Show Season 2020 is Here!

 

Breeding season has finished and show season for us began this weekend. It certainly doesn’t feel like it’s been nearly 7 months since our last show for 2019. Breeding season is hectic and certainly flies by when you spend every spare second with your face in brooders and grower pens. Now that everything is out of the garage and growing well outside life is a little bit easier.

All the hard work is starting to show results and choosing potential showers can be quite a challenge when you are waiting for them to mature and go through that first moult. This year I didn’t breed as many as last year due to the drought and cost of feed but I still managed about 250 across all the breeds mum and I have. We have managed to get that down to around 130 now with about 100 of those being pekins. Every weekend we are out in the pens trying to decide what else can be moved on (especially when it comes to cockerels).  This is always hard and I am picking on the smallest of things to reduce the number of cockerels I have to feed.

 

This season there were two things I was trying to improve on. Firstly, I needed to work on getting more front into my cockerels and secondly, my mottled pekins were getting too dark in the hackles. With some help and advice from a fellow breeder, we chose a cockerel that had the best front out of what I had and then we chose two hens and put them together. They have produced some nice pullets and a couple of cockerels have caught my eye. I do still think this is something I need to continue to work on. When it comes to the mottled pullets, I have a few potential pullets in the grower pens. Their mottling is looking more even and there is colour back in their hackles but now to also work on foot feathering. This was the first season that I have bred mottle splits so it will be interesting to see how they mature and what they produce when put back to a mottle cock bird next breeding season.

 

I haven’t quite decided on my show team for the year, however I do have a few in mind but they are still young and need to do a bit more growing and go through their first moult.  Then I will make some decisions about what to keep and what to move on.

Saturday 8^th Feb was the Uralla Ag show. This was a small show but as it is close to home mum and I like to support our local clubs and we entered some young birds. Honestly, there were not many pekins entered but it is always a good day to catch up with people we haven’t seen for a while and also to see what judges think about what I did enter. Out of four cockerels and a cock bird, my young black from the trio mentioned above placed first and also took out the best of breed.

 

– Nathan Quayle