Sept. 9, 2024
John Tinsley On Minorcas-Part 1
In this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast hosted by Rip Stalvey, guest John Tinsley discusses his extensive experience raising Minorcas, a chicken breed known for its size, fertility, and egg production.
Tinsley shares his journey into poultry, influenced by his father and grandfather, his transition to raising Minorcas for their desirable traits, and the challenges involved in giving them enough space. He details his coop and pen setups, feeding practices, and breeding methodology, highlighting the importance of managing both males and females for optimal growth and show readiness.
The episode emphasizes Tinsley's dedication to maintaining and improving Minorcas, including special management practices for show preparations and the importance of line breeding while introducing new genetic material to combat inbreeding challenges.
The podcast concludes by underscoring the reliable hatching characteristics of Minorcas and encourages listeners to subscribe and share feedback. Part two will be posted next Tuesday.
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WEBVTT
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Hi! Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast.
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I'm Rip Stalvey, and together with Mandelyn Royal and John Gunterman, we're your co hosts for this show, and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy, and productive flock.
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Hi, this is Rip Stalvey, your host, and we're gonna be talking with John Tinsley about Minorcas.
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John, it's a pleasure to have you on today.
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Oh, it's good to be here Rip, I appreciate you asking love to spend, love to tell some information about our favorite breed.
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We're looking forward to it.
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Before we get into Minorcas as such, John, how about telling us a little bit about yourself?
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When did you first get interested in poultry?
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That's a I blame my father and my grandparents for that.
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We lived in a big old house when I was a kid and my dad kept the incubator and the box of baby chicks in my room when I was probably 2 or 3 years old and my first recollection of chickens was waking up in the middle of the night to go play with them.
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When I was probably 3 or 4 years old, and then, we always had chickens of some type.
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We always had a, dad and my grandpa, they grew up, they had a white leghorn.
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Farm of 500, and that's what they sold butter, cream, and eggs for revenue back in the 50s.
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And of course, we always had some type of chickens along the way.
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What led you to settle on Minorcas?
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What about them?
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You know what?
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Over the years of raising just about anything and everything, bantam, large fowl, it's I think we've run the gamut, and I raised Wyandottes for years, and really specialized on bantam wind dots for years, and it was, I got And not to disparage them, I still love them, but I got tired of not getting many eggs, and not hatching very well, and not having fertility, and things like that, so it's like I started migrating to something that I knew would lay really well, I knew would have great fertility, and I knew that would hatch really well, and Menorcas have fit that bill.
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Very good.
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How long have you had Menorcas?
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We've had Menorcas over the years.
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I had some probably, I had some white and blacks about 20 years ago, and they were pretty decent, but I never really focused on them.
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Just had them, I liked having them around, they were nice to look at.
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And then I guess about 2009 was when I started.
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I got back into it and got some rose combed black minorkas from Wallace and Brad Buttram in Missouri.
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And that's that kind of kick started that and raised a few of them for a few years.
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And then after that, we we branched out into the whites after that.
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I'm certainly glad to see somebody working with the whites because there's just, at least down here in the south where I'm at, you hardly ever see a white Menorca, and that's been that way for years.
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And I think that, there's, I guess there's some historical significance to that.
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Just the same as you don't see a lot of black Leghorns because black Menorcas existed in such good state, you don't see a lot of white Menorcas because white Leghorns existed in such good quantity and quality.
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And I think that's what led to.
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The white Menorca is not being as popular or not being seen as much as they were in the past.
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They there's been just a very few number of readers that have been raising whites, in the last 20 to 25 years.
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Gotcha.
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Tell me John, what do you find most challenging about Menorcas?
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I think that the biggest issue when you deal and a lot of people may not realize it, and they see, a few Menorcas in a showroom, and you don't see a lot of Mediterranean breeds in a showroom in general.
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I think a lot of people may not understand the size of Menorcas.
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Menorcas are an enormous chicken.
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And they, and when they're bred right and they look right they should take your breath away a little bit.
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You should see them and go, wow, that is an impressive chicken.
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And for Menorcas to really thrive, I think the biggest issue that we've had to deal with is you've got to have space.
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You've got to have lots of room for Menorcas.
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They're not something, you can keep them in confinement, and they do well in confinement, but you just better have a lot of room for each bird that you have in.
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Makes perfect sense.
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And I agree with you on the impressive size and the wow factor.
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Because probably the first standard bred Menorcas I ever saw, really wasn't all that long ago, but Richard Schrock brought them down here to Florida for a show.
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And I walked in and I was just literally dumbfounded at the size of those Menorcas.
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For sure, and Richard is That is most definitely, whether it's a male or a female, if you're going to show Menorca's properly, you really have to have them in a double coop.
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Just because they're so long, their tails are so long and they're so tall, they need as much room to really spread out and look like they should, in a show.
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And of course, Richard is famous And rightfully as probably the most recognized and most awarded Menorca breeder.
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In the American Poultry Association, with, when it comes to single comb black minorcas, he's master breeder, master exhibitor, he's done it all.
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And Richard, over decades had figured out a great way to really condition his birds to, to a standard that not many others have been able to achieve.
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Lord knows we haven't had that ability yet, but it's always something we strive for is to have birds that were always conditioned as great as his were.
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We've talked about what you find most challenging, but what do you find most rewarding about Menorcas?
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To think about that question a little bit and, to me, it's, I'm just a simple country guy at heart in a lot of ways, but, I like to just get a 5 gallon bucket, turn it upside down, and sit on it, and just sit and watch, they're such regal, majestic birds, when they're just walking around, they're really a pleasure to watch and a lot of people, a lot of people will say Mediterranean breeds are very flighty and they're very scary, and they get scared easily and they don't Menorcas, and I always say this to everyone that I talk about, Menorcas are pigs for food.
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If you have treats or if you have something for them, they'll come up and be your best friend and love you.
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And you just have, you do have to spend the time and you do have to take the time to just sit down with them and their personality will really come out and they They really show in that sense.
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Plus, you can't talk about Menorcas without talking about one of the great things about them is eggs.
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You get a large quantity of very large eggs.
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And with all of our different varieties that we raise, we get, we, It can be a hundred and five degrees and we're still getting eggs, or it could be ten degrees and we're still getting eggs.
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They That's pretty remarkable.
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They are, in a lot of ways they're bulletproof, in a lot of ways that other chickens aren't.
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You don't have to really coddle them, you don't have to look after them and worry about certain things.
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It's you give them clean feed and clean water and take care of them, and they're going to go about their business and be just good chickens for you.
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Talk us through How do you raise your minorkas?
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From the time you set the eggs until you have your mature birds?
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What steps do you go through with your birds?
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The way we do it is, and I talk about specifically on our farm, where me and my parents raise our minorkas there.
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I also have a partner that I work with minorkas, and Jill Harp, and she does things a little bit different than I do, but for the most part we follow the same way.
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You hatch chicks out, you put them in a small tub, or a Cattle water trough until they get feathered out a little bit more and then we have I have a fairly large brooder coop, that has electricity in it that, basically I keep out light in there, not necessarily a heat lamp because they're starting to get feathers by that time.
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And that coop, even for small chickens, and we're talking about, three to four weeks old, it's an eight by sixteen coop.
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And so I give them plenty of room to run around and I will leave them at that stage and in that area for a little while, until they start showing the differences in sexes.
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And then at that time, then I'll start separating out males and females.
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Because, anyone who's ever raised chickens very long, you know that keeping young males and females together sometimes can not be easy.
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Be real productive in terms of having them grow and feather out correctly.
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And I'll segregate and I'll take the best males that I want to keep and put, 5 or 6 in an 8x8 coop, and let them grow up a little bit from there and then segregate after that.
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It's always about not letting them get overcrowded.
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As they grow it's Continually breaking up pins into smaller pins as you go along, that way they continually have, the area to continue to grow.
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I will say this, and this is, you can argue this is a good or a bad thing about Menorcas, but young Menorcas, as they're growing up they will eat.
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They are very large birds, and they become very large birds, and they will consume a lot of feed as they're growing up.
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But that's, that's how they get that size, and they put a lot of effort into eating and getting larger, and grow fairly rapidly.
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They'll become Fairly good sized birds, within 6 weeks to 2 months, they're already, a pretty good size.
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You, you were talking about how much they like to eat, but do you use any special feed with them?
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Do you feed a high protein, a mid range?
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Mid range.
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I don't I've tried it different ways.
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I've fed the high protein.
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I've fed in between and I've fed low protein And I'd like to say that, that Menorcas are fairly bulletproof when it comes to feed as well.
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I feed them a good leg crumble, that's either, depending on the time of the year, either 16 to 20 percent, nothing that's outlandish by any means, because, there's, you can talk about feeding them too much protein, you don't necessarily want to do that, but it's usually 16 to 20, usually during breeding season, when they're really putting in the effort to laying eggs and all of that, I will feed a higher protein feed, usually around a 20.
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And then the rest of the year, when it gets hotter, when it gets colder, they will definitely cut back on their feed consumption and they usually cut back on the protein level as well.
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And they seem to do really well.
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Through that process.
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Of course, growing out, with younger birds, you do feed them, I do feed them a higher protein grower feed.
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Especially, when they're younger they need as much as possible.
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And I'll do that probably through about four months.
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About four months of age, I'll continue to feed that high protein grower feed and then start transitioning to a little bit less protein as they're filling out.
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Got it.
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Do Menorcas require any special management practices?
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Those males are so big and they have, pretty good sized tails on them.
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Is there anything you do to keep them in good feather or keep those managed up?
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If you're going to be preparing a male for a show, you're going to have to segregate him for an extended period of time.
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For those tails to stay in good shape and to fill out the way you want them to, you're going I have some 4x4 and some 4x8 foot pins, that I keep some of the extra males in, or ones that I'm planning to show, and I'll keep them in there for 3 4 months to let those tails really fill out and not get broken, because, as chickens, they're Breeding or just interacting with others or doing whatever they do, they have a tendency sometimes to break tail feathers and with a bird, like a Menorca that does have such a full, long tail feather, if that breaks and you have to pull it out, you're talking about two months.
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And so it is definitely something you have to be aware of, when you're getting ready to show males, is you really want to sequester them and keep them away from other birds, and the females for that matter too, because their tails can be very full and very large feathered as well.
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Let's talk for a minute about your pen and coop set up.
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Okay.
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And let's go from breeding pen to grow out and there I have the smallest pens that I use are the, are four by four or four by eight, and those are usually just for single birds that are conditioning or something like that.
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For the other matings it depends on how big of a mating that I have.
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I have four 8x8 coops that I use for trios or quads, and that gives them plenty of room, and I have a fairly high roost as well, because Menorcas do like to fly, and they do need to have very muscular wings and very powerful bodies, and so it's good for them to have that ability to fly up and it's good for them but I have four of those 8x8 pins that I kind of use, I'll use for trios or quads during breeding season.
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And then once I break those up, I'll use those pins for younger birds, to break out smaller groups of pullets or cockerels.
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The other, I have two other pens that are eight by 16, which are pretty good size, and I can keep a larger group of breeders in there, or I'll use those for raising young chicks.
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And then I have two large, really large area cooks that are, one is 16 by 18 and the other one's 16 by 16.
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And I use those.
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One is like after breeding season is over, that's a.
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Repository for the hens that are not breeding.
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They can hang out in there in a big coop, plenty of water and feed.
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And the other big coop I use for grow outs, as they're getting larger, I can put them out into a much larger coop to, to give them extra room to, to watch them fill out.
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A lot of big coops.
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There's not a lot of, I have a few small conditioning cages, that I use That are three foot by three foot, that are three feet high, that I can put a birdie in if I need to, but in terms of big pins I've got a lot of big pins and like everyone else, I'm sure I could build a couple more and use them.
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That's the never ending struggle.
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We never have enough pens.
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It just never fails.
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We always find a way to put something in them magically.
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That's very much, that's been an investment, since we started with Menorcas, 11 years ago.
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That has most definitely been an investment, monetarily wise, of building much larger pens to accommodate the much larger birds and give them the room to roam that they need to.
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Is there anything you would change about that setup?
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Obviously you would love to have birds to be able to run outside and, and have that pastoral view of chickens out on the pasture and the grass and things like that.
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But unfortunately, where our farm is, there's a lot of predators.
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And you name it, it's coons, skunks, bobcats, foxes, hawks, owls, you name it, anything and everything loves to eat chicken.
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And We've just, we've gotten to the point where we do not let the birds out to free range just because they're too valuable and it's not very good practice on our part to, to have them out and have them be decimated by predators.
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So having a big run area would be great, that was protected from predators.
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That would definitely be something that, I'm working for in the future.
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And in probably more More pens for conditioning males and females, I need more pens to be able to segregate more birds, as they grow to allow them to really flourish and fill out.
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Okay, let's transition now into breeding Menorcas.
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What do you look for when you're selecting your breeders?
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There's a lot of things we look for and there's always room to improve, the ultimate Menorca.
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In our mind, it's always going to be, it's going to have a very good leg length and it's going to show a good amount of shank underneath, it's going to have a full breast, it's going to have an angled body and tail, full tail obviously, and then of course you look at the head points if you want a bird with a nice white earlobe that's fairly large, and then you look for symmetry in the comb.
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With single combs, they've been bred to a fairly high level and you don't have to worry about that.
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About culling for combs near as much.
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Rosecombs on the other hand, because of their scarcity, and we've had to mate with single combs, you've had to, you have to be very judicious in looking at rosecombs.
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In their symmetry and things like that, that's always something we really improve.
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But when you look at for the health and the stature of a bird, when we have a young bird, we want to see it, it looks long and tall.
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When you see it, when you see a young Menorca, you want it to look long and tall because its body will fill out, over time.
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Menorca really don't fully mature until 14 to 18 months.
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They're not gonna really get to their full size until then.
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So even a bird that's 10 to 12 months old is really not to its full potential yet.
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So you do have to be patient with that a little.
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But you can see when a young bird has, the legs and.
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The shank showing and the nice body with it, you can definitely tell that it's going to be a useful bird for you down the road.
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Got it.
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Let's talk about your breeding program just for a minute.
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Do you flock, mate, inbreed, linebreed?
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What do you do?
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We're linebreed and, and that's the good thing about having a partner.
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Jill Harp, my, my partner in, in raising Menorcas.
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We have a couple different clans.
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It's like we have birds that are related.
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Probably best described as cousins, but we try to keep our own flock a little bit separate and breed for things that we have that are good traits in each one of our flocks, and then if we need to cross over and trade birds, we do that as well.
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And that's been one of the benefits.
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In terms of making progress with the white Menorcas especially, is having someone there to always work with and having a resource to trade birds back and forth with.
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This is most definitely a group project, that we've been working with Menorcas.
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It is Not solely my accomplishment or anyone else's, this has definitely been a team effort and a lot of people have contributed to bringing back a couple of the rare varieties of Menorcas and mainly specifically talking about the single comb whites and the rose comb whites but we do we family mate, I guess that's the best way to describe it is, I do.
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Sons to mothers, I'll do fathers to daughters, as usually, that's a little bit of a line breed.
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But we've also, we've, being that we've been working with a a relatively kind of recovery with Rosecomb White Manor, cause we've had to go outside the box a little bit on some of those, and cause we've had to mate to, Black Menorcas that had some better traits that needed to be brought into the white Menorcas for sure and so we've been introducing new blood along the way because we had been working on rose comb whites for about five years and we started just to see a glimpse of problems of inbreeding, a little bit.
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And inbreeding is a necessary evil.
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We all know that.
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But we started to see some problems that we didn't really like and we wanted to jump ahead of, and that's where we crossed into The blacks again, because the initial cross with a white and a black to start the program for rose comb white minorcas, we could trace every bird back to that original pair, and so we needed to add some new blood into that to try to reinvigorate it, and it definitely has done so.
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And now it's just reincorporating those birds back into the program to get back up to where we want them in terms of the rose comb whites.
00:20:07.299 --> 00:20:08.410
Think I answered that question.
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I think I went off on a tangent a little bit.
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You did good.
00:20:11.420 --> 00:20:12.920
Let's talk about your hatching program.
00:20:13.640 --> 00:20:17.979
I know some breeds require a little bit different hatching technique than others.
00:20:17.979 --> 00:20:18.935
What about Minorcas?
00:20:19.700 --> 00:20:20.910
No, not really at all.
00:20:21.200 --> 00:20:23.230
They're pretty straightforward in terms of hatching.
00:20:23.359 --> 00:20:35.099
And again, that goes back to one of the things that we were attracted, and as we've raised more of them along the way, we're like, hey, these things lay really well, they're really fertile, and they hatch really well.
00:20:35.589 --> 00:20:45.500
And so we haven't had a lot of issues in terms of hatching that you may have, with some other breeds, and like I said, we've raised a lot of different stuff, but Minorcas hatch really well.
00:20:46.007 --> 00:20:57.136
Thank you for joining us this week and before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released and they're released every Tuesday.
00:20:57.676 --> 00:21:04.007
And if you're enjoying this podcast, we'd like to ask you to drop us an email at poultry keepers podcast at gmail.
00:21:04.027 --> 00:21:06.297
com and share your thoughts about the show.
00:21:07.507 --> 00:21:11.307
Thank you again for joining us for this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast.
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We'll see you next week.
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00:00:03.100 --> 00:00:13.300
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Hi, this is Rip Stalvey, your host, and we're gonna be talking with John Tinsley about Minorcas.
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John, it's a pleasure to have you on today.
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Oh, it's good to be here Rip, I appreciate you asking love to spend, love to tell some information about our favorite breed.
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We're looking forward to it.
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Before we get into Minorcas as such, John, how about telling us a little bit about yourself?
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When did you first get interested in poultry?
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That's a I blame my father and my grandparents for that.
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We lived in a big old house when I was a kid and my dad kept the incubator and the box of baby chicks in my room when I was probably 2 or 3 years old and my first recollection of chickens was waking up in the middle of the night to go play with them.
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When I was probably 3 or 4 years old, and then, we always had chickens of some type.
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We always had a, dad and my grandpa, they grew up, they had a white leghorn.
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Farm of 500, and that's what they sold butter, cream, and eggs for revenue back in the 50s.
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And of course, we always had some type of chickens along the way.
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What led you to settle on Minorcas?
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What about them?
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You know what?
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Over the years of raising just about anything and everything, bantam, large fowl, it's I think we've run the gamut, and I raised Wyandottes for years, and really specialized on bantam wind dots for years, and it was, I got And not to disparage them, I still love them, but I got tired of not getting many eggs, and not hatching very well, and not having fertility, and things like that, so it's like I started migrating to something that I knew would lay really well, I knew would have great fertility, and I knew that would hatch really well, and Menorcas have fit that bill.
00:02:09.626 --> 00:02:10.195
Very good.
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How long have you had Menorcas?
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We've had Menorcas over the years.
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I had some probably, I had some white and blacks about 20 years ago, and they were pretty decent, but I never really focused on them.
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Just had them, I liked having them around, they were nice to look at.
00:02:24.816 --> 00:02:27.466
And then I guess about 2009 was when I started.
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I got back into it and got some rose combed black minorkas from Wallace and Brad Buttram in Missouri.
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And that's that kind of kick started that and raised a few of them for a few years.
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And then after that, we we branched out into the whites after that.
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I'm certainly glad to see somebody working with the whites because there's just, at least down here in the south where I'm at, you hardly ever see a white Menorca, and that's been that way for years.
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And I think that, there's, I guess there's some historical significance to that.
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Just the same as you don't see a lot of black Leghorns because black Menorcas existed in such good state, you don't see a lot of white Menorcas because white Leghorns existed in such good quantity and quality.
00:03:09.240 --> 00:03:10.900
And I think that's what led to.
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The white Menorca is not being as popular or not being seen as much as they were in the past.
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They there's been just a very few number of readers that have been raising whites, in the last 20 to 25 years.
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Gotcha.
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Tell me John, what do you find most challenging about Menorcas?
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I think that the biggest issue when you deal and a lot of people may not realize it, and they see, a few Menorcas in a showroom, and you don't see a lot of Mediterranean breeds in a showroom in general.
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I think a lot of people may not understand the size of Menorcas.
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Menorcas are an enormous chicken.
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And they, and when they're bred right and they look right they should take your breath away a little bit.
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You should see them and go, wow, that is an impressive chicken.
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And for Menorcas to really thrive, I think the biggest issue that we've had to deal with is you've got to have space.
00:04:08.090 --> 00:04:11.310
You've got to have lots of room for Menorcas.
00:04:11.810 --> 00:04:20.160
They're not something, you can keep them in confinement, and they do well in confinement, but you just better have a lot of room for each bird that you have in.
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Makes perfect sense.
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And I agree with you on the impressive size and the wow factor.
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Because probably the first standard bred Menorcas I ever saw, really wasn't all that long ago, but Richard Schrock brought them down here to Florida for a show.
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And I walked in and I was just literally dumbfounded at the size of those Menorcas.
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For sure, and Richard is That is most definitely, whether it's a male or a female, if you're going to show Menorca's properly, you really have to have them in a double coop.
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Just because they're so long, their tails are so long and they're so tall, they need as much room to really spread out and look like they should, in a show.
00:05:07.785 --> 00:05:17.204
And of course, Richard is famous And rightfully as probably the most recognized and most awarded Menorca breeder.
00:05:17.500 --> 00:05:25.790
In the American Poultry Association, with, when it comes to single comb black minorcas, he's master breeder, master exhibitor, he's done it all.
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And Richard, over decades had figured out a great way to really condition his birds to, to a standard that not many others have been able to achieve.
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Lord knows we haven't had that ability yet, but it's always something we strive for is to have birds that were always conditioned as great as his were.
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We've talked about what you find most challenging, but what do you find most rewarding about Menorcas?
00:05:54.110 --> 00:06:29.071
To think about that question a little bit and, to me, it's, I'm just a simple country guy at heart in a lot of ways, but, I like to just get a 5 gallon bucket, turn it upside down, and sit on it, and just sit and watch, they're such regal, majestic birds, when they're just walking around, they're really a pleasure to watch and a lot of people, a lot of people will say Mediterranean breeds are very flighty and they're very scary, and they get scared easily and they don't Menorcas, and I always say this to everyone that I talk about, Menorcas are pigs for food.
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If you have treats or if you have something for them, they'll come up and be your best friend and love you.
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And you just have, you do have to spend the time and you do have to take the time to just sit down with them and their personality will really come out and they They really show in that sense.
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Plus, you can't talk about Menorcas without talking about one of the great things about them is eggs.
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You get a large quantity of very large eggs.
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And with all of our different varieties that we raise, we get, we, It can be a hundred and five degrees and we're still getting eggs, or it could be ten degrees and we're still getting eggs.
00:07:03.420 --> 00:07:04.911
They That's pretty remarkable.
00:07:05.321 --> 00:07:10.730
They are, in a lot of ways they're bulletproof, in a lot of ways that other chickens aren't.
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You don't have to really coddle them, you don't have to look after them and worry about certain things.
00:07:17.670 --> 00:07:24.600
It's you give them clean feed and clean water and take care of them, and they're going to go about their business and be just good chickens for you.
00:07:25.151 --> 00:07:28.480
Talk us through How do you raise your minorkas?
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From the time you set the eggs until you have your mature birds?
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What steps do you go through with your birds?
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The way we do it is, and I talk about specifically on our farm, where me and my parents raise our minorkas there.
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I also have a partner that I work with minorkas, and Jill Harp, and she does things a little bit different than I do, but for the most part we follow the same way.
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You hatch chicks out, you put them in a small tub, or a Cattle water trough until they get feathered out a little bit more and then we have I have a fairly large brooder coop, that has electricity in it that, basically I keep out light in there, not necessarily a heat lamp because they're starting to get feathers by that time.
00:08:09.230 --> 00:08:16.060
And that coop, even for small chickens, and we're talking about, three to four weeks old, it's an eight by sixteen coop.
00:08:16.711 --> 00:08:26.365
And so I give them plenty of room to run around and I will leave them at that stage and in that area for a little while, until they start showing the differences in sexes.
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And then at that time, then I'll start separating out males and females.
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Because, anyone who's ever raised chickens very long, you know that keeping young males and females together sometimes can not be easy.
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Be real productive in terms of having them grow and feather out correctly.
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And I'll segregate and I'll take the best males that I want to keep and put, 5 or 6 in an 8x8 coop, and let them grow up a little bit from there and then segregate after that.
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It's always about not letting them get overcrowded.
00:08:56.865 --> 00:09:07.745
As they grow it's Continually breaking up pins into smaller pins as you go along, that way they continually have, the area to continue to grow.
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I will say this, and this is, you can argue this is a good or a bad thing about Menorcas, but young Menorcas, as they're growing up they will eat.
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They are very large birds, and they become very large birds, and they will consume a lot of feed as they're growing up.
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But that's, that's how they get that size, and they put a lot of effort into eating and getting larger, and grow fairly rapidly.
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They'll become Fairly good sized birds, within 6 weeks to 2 months, they're already, a pretty good size.
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You, you were talking about how much they like to eat, but do you use any special feed with them?
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Do you feed a high protein, a mid range?
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Mid range.
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I don't I've tried it different ways.
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I've fed the high protein.
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I've fed in between and I've fed low protein And I'd like to say that, that Menorcas are fairly bulletproof when it comes to feed as well.
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I feed them a good leg crumble, that's either, depending on the time of the year, either 16 to 20 percent, nothing that's outlandish by any means, because, there's, you can talk about feeding them too much protein, you don't necessarily want to do that, but it's usually 16 to 20, usually during breeding season, when they're really putting in the effort to laying eggs and all of that, I will feed a higher protein feed, usually around a 20.
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And then the rest of the year, when it gets hotter, when it gets colder, they will definitely cut back on their feed consumption and they usually cut back on the protein level as well.
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And they seem to do really well.
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Through that process.
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Of course, growing out, with younger birds, you do feed them, I do feed them a higher protein grower feed.
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Especially, when they're younger they need as much as possible.
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And I'll do that probably through about four months.
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About four months of age, I'll continue to feed that high protein grower feed and then start transitioning to a little bit less protein as they're filling out.
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Got it.
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Do Menorcas require any special management practices?
00:11:01.225 --> 00:11:05.705
Those males are so big and they have, pretty good sized tails on them.
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Is there anything you do to keep them in good feather or keep those managed up?
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If you're going to be preparing a male for a show, you're going to have to segregate him for an extended period of time.
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For those tails to stay in good shape and to fill out the way you want them to, you're going I have some 4x4 and some 4x8 foot pins, that I keep some of the extra males in, or ones that I'm planning to show, and I'll keep them in there for 3 4 months to let those tails really fill out and not get broken, because, as chickens, they're Breeding or just interacting with others or doing whatever they do, they have a tendency sometimes to break tail feathers and with a bird, like a Menorca that does have such a full, long tail feather, if that breaks and you have to pull it out, you're talking about two months.
00:11:57.904 --> 00:12:12.475
And so it is definitely something you have to be aware of, when you're getting ready to show males, is you really want to sequester them and keep them away from other birds, and the females for that matter too, because their tails can be very full and very large feathered as well.
00:12:12.975 --> 00:12:17.384
Let's talk for a minute about your pen and coop set up.
00:12:18.184 --> 00:12:18.485
Okay.
00:12:18.485 --> 00:12:31.980
And let's go from breeding pen to grow out and there I have the smallest pens that I use are the, are four by four or four by eight, and those are usually just for single birds that are conditioning or something like that.
00:12:32.370 --> 00:12:36.519
For the other matings it depends on how big of a mating that I have.
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I have four 8x8 coops that I use for trios or quads, and that gives them plenty of room, and I have a fairly high roost as well, because Menorcas do like to fly, and they do need to have very muscular wings and very powerful bodies, and so it's good for them to have that ability to fly up and it's good for them but I have four of those 8x8 pins that I kind of use, I'll use for trios or quads during breeding season.
00:13:03.139 --> 00:13:11.440
And then once I break those up, I'll use those pins for younger birds, to break out smaller groups of pullets or cockerels.
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The other, I have two other pens that are eight by 16, which are pretty good size, and I can keep a larger group of breeders in there, or I'll use those for raising young chicks.
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And then I have two large, really large area cooks that are, one is 16 by 18 and the other one's 16 by 16.
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And I use those.
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One is like after breeding season is over, that's a.
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Repository for the hens that are not breeding.
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They can hang out in there in a big coop, plenty of water and feed.
00:13:45.985 --> 00:13:55.784
And the other big coop I use for grow outs, as they're getting larger, I can put them out into a much larger coop to, to give them extra room to, to watch them fill out.
00:13:56.284 --> 00:13:57.235
A lot of big coops.
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There's not a lot of, I have a few small conditioning cages, that I use That are three foot by three foot, that are three feet high, that I can put a birdie in if I need to, but in terms of big pins I've got a lot of big pins and like everyone else, I'm sure I could build a couple more and use them.
00:14:14.195 --> 00:14:15.735
That's the never ending struggle.
00:14:16.384 --> 00:14:17.634
We never have enough pens.
00:14:17.985 --> 00:14:18.855
It just never fails.
00:14:18.855 --> 00:14:21.705
We always find a way to put something in them magically.
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That's very much, that's been an investment, since we started with Menorcas, 11 years ago.
00:14:30.115 --> 00:14:41.825
That has most definitely been an investment, monetarily wise, of building much larger pens to accommodate the much larger birds and give them the room to roam that they need to.
00:14:42.625 --> 00:14:44.845
Is there anything you would change about that setup?
00:14:45.404 --> 00:14:54.125
Obviously you would love to have birds to be able to run outside and, and have that pastoral view of chickens out on the pasture and the grass and things like that.
00:14:54.125 --> 00:14:58.054
But unfortunately, where our farm is, there's a lot of predators.
00:14:58.855 --> 00:15:06.764
And you name it, it's coons, skunks, bobcats, foxes, hawks, owls, you name it, anything and everything loves to eat chicken.
00:15:07.294 --> 00:15:22.205
And We've just, we've gotten to the point where we do not let the birds out to free range just because they're too valuable and it's not very good practice on our part to, to have them out and have them be decimated by predators.
00:15:22.774 --> 00:15:26.664
So having a big run area would be great, that was protected from predators.
00:15:26.664 --> 00:15:29.745
That would definitely be something that, I'm working for in the future.
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And in probably more More pens for conditioning males and females, I need more pens to be able to segregate more birds, as they grow to allow them to really flourish and fill out.
00:15:45.865 --> 00:15:49.345
Okay, let's transition now into breeding Menorcas.
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What do you look for when you're selecting your breeders?
00:15:52.835 --> 00:15:57.245
There's a lot of things we look for and there's always room to improve, the ultimate Menorca.
00:15:57.350 --> 00:16:21.330
In our mind, it's always going to be, it's going to have a very good leg length and it's going to show a good amount of shank underneath, it's going to have a full breast, it's going to have an angled body and tail, full tail obviously, and then of course you look at the head points if you want a bird with a nice white earlobe that's fairly large, and then you look for symmetry in the comb.
00:16:22.049 --> 00:16:27.980
With single combs, they've been bred to a fairly high level and you don't have to worry about that.
00:16:28.304 --> 00:16:30.695
About culling for combs near as much.
00:16:31.245 --> 00:16:42.215
Rosecombs on the other hand, because of their scarcity, and we've had to mate with single combs, you've had to, you have to be very judicious in looking at rosecombs.
00:16:42.715 --> 00:16:47.174
In their symmetry and things like that, that's always something we really improve.
00:16:47.195 --> 00:16:53.375
But when you look at for the health and the stature of a bird, when we have a young bird, we want to see it, it looks long and tall.
00:16:53.644 --> 00:17:00.524
When you see it, when you see a young Menorca, you want it to look long and tall because its body will fill out, over time.
00:17:01.210 --> 00:17:05.259
Menorca really don't fully mature until 14 to 18 months.
00:17:05.809 --> 00:17:08.599
They're not gonna really get to their full size until then.
00:17:08.599 --> 00:17:13.319
So even a bird that's 10 to 12 months old is really not to its full potential yet.
00:17:13.380 --> 00:17:15.319
So you do have to be patient with that a little.
00:17:15.670 --> 00:17:19.150
But you can see when a young bird has, the legs and.
00:17:19.894 --> 00:17:26.214
The shank showing and the nice body with it, you can definitely tell that it's going to be a useful bird for you down the road.
00:17:27.015 --> 00:17:27.444
Got it.
00:17:27.974 --> 00:17:30.944
Let's talk about your breeding program just for a minute.
00:17:31.444 --> 00:17:33.924
Do you flock, mate, inbreed, linebreed?
00:17:33.944 --> 00:17:34.434
What do you do?
00:17:34.934 --> 00:17:38.775
We're linebreed and, and that's the good thing about having a partner.
00:17:38.875 --> 00:17:43.214
Jill Harp, my, my partner in, in raising Menorcas.
00:17:43.714 --> 00:17:46.275
We have a couple different clans.
00:17:46.345 --> 00:17:48.625
It's like we have birds that are related.
00:17:49.009 --> 00:18:03.589
Probably best described as cousins, but we try to keep our own flock a little bit separate and breed for things that we have that are good traits in each one of our flocks, and then if we need to cross over and trade birds, we do that as well.
00:18:04.130 --> 00:18:05.779
And that's been one of the benefits.
00:18:05.940 --> 00:18:16.369
In terms of making progress with the white Menorcas especially, is having someone there to always work with and having a resource to trade birds back and forth with.
00:18:16.779 --> 00:18:21.190
This is most definitely a group project, that we've been working with Menorcas.
00:18:21.750 --> 00:18:44.204
It is Not solely my accomplishment or anyone else's, this has definitely been a team effort and a lot of people have contributed to bringing back a couple of the rare varieties of Menorcas and mainly specifically talking about the single comb whites and the rose comb whites but we do we family mate, I guess that's the best way to describe it is, I do.
00:18:44.704 --> 00:18:51.115
Sons to mothers, I'll do fathers to daughters, as usually, that's a little bit of a line breed.
00:18:51.434 --> 00:19:28.599
But we've also, we've, being that we've been working with a a relatively kind of recovery with Rosecomb White Manor, cause we've had to go outside the box a little bit on some of those, and cause we've had to mate to, Black Menorcas that had some better traits that needed to be brought into the white Menorcas for sure and so we've been introducing new blood along the way because we had been working on rose comb whites for about five years and we started just to see a glimpse of problems of inbreeding, a little bit.
00:19:28.650 --> 00:19:30.930
And inbreeding is a necessary evil.
00:19:30.940 --> 00:19:31.950
We all know that.
00:19:32.549 --> 00:19:56.799
But we started to see some problems that we didn't really like and we wanted to jump ahead of, and that's where we crossed into The blacks again, because the initial cross with a white and a black to start the program for rose comb white minorcas, we could trace every bird back to that original pair, and so we needed to add some new blood into that to try to reinvigorate it, and it definitely has done so.
00:19:57.599 --> 00:20:06.799
And now it's just reincorporating those birds back into the program to get back up to where we want them in terms of the rose comb whites.
00:20:07.299 --> 00:20:08.410
Think I answered that question.
00:20:08.410 --> 00:20:09.960
I think I went off on a tangent a little bit.
00:20:10.049 --> 00:20:10.859
You did good.
00:20:11.420 --> 00:20:12.920
Let's talk about your hatching program.
00:20:13.640 --> 00:20:17.979
I know some breeds require a little bit different hatching technique than others.
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What about Minorcas?
00:20:19.700 --> 00:20:20.910
No, not really at all.
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They're pretty straightforward in terms of hatching.
00:20:23.359 --> 00:20:35.099
And again, that goes back to one of the things that we were attracted, and as we've raised more of them along the way, we're like, hey, these things lay really well, they're really fertile, and they hatch really well.
00:20:35.589 --> 00:20:45.500
And so we haven't had a lot of issues in terms of hatching that you may have, with some other breeds, and like I said, we've raised a lot of different stuff, but Minorcas hatch really well.
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