Following on from his previous article Making your Own Line of birds, Laurence Beeken looks at how to fix specific traits into your line, and how to introduce fresh blood when necessary.

So you've selected your birds and your first season has gone well, and now you're ready to look to the future and create the line that, hopefully, will be associated with you and become sought after by those who show and by those who wish to start off. You are now ready to start fixing the good and eliminating the bad. Remember that the sole point of all of this breeding is to improve the quality of your birds year on year without losing the vigour of the line - both in terms of how robust the birds are and how well they reproduce - a poor doer is unlikely to produce good offspring as weak birds invariably produce weak chicks which are then prone to disease.

By relying on ineffective worming treatments, poultry keepers are likely to build up problems as the birds’ environment becomes increasingly contaminated by large numbers of worm eggs, resulting in heavier worm burdens and ill birds.

Popular Poultry Breeds (Hardback)

by David Scrivener

Publisher: The Crowood Press Ltd. Edition Published: 10 Jun 2009  Hardback: 224 pages ISBN-10: 1847971032 ISBN-13: 978-1847971036

There is a misconception that Chlamydia can only be caught by humans from parrots, but it is common in pigeons, occasional in turkeys and ducks and is becoming more common in chickens. It is known as psittacosis in parrots or ornithosis in other birds, this is a potentially dangerous zoonotic disease as it may cause flu-like symptoms, pneumonia and abortion in humans.

If you are breeding or showing your birds, you will find it soon becomes necessary to identify them. Chickens, ducks and other poultry and pigeons can be clearly identified by a unique number printed on a leg ring which is registered to you when you purchase them. This allows you for example to prove ownership of your birds at the end of a show before you take them home, or identify birds that are being used in a breeding pen and maintain accurate breeding records.

There are many different types of identification used to identify pedigree animals from the tatoos used on cattle, pigs and horses to ear tags used on sheep, or microchips that are often used on cats and dogs. Identification is used on farms, primarily to identify animals that are going into the food chain but pigeon fanciers adopted leg rings many years before people were ringing poultry and it is mandatory for birds to have a permanent leg ring identification if they are to be entered into a race or a show.

The Hook Bill is now a seriously endangered rare breed. Sadly, it is thought that many colours have already been lost. The White variety is having great difficulty surviving. Hook Bill ducks have a history of more then 400 years, making them the oldest Domestic Waterfowl breed in Europe. Even Charles Darwin described Hook Bills in his books and kept them on his pond, yet their popularity has declined dramatically recently and there is now only an estimated 250 - 400 Hook Bill Ducks left in Europe.

What can you do?

If you are familiar with showing and breeding then you will almost certainly recognise the reference to a 'line' or a 'strain' and this becomes immediately obvious when you start to look at show winners - a particular exhibitor will have a row of birds all appearing exactly the same, and in fact the average member of the public visiting the show would be hard pressed to spot even the smallest difference.

This range of related birds will all have been bred in a specific way to maximize the preferred features and minimise or even eradicate those physical traits which fall 'foul' of the breed standards. The line is fixed to such an extent that a judge will recognise instantly a specific breeder's stock, and would even be able to tell which line a new exhibitor's bird originates from.