Hybrid Chickens...
Hybrid chickens are a cross of two breeds to gain a specific result. They have their place but its important to know the pros and cons of them.
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Jennifer: 0:00
Hi, and Welcome to Poultry Nerds Podcast. I'm Jennifer Bryant, and I'm here with my co host for the show, Carey Blackmon. And we're here to help you get all the information you need. To grow the healthiest, happiest, and best quality birds possible.
0:16
Mhm.
Carey: 0:23
All right. So today we're going to talk about chickens. Imagine that we're going to talk about hybrids, how to make the crosses, what some of them, what some of the results you get, things like that. I know Jennifer has done a hybrid chicken. I have one that I've been messing with. And so we'll go from there. How are you doing Jennifer?
Jennifer: 0:50
I'm okay. It's been a couple years since I did a hybrid chicken, but I'm not opposed to doing them again.
Carey: 0:58
It's fun. That's actually what got hybrid chicken, doing stuff with chicken breeding is actually what got me into quail because I could see the results faster.
Jennifer: 1:09
Same.
Carey: 1:11
It's like the inner mad scientist in me. That, that was interesting.
Jennifer: 1:18
Let's define hybrid for people who are new to birds and may not understand what we're talking about, but that just simply means crossing the genetics. Could cross two different breeds, two different color varieties, or even if you had two distinct lines, Say of Orpingtons, you, and you cross those, then that would be an F1 hybrid. So each time you cross one should be for a reason. The reason could be for breeding purposes to get a show bird, to get more breeders, to fix a genetic flaw that you're working on, or it could just be simply, you want to see what you're going to get when you put these two birds together.
Carey: 2:03
Yeah,
Jennifer: 2:05
It's pretty simple. You do the Dela Rosa hybrids, right?
Carey: 2:10
Yep.
Jennifer: 2:10
Those are across of Rhode Island Red and Delaware?
Carey: 2:15
That is correct.
Jennifer: 2:17
Okay. Does it work both ways or only one way?
Carey: 2:20
My purpose behind that is I live in more metro than rural area. And I have a lot of people that live in downtown that want chickens, but they're not allowed to have roosters. So the whole thought process behind the Della Rosa was something that I could sex right out of the hatcher. And with that, I use a Rhode Island red rooster and a Delaware hen. The hens come out red. Roosters come out white and it works great. The birds, I know exactly what they are when they come out. The, it only, I haven't tried past three generations to see if it continues to be sex length like that. I'm guessing the answer is going to be no, because in theory it shouldn't. But it works and a lot of people really like buying. I can guarantee you it's a red pullet. So that was the reason why I started that. And I had the Delaware's for meat birds. I was raising them for that. And I had some Rhode Island Reds that were not show quality, but they were some really good roosters. Great personalities. The temperament was there. I could put three or four of these things in with 10 pullets and they would not fight each other. They would not fight over the hens, really good temperament. So I put them into that program and it does really, it works. It's cool. People like it. Those and some other. 5 chicks actually paid for my hatching time CT 180 incubator.
Jennifer: 4:33
Yeah. People who only can have pullets, girls, I mean that the sex, so what we're doing is we're using the sex linked genes to create a auto patch when we do something. So I do the same thing with quail. I put an Egyptian rooster over pharaoh hens and the offspring, The Egyptians are girls, and the pharaoh phenotype is males, because they're split. But you can't see that when you look at them. So the dark ones would be males, and the females would be Egyptian color, which I call blonde, but I think technically they're red. But they look blonde to me, so anyway, so hybrids. Chickens, they serve a purpose. And they're done on purpose by hatcheries. The reason why I wanted to talk about them today is because if you're new to chickens and you are thinking that you have to order from a hatchery to get your chicks, Started or you stop at tractor supply or whatever and get the impulse buy chicks
Carey: 5:47
A
Jennifer: 5:49
lot of those birds in there are not breeds They are hybrids so I was looking on some of the websites and The ones that look like a copper Maran because everybody wants those chocolate eggs They're calling them dominant coppers, rustic ramblers mystic Marans. Let's see, there's a few different hatcheries that do it, and they may look a lot like a CoppoMaran, but they are not. They might have the wrong skin color, they won't be feathered all the way down to their outer toe. They'll be brassy. They might have a purple sheen to them, which you don't want on any chicken breed. Honestly, you want the green sheen. They will probably lay a darker egg which is why people like them. And there's nothing wrong with them. We are not implying that there's anything wrong with them. We just want to explain that when you get these, Mystic Marans, I see them a lot. They are not Copper Marans. They are a cross between a Barred Rock and a Copper Maran.
Carey: 7:11
And
Jennifer: 7:11
when you breed them, there is no telling what is going to come out what it will look like. What it barnyard mix, but won't be a Copper Maran. So that's a soapbox of mine is people just don't understand. Now kudos to the hatchery that I'm looking at for calling them hybrids. Occasionally I will see them referred to as this is a hybrid breed, which I don't think is the correct terminology because it's not a breed. It's just a hybrid bird. The other one that I found was called an austral white Which is crossed between a black australarp and a white leghorn Again it's a hybrid it's meant for egg laying For its docile behavior I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I'm just saying that it's a cross and it won't breed true. You can't, they won't all come out uniform. So if I breed my Orpingtons, or you breed your Rhode Island Reds, I know that if I put these two together, And so do you. You're gonna get an Orpington or a Rhode Island Red out of them. There's no question. If you put a Mystic Maran with a Mystic Maran, could theoretically get some with Barim on them. You're gonna get a hot mess coming out of there.
Carey: 8:47
So
Jennifer: 8:50
if you think that you can buy a Mystic Maran and take it to a show, it's not going to work. Totally different animal than what you will see at a show.
Carey: 9:00
Yeah, it is. Those, I really hate it for people because a lot of times people order those birds from a hatchery. And, a lot of the hatcheries will even say exhibition quality. Bye. If you take a hatchery exhibition quality to a Black Copper Maran show you're going to notice a big difference between those birds and your bird. The same with the Rhode Island Red. If you, there's a hatchery out there that charges a beautiful, shiny penny for their exhibition line of Rhode Island Reds, but when you get those and you hatch them out or you get them as chicks, they, You can put them between, you can put them side by side with a standard red and notice the difference.
Jennifer: 9:52
Yeah and you could, in theory, if you had a long lifespan ahead of you, take those birds and breed them into something. magnificent through lots of selection, but I don't know anybody that has enough patience to do that.
Rip Stavey: 10:09
Hi there, fellow poultry enthusiasts. I'm Rip Stalvey from the Poultry Keepers podcast. Please pardon me for interrupting. I promise I won't take long, but there's something I need to tell you. I hope you're enjoying this Poultry Nerds podcast as much as I am. I think my friends Carrie Blackmon and Jennifer Bryant are doing a great job here, and I know they have even more fantastic shows in the works. You better subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. Ha! I know I sure will. Now let's get back to Carrie and Jennifer.
Carey: 10:38
It's Mandelyn, she works with the American Bresse and when she got those, she's been working with them for eight or nine years now. And, she's been breeding for table traits. And so she's culled really hard throughout her period of time doing those. To be able to get the larger birds that she has. It's six, eight year process. Cause she, she told me that she has only gotten to that point. Within the last two years, which tells me five to six years is how long of heavy selection, heavy coaling, and everything else that it took to turn a bird that was essentially a hatchery bird into what it's supposed to be.
Jennifer: 11:35
And eating a lot of chicken. So when we say that we take a bird or a lawn and breed it. To what we want, like Mandelyn here in five or six years, don't think that you can hatch a dozen chicks. And move it along. I would, I've never asked her, but I would be willing to bet that she hatches hundreds of chicks per year to find next year's breeders.
Carey: 12:05
I know that she has a 1502 GQF and the whatever, the hatcher that compliments it, and in hatching season. She fills them up constantly. I mean she does she hatches out hundreds of birds a year
Jennifer: 12:26
Yeah, and you have to in order to pick the best ones so the other popular hybrid that We see A lot with newbies that go and they get them from tractor supply, the bins got mixed up and they didn't realize they got them is the infamous Cornish cross. Even in its name, it tells you it's a hybrid and that's a cross between a Cornish and a white rock. And that's in simplistic terms. It's, they, the breeders have been bred to a point. Purpose and to create that cross that we know the Cornish cross and nobody really knows exactly what those breeders. I've never seen the breeders. Have you seen the breeders?
Carey: 13:15
So at one point in time I wanted to find me a breeding set
Jennifer: 13:21
Because
Carey: 13:23
I know The Cornish cross that you see when you buy the day old chicks, that is not the parent stock and I wanted to get like a trio or four of those so I could hatch out my own Cornish cross, dang. I can't find anybody to sell that.
Jennifer: 13:45
No, I think you have to get a license and, get really business close with those breeders. And I don't even know where they are. I had
Carey: 13:55
somebody tell me that he could pull a favor if I really wanted it. But it, he said, you better be ready to spend money because people that when they do sell those breeder sets, he said six, 800 per bird.
Jennifer: 14:14
Wow. Wow.
Carey: 14:17
And I was like, Whoa,
Jennifer: 14:19
But you can, you can sell those chicks like hotcakes, too.
Carey: 14:24
Oh, yeah.
Jennifer: 14:25
Those particular Cornish Grasses, those are bred for meat production, to put on a large amount of meat very quickly. And it's a hybrid that is bred to do that on purpose. And it's the same concept as a mystic Maran to lay the dark egg, the Cornish cross to put on the meat. You have a purpose for doing that hybrid. You cannot keep a Cornish cross and breed them together and get more Cornish crosses. It does not work. I know there are a couple people that have tried to keep rangers and have gotten a couple eggs from them, but I've never heard of anybody hatching out any more rangers. I don't know anything about the ranger parent stock. Do you know anything about them?
Carey: 15:19
So I know that there is a Rhode Island Red in that mix, and I'm not 100 percent sure what else is in that mix, but yeah, it's, if you do, you're just going to get more Rangers. Now I know somebody that used the ISA Browns. The, for egg production and what they did because they wanted to hatch out more is they got a Rhode Island red and a white legger two roosters, threw them in the pen with about 40 ISA brown hens and they, those roosters were very active and they hatched out a lot of chickens. The rooster chickens that hatched out went off to go be table birds and the hens laid a lot of eggs and are still laying a lot of eggs today, two years, two years down the road from this science project.
Jennifer: 16:33
Interesting. I did the rangers last year, didn't care for them, didn't care for the personalities, didn't care for their size, didn't care for their taste, and, but I can say that I did it, I tried it, and I won't do it again.
Carey: 16:47
Yeah.
Jennifer: 16:49
All right, so here's the big question for all the animal rights activists, the vegans, and everybody else that wants to get on the bandwagon. Is what happens to all those male chicks? If all the people just want the girl chicks what happens to all the male chicks?
Carey: 17:06
Sell them.
Jennifer: 17:07
Yeah, we still sell them. They don't, I, I don't know of anybody that puts them in a grinder, at least not here in the States. Now that could be something that happens in other countries, but as far as I know, it doesn't happen here.
Carey: 17:19
Yeah, I don't know about that, but there's a large population of people they want those. Just regular barnyard chickens. They want the roosters. They want to grow them and they will process them because, in the Hispanic culture, they typically would rather have a rooster over a hen when it comes to putting it on the table. They say it tastes different. But I know there's a guy local to me that has a large Hispanic clientele and they actually want him to leave the head intact with the bird when it's processed, because They want to see that it was in fact, a rooster.
Jennifer: 18:08
Interesting. So I hatch out hundreds of birds a year to pick my show birds and my breeders and everything. And that leaves me with a lot of males. We do grow them out and eat them. I have found that canning a rooster makes the meat really tender. And so that's what we use them for. I do have a family that comes and buys extra roosters from me. He will take as many as I can provide to him, as long as they've never crowed. If they've crowed, he doesn't want them.
Carey: 18:47
So he wants them young.
Jennifer: 18:48
Yeah. So he'll come get them in three or four months, which is odd because, it's hard for me because, it's hard for me to do a selection at that point. So the only thing I could really do is You know, if they're too, they're the smallest ones or just for whatever that's a, you need to go back and listen to the selection video or podcast for that. But it's hard to select that young age. So sometimes he's not overly happy with that, but he doesn't want them if they've grown. So interesting. That's
Carey: 19:24
definitely a new one. Yeah, I haven't heard that.
Jennifer: 19:28
Yeah. Let's see. So I have a friend that manages a hatchery in Ohio, and I had emailed him in preparation for this podcast and asked him what they do. With all the little male babies that they end up with because people just want to order the females And he said luckily that they are able to sell them. They offer a rooster pack for people who want to just grow them out for the table the And then whatever they can't sell that way they have an amish community near them that takes them And grows them out for the same reason, but there's no grinding of chicks or anything like that. That the media wants you to think is happening, at least not as far as he is concerned.
Carey: 20:24
Yeah, now I do know that does happen with older birds like quail. A lot of people use that for feeding their animals. But it's no different than hamburger meat.
Jennifer: 20:43
No, you just grind it up. It's just meat is meat. Now my, when I do the sex link catch on the quail and I ship out, that was one of my best sellers was the quail. Hens that did leave me with a lot of males and that's where the reptile feeders came into play. So I actually was able to offload them to reptile people.
Carey: 21:12
Makes sense.
Jennifer: 21:13
We don't grind here at Brian's Roost either. Everything gets used.
Carey: 21:18
That's right. Everything gets used. At one point, didn't you cross an Orpington and a Cochin?
Jennifer: 21:30
I did. I had an extra Cochin cock bird and I had some yard Orpington hens. And so I just put them out in the yard together. So when I don't have any use for them in a breeding pen, I just throw them out in the yard. And so he got, his name was pretty boy at the time. And he has gone off to live with a lady about an hour from here. And I want to say he's probably pushing four years old at this point and he's still going good. But he was with some Orpington hens and all of the offspring came out blue. with gold flecks and they look like they had necklaces on and then they had gold flecks sometimes around their thighs And I call them black gold because they had all the fantastic qualities of an Orpington. Good mamas lay eggs regularly good size, they were heavy, and the poachin broodiness, which is just crazy how broody a poachin is. I don't even know how that breed exists, honestly, because they lay four eggs and they go broody for the rest of the summer. We get enough chicks out of them is crazy. But gosh, I sold those things like hotcakes, but the second generation, I'm sure, was just a hot mess. There's no telling what came out of those.
Carey: 22:59
And that happens a lot with a lot of different crosses like that. When you do something, make a hybrid cross, it's easy to know what F1 is going to be. But F2 or F3 is like a box of chocolates.
Jennifer: 23:14
Yeah. I saw a post this morning and I engaged with him and he didn't really understand. And it was a quail post, but it's going to apply to chickens. And what he did was he ordered jumbo eggs from four breeders. So he would create genetic diversity. And I was trying to explain to him that all he did was create a bunch of hybrids. And made a hot mess is what he did. And there was no reason to spend the money to buy from these breeders he was buying from. If he was just going to mix them up, because all he did was undo the work of the breeder. Now he never, as far as, I haven't checked in a little bit, but as far as I know, he still doesn't understand what I'm trying to tell him. I bet you
Carey: 24:03
he watched some videos on spiral breeding, and that's what he was trying to do. And that is not for.
Jennifer: 24:13
Actually, he breeds dogs and he was trying to apply his mammal breeding logic
Carey: 24:20
to it.
Jennifer: 24:22
Exactly. And but for the sake of this podcast, the reason why I bring it up is because what he was doing was creating hybrids.
Carey: 24:31
Because
Jennifer: 24:32
my line of jumbo browns, and Rebecca's line of jumbo browns, and your line of jumbo browns, they're all going to be different, because we all select for different things. Our, even if we say we're selecting for the same thing, our eye is different. And so the genetic makeup, will be different. And when we cross them, it's a hybrid. They're going to have hybrid vigor. They're going to look different. And you need to keep those separated from your main line.
Carey: 25:06
I would recommend to somebody that if they were wanting to do something like that in a bird, get them from the same person, find some that you like, get them from the same person and. Try it out before you mix in another gene pool.
Jennifer: 25:32
Yeah, that's subline.
Carey: 25:33
Yeah don't do that. Don't undo what that person spent years doing. Try it out. You probably going to be happy and it's going to save you a lot of time.
Jennifer: 25:46
Yeah because the breeders already put in all the time.
Carey: 25:49
That's right. That's why they charge so much for
Jennifer: 25:52
eggs. Yeah, exactly.
Carey: 25:55
Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive all the new episodes right when they are released, and they are released on Thursday mornings. Feel free to email us at PoultryNerds@gmail.Com and let us know what you think of the show. If you're on Facebook, check us out at the Poultry Nerds and make sure to give us a like and a follow. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning and keep it egg citing. This is Carey from Poultry Nerds signing off. Feathers up, everyone.
