Hello everyone. We'll get these flying birds out in a second but first let's go and have
a look at the breeding pigeons. Down here this little hen, she is only on one egg. She laid two
and they were both fertile but one of them died halfway through incubation. I'm not sure what
the problem was there, but that egg if it's not already hatched it's hatching right now.
Maybe if I don't have this video out by the afternoon I'll have another look and give you
guys an update. All right, well it's the afternoon, cockbird is on the nest, but here is an update:
the egg has hatched! And there is a chance that this little baby might even be my very first
recessive opal spread, I think we'll know in about a week or so. Anyway, back to the video.
Check this guy out, have you ever seen a cock bird more protective of his nest?
I just want to have a look at your babies! Can we have a look? See, they can defend themselves!
All right, I'll move him out of the way and we'll have a look at these little black babies.
We'll get a better look down here where there's no father to protect them. So they're both black
babies or at least that's what they look like at the moment. It doesn't seem like we've got a
recessive opal spread in this nest, I haven't had much luck trying to get a recessive opal spread
but let's have a closer look at them. They've both already got their rings on them they're about
what are they, about a week and a half old? They both look like they'll be pure blacks,
apart from this one who has a few little white feathers on his backside.
So that'll be a nice way to tell them apart, but
these two will be going into the race team for next year,
so you guys are going to see these guys grow up and hopefully get out to about 600 kilometres.
All right, let's see if dad lets us put them back.
Relax, I'm putting them back!
And that's how he says thank you.
He could win a boxing match, this guy.
Why don't you give me a high five?
Oh, hi ten! All right, I'll leave him alone.
And down here my little old old red checker cock, he has babies as well.
He's got a bit of red on his face and that's just because he's been into the pink mineral powder
he's probably just given a nice mouthful to his babies, let's have a look at them.
He's much more docile than the opal cock so he's definitely going to let us have a look.
See, this guy's much tamer.
His babies they're a bit younger, I'm really
hoping that one of these will be a red checker cock
because a red checker cock is what I need for my yellow project.
Anyway before these guys get too cold I'll put the father back on them
and in a few days we'll have a better indication of their colour.
Here's the pink powder that the red checker cock has been getting into, the birds love
this stuff whenever I put it down. It's a little bit expensive but it's very good for the birds
and the babies love it. Anyway, let's move on to this side of the loft. Now over here on this side
there are only one lot of babies at the moment and that is in the red nest.
These are still fresh babies, haven't got their rings on yet.
But these will both be recessive reds. As you can see their parents are recessive reds so these guys
will be too, and you can also tell by the little brown ring on the end of the beak here. That's a
good indication that the babies will be recessive red so if you're ever trying to breed recessive
reds from heterozygous birds that's a good little early indication that you might have one.
Nice fat little babies, this one has a little ring as well but obviously like I said parents,
are both reds these will be reds. We'll just have to see how much white they have on them.
And again these guys will be in the race team. My plan for babies out of this pair is to fly them
and then choose the best one or two and breed them into some better racing stock, because these guys
they can do the racing but they're a little bit too slow for me at the moment, so I'm hoping to put
them into some better stock and improve the speed. Anyway, let's put these back over in the corner.
That doesn't look comfortable!
There we go, she'll jump back on in a sec.
The rest of the eggs, so these guys,
these guys,
and these guys, if you want to focus! those three will hatch around Wednesday, so in another four
or five days. And then we have this pair, they are on eggs, but of course they're
only a fresh pair so it's still another and a week and a half until these guys hatch.
Now i need to point out the first bit of bad news for this video,
and that is that this nest has been abandoned. The little lemon hen is hiding in there for the
moment, but towards the end of the video I'll show you what's going on there. Just quickly
we'll have a look at this hen, she's actually sitting on fake eggs and the reason for that
is that this hen and her old cock bird have a bad habit of smashing their own eggs, so what I've done
is move their eggs into some other nests just to protect them for a while and when they're due to
hatch, if they're fertile, I'll bring them back into this nest and these guys can raise them.
I would have preferred to foster the eggs out but I didn't have any other pairs that
laid in time so unfortunately I've had to do it this way. But the reason that we lost the nest in
the breeding section is that this hen is really not well, she's actually looking a lot better than
she was yesterday I've moved her into the flying section where there's no cocks to chase her around
but I might have to take her to the vet tomorrow because she's a good hen this one and
she's not very healthy at the moment.
I've been hand feeding her to try and get a bit of weight on her,
but I'm really hoping we don't lose this hen
because she has a very good hen.
Anyway I'll keep you guys updated on that, let's have a look at the flying birds. All right are
you guys ready to go out for a fly? Let's put them outside. So there are only the two flying birds at
the moment, there's the little checker that I bred here and then there's the reduced checker hen
We did actually unfortunately lose the other reduced hen, I think she was just a bit too old
to break in. Thankfully we still have this one and she's broken in quite successfully.
These two haven't started flying too much yet they just do a few laps around the house and
then they come back down to land but it's not going to be too much longer and then
we'll have a few more in the flying team with them, so we're looking forward to that.
Anyway guys I hope you've enjoyed today's video, there's a lot going on now that we've got the
birds breeding and egg starting to hatch, so I'll catch you in the next one, I hope you enjoyed!