Seeing Quality in the Nest Box

Bill and Christine Heale

The achievement of breeding a stormer or a nest of quality chicks must start with a good feeding and management routine that runs all the year, from when the bird is a youngster right through its adult years. With the build-up to the breeding season, good mixtures of seeds, grits, iodine or pigeon blocks, plus titbits which your birds may have been used to, will all help to add that extra weight and breeding fitness we all look for when selecting our chosen pairings.

Soft Food

We give soft food to breeding pairs but recommend that it should be introduced before the breeding season starts. This is provided to the birds in the flight so that they get used to it. We do not feed soft food all year through, as the show birds would be affected. In our experience, soft food keeps the birds in a soft moult and not in tight feather condition. It is a known fact that the body temperature increases when extra protein is given, and this would not he good for potential show birds.

Our Golden Rule

Our golden rule is - stick to routine and not make any sudden changes in feeding etc., whilst the breeding season is on.

Laying

Once the pairings have been made in the respective breeding cages we patiently wait for the first eggs to be laid after 10 days. Eggs come in all shapes and sizes, from the standard egg shape, some are large, small, round like marbles and a few may have pointed ends. Even the structure of the shell can be different. A few can be imperfect, being either porous or soft. Some eggs can be double-yolked, or you can get some eggs with weak yolks which are not visible to the eye when being candled. Personally, we have never had any joy of double-yolked eggs hatching, so these, along with the small marble type eggs plus any soft shell or porous eggs, are discarded. If any of these were fertile and were left in the nest, there would be a high probability that they would addle, or be dead in shell anyway.

Hatching problems

Hatching time can cause some problems in the case of eggs with pointed ends. Chicks chipping, find turning difficult, and will often end up dead-in-shell. Sometimes, problems can occur for a large chick in chipping round the top of an egg. As it finds turning difficult, this causes stress to the chick. We have learned to recognize the problem signs and usually give a little help by gently slitting the egg, but leaving the top still intact, so the chick can escape from the shell in its own time when rested. We have saved a number of chicks this way over the years.

When you are pairing up, put several pairs down at the same time with both maiden hens and adult hens in the pairs. This helps if anything goes wrong when the chicks hatch, for example, hens with no crop milk , or illness in a cock or hen. In these circumstances, chicks can be moved to another nest and saved. If you are stuck with no chicks hatched elsewhere, a little warm milk with glucose can be given to the hatchling via a small dropper. This will often help a youngster survive until the hen gets her crop milk or another nest has hatched a chick.

Observation

Once the season is underway with chicks in their different stages, observations must be made on the appearance of chicks. Full crops containing rich coloured crop milk in the very young, to full crops of mixed seed in the older ones is the order of the day.

As the days go by, hopefully our fancied pairings will have produced chicks. Observations are made on several factors. Firstly, the chicks should be healthy-looking and be well fed. Quality factors can be seen in the size of feet, as larger feet and legs indicate a potentially larger than average bird. Our main consideration and priority is the skull size and width. We look for this extra dimension as it will indicate birds having good width between