bird that we see consistently and not just the odd ends. There she is, or there he is, really working on making that to where that's the normal and not. A lottery win. And once we get to that point where the silvers are nice and homogenized and we're picking the best from a group of good and not just the best from a group that's all over the table then I can start paying more attention to the cuckoos right now, trying to get their numbers up to where I even have anything to work with. And actually be able to make some selections on them and not just be in that you gotta work with what you have position. So that's where I'm at. That's the Morans are fun. They're super exciting. I enjoy them a lot. They're a tough breed. There's a lot of things going on. From body type to patterns to eight color. So that creates a lot. There's a lot of things, a lot of boxes to check. But I like a challenge. I am definitely a glutton for punishment, even with dogs I don't show an easy breed there either with my. My cardigan Walsh corgis. So I am definitely a glutton for punishment and I like a challenge and they are a challenge and I'm having a lot of fun with them. So it'll be really exciting to see now what we achieve in the next five generations, and I'm really looking forward to it. So I appreciate you guys allowing me to come on and talk and just talk about my birds and where we're at and what we're doing, and, hopefully we can talk more in the future and I'm looking forward to hearing what you guys have to say on the podcast and meeting more of you. And hopefully you all have been able to learn a lot from the podcast as well, and implement some of the suggestions and see improvements. It'll be really exciting to track. How the birds change just from the environmental changes we made this year with the food and the bedding. So it'll be really cool to see. I'm really excited. Thank you for having me on. Bye. Thank you Maleeah and thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. Be sure to join us next week for another great episode of the poultry Keepers Podcast. Until then keep learning, keep improving, and keep enjoying the birds that you love.