Creating a Winning stud

I should say that i don't consider myself a subject expert, I have no formal qualifications in stock management or animal husbandry. I have however enjoyed a fair amount of success on the show bench and have over ten years experience of developing winning Fifes.

One of the most important lessons I've learned in over a decade of breeding exhbition Fifes is, like many things in life, it's the combination of specific elements that delivers the overall success, no one element will deliver consistent quality over a number of years.

So like any good recipe building a winning stud of fifes starts off with a selection of ingredients. I've captured these under the following headings:

Detailed Pedigree and Breeding Records

Conditioning

Environment

Quality factors

Structure

Patience

Success Criteria

Succession Planning

When visiting Gerald for the first time in late 2003 the first thing that struck me was how well he knew his own birds, over the years I have enjoyed access to his breeding and pedigree records and one of my first questions when acquiring a new bird from him is always "How's it bred".

Detailed Pedigree and Breeding Records

There are a number of commercial stud management software systems available and a handful developed specifically for the development of bird breeding programmes. Although I've dabbled with them periodically I've never strayed too far away from the Excel worksheets I created when I first started out.

Opposite are a selection of examples from my detailed breeding pedigree and breeding records. The Pedigree sheet was first developed a couple of years into the breeding programme. Like many fanciers i use a line breeding programme in my stud, this is well evidenced in the 2012 breeding programme extract right where you can see all of the cock birds are related.

It's widely acknowledged that pedigree and line breeding are key elements of producing consistency. In pedigree terms my sheets are quite basic in that they only display the family tree of a bird (shown in this example as TPDYH Bl3 - which translates to a Three Parts Dark Yellow Hen, Blue Ring Number 3). When I pull together my draft of pairings i can check the pedigree lines to see how closely related the birds are.

The breeding programme sheet is a single page view of the pairings, trios and multiple hens i intend to use for the forth coming season. Behind this are worksheets detailing the fertility rates of the flighted birds, the hatch to rearing ratio of the flighted hens and the exhibition ratio of the youngsters (so how many made the show team, and what their performance was).

This is all information that allows me to make informed decisions on which birds to retain and which birds will form part of the breeding programmes.

The final example shows the sheets i use in the birdroom during the breeding season itself. It's a standard form that tracks the basic information that will go on to populate the pedigree and breeding programme work sheets.

So in summary the detailed records are all about reducing the risk - if a specific line of birds has fertility issues there's little point as using it as the foundation for your stud as over time it will increase the problems you have. Similarly if a bird is of outstanding visual quality but its offspring don't have that quality then it's role in the shed changes - there's no substitute for having a real life model of what you're trying to produce.

Conditioning

The site contains the basic approach i adopt each year in preparing the birds in the run up to the breeding season here. Bringing birds into condition methodically and gradually should ensure problems in the breeding season are kept to a minimum.

For me the key is to keep the seasons as short as possbile - so my show season never really extends beyond 6 weeks, and i try and limit my breeding season across 16 weeks. That gives 30 weeks of the year where the birds are not involved (the moult aside) in anything too excerting, in this time i can build them up gradually offering them wild seeds, greens, access to baths and as much fresh air and natural day light as i can.

Fit and healthy birds should in theory at least, produce fit and healthy birds. I treat all the birds once a year with an intradine solution to clear out any nasties in the gut and in the run up to the breeding season i offer soluable calcium (grit and cuttlefish is always available) and in the run up to the breeding season will offer a soluable vitamin and mineral supplement.

There are countless lotions and potions, miracle products that claim to do this and do that, I've tried many of them over the last ten years and have really gone back to basics.

Environment

I could easily have combined conditioning and environment as they are so interlinked. Environment for me includes the physical elements such as cages and flights, lighting etc (which are covered off in detail on the site here) and the none physical elements.

As strange as this probably sounds stress can be one of the biggest challenges in the birdroom. Many of us use the birdroom as an oasis of calm to escape day to day issues and we know that we cope better with lifes up and downs when we're more at ease. I've found that it's the same for the birds, i've also found that my own negative energy and stress seems to transend to the birds they pick up on it and it seems to have a negative impact on them.

I don't profess to understand in any detail the energy fields of the body, in fact i'm somewhat sceptical (largely due to my lack of understanding). But I have seen first hand how by creating a calm and relaxed environment in the birdroom the birds thrive. As a result, although i still use the birdroom as my calm place i try to ensure, particularly during the breeding season, that i'm calm around the birds.

Each of the birds i retain has a full pedigree sheet created for it for my pedigree pairing programme, this particular bird is the mother of the variegated buff hen on the home page of the site. The shaded in mother and father sections indicate that this bird has the same family blood on both parental sides as its intended mate.

Below is an extract from my 2012 breeding programme, this shows the A-line cock birds. I use the pedigree sheets and this spreadsheet approach to develop my pairings (the expanded version is linked to fertility records, success of siblings and offspring on the show bench etc).

This is a simple breeding records sheet i use throughout the season, the information from this flows into the decision making for moving the stud forward.

Quality Factors

Key to any winning stud is birds of real quality, by that i mean not just obvious visual quality but the ability to reproduce and exceed their own quality. As fanciers our aim is to breed as close to the model as we can, details of the model and things to look out for are included in this site. Beyond these visual traits It's important to identify the "quality" factors, those elements that set our birds apart, for me positioning, poise and steadiness are three quality factors (shape, size, colour, feather are all a given) and it's those factors that i look for in my own bird (and those I judge on the bench).

Of course establishing these quality factors is the challenge, but knowing what they are is half the battle for me. I'm a firm believier that poise, steadiness and positioning are bred into a bird, although with extensive training they can be developed, i feel they have to be "within" to start with. I recently had a visit from a local novice, an ex pigeon man who has all of the component parts to make a really good champion in years to come, i pulled my three colour special winning dark hens from their flight cage where they'd enjoyed stretching their wings for the last few months and popped them in training cages. Within moments those birds were settled and showing their quality.

We all tend to look at certain parts of our stud and look to "correct the faults" with our breeding selections, and my approach is no different, but to keep competitive over the years its the quality factors that set a stud apart.

Structure

I've listened, read and watched with interest the theory and structure around breeding programmes. For my own part I often feel too much emphasis is placed on the breeding approach, there seems to be an expectation that by adopting a certain structure progression and show success will be guaranteed- the quality of the birds seems to become secondary.

That's not to say that structure and approach isn't important, in my view it's vital for the development of the stud, it's just that it's not going to solve all your challenges on its own. For me it's about having a structure to work within, rather than a rigid framework that is to be adhered to, i've looked at some of the most successful bird men around and taken the format of their approach and used what works for me.

So currentIy i have three families in the shed, they're all distantly related, one is predominantly light, one is dark and the other is cinnamon (I keep this one seperate intentionally although it's only a few birds). I use the structure to help keep focus on the numbers (as the quality of the stud improves this gets more difficult) and the ratio of yellow and buffs (ensuring that there is at least two of each, ideally 4).

I can have at any one time upto 4 generations of cock birds in the family line, the ratio is normally 50/50 on the cock side so that 50% are flighted and 50% unflighted, hens are more often 30/70 so 30% flighted. This allows me to move "up and down" the gene pool to progress the stud, so for several years there can be one principal cock bird in the line, I may have his brother (but never a half brother at the top of the line) his two best sons (if i kept 5 off him initially i'll trim down to the two who've produced the best) and then his grandsons and nephews.

That principal bird will never leave the shed, he can only ever be a flighted bird, and he may have only been used across one hen in his first year, he'll get more hens in his second and third breeding year. That's an approach i use quite a lot, i rarely run an unflighted cock with more than one hen in his first year, i select the optimum (based on pedigree and visual elements) hen for him and check the quality of the offspring, so he has to earn his status as top bird. Having proven his worth he moves up the chain based on his own success and that of his offspring. It may be that he's in his third year before hen can be classed as the key cornerstone bird of the line, by that time i'll have his sons and grandsons (if i don't then he won't be the top bird) in the breeding team and so the development continues.

Patience

There are few fast tracks to success, the hobby has it's fair share of trophy chasers who simply follow those who have had one show win and pull in birds in an effort to replicate their success, few outside of the volume breeders of birds rarely succeed. I'm not knocking those people, through my early forays into breeding I'd identified Gerald as having one of the countrys top studs so i went there, even today there's nothing i love more than to visit birdrooms and it's hard to resist a quality bird when it's put up.

Dipping into other successful studs is always worthwhile for developing an outcross in your own line. What i struggle to understand is those fanciers who bring in a number of birds, breed with them and ditch everything after one season, then repeat the same approach year on year. Success is never guarnateed and is almost never immediate, so think when your buying in birds what you're trying to achieve with them and then work with them.

Key is to invest time before money, think where you're going to get your birds from, think how easy it will be to go back to the source, think about why you're going to that fancier. Remember very few people if anyone will let their best birds go, by making an investment into the pedigree you're trying to build a stud of similar quality and that is going to take time.

Success Criteria

Another important element to developing a winning stud is defining what you class as being successful. By establishing the things you'd like to achieve with your birds you can track your progress against these targets and see what still needs to be achieved.

To bring this idea to life, as a novice when i first started out i set myself a target of breeding a certain number and certain quality of bird across the various colours.

Each year I could check my progress by looking at the number of birds bred and the number of colour specials i won. Pretty straightforward and obvious but it gave me the focus on what i needed to improve.

When I first moved up to champion status my targets changed to reflect the step up, in my first year I set myself a target to get my birds in the cards at the big specialist shows, I set a three year target of winning my first colour champion special (I achieved it in two!) and a five year target for my birds to be competitive across the show season and colours (in my fifth year I won three colour specials with three different birds).

My current targets are to win Best in Show (in 2013 I got very close with Second best champion at the North West) and to complete the set of champion colour specials (I've won Best Clear, Best Variegated , Heavily Variegated, Green, Best Foul and Allied to White on at least one occassion as a Champion) I'm looking to win best cinnamon to complete the set.

Success is not confined only to performance on the show bench it can also be on the establishment of strong colour lines within the stud (so I'm working on a cinnamon line at the moment for example and when i've bred a suitable number of quality I'll have achieved success).

The key for me in this area is for success criteria to develop over time, so set yourself a realistic yet stretching target of what you'd like to achieve (we all want to breed a shed full of Best in Show birds but is that a realistic criteria in our first years?), go for it and when you've achieved it step up your criteria.

Succession Planning

One of the biggest challenges is not getting to be competitive in the large champion classes, but staying there over a period of years. Those fanciers who have been at the top for many years are the ones i look to emulate. I firmly believe the reason they achieve this is through thinking and planning ahead.

One of the reasons I use so many un-flighted birds and the family lines approach is to ensure that the line continues to develop and that when i inevitably lose a principal bird there are two or three waiting to take their place. So when i put together my breeding programme for the coming year I'm not just focused on the outcomes i want for that year but on the pairings i need to make to move the stud forward and so i've got the right blend of pedigree to use in future years.