Selecting the Breeding Team

Selecting the birds that you'll retain for breeding is the most important element of developing your stud, after all making the wrong decisions or not allowing enough time could set your breeding programme back many years.

When making the selection of which birds to retain I have followed the advice offered by many experienced successful breeders - be ruthless in your selection, retain the best and keep "families" of Fifes.

Determining the best can be a real challenge - developing the "eye" for a good fife takes a while but studying both your own birds and others you'll soon get the hang of what to look for and what to improve in your own stud. Show success is one factor to look for, but shouldn't be the only consideration, for some reason certain birds look like world beaters in your own bird-room but can go to pieces in front of a judge.

I do my first draft of pairings in October - at the start of the show season - I'll review the visual quality of the birds and then the parentage and quality of the siblings. Ideally you want to retain birds that are from "good" families by that I mean that their brothers and sisters are of similar quality and also worth retaining.

As the stud develops selection becomes increasingly difficult, in the summer of 2010 I introduced a new approach to the selection process, bringing fertility in addition to visual qualities and pedigree into the mix.

Deciding on Numbers

As your stud progresses it becomes an increasingly difficult selection and in an effort to minimise making mistakes i will look at birds over a couple of weeks. Having a fixed number of birds to retain helps focus the mind and avoid the temptation to keep them all. So I start the process by deciding that I'll retain 10 to 12 cock birds and 20 to 22 hens.

Taking the cock birds first i'll review the quality of the birds across all of the colours and both yellow and buff, if as is sometimes the case I find that one colour line (I split my colour lines into clear and lightly variegated, which will have whites and cinnamon too and heavily variegated and selfs, which will have blues) is particularly strong i will keep more of those birds than others. So I may have 8 cocks from my dark lines (one of which is normally a self blue), of these there is usually an even split of yellow and buff cocks. I like to retain at least 2 yellow or buff cocks from a colour line, as if something happens to one you have a fallback option to run with.

Many fanciers obsess with the quality of their cock birds, i can see some logic in this as a cock bird can be run across multiple hens, whilst I like to ensure I have a good stud of quality cock birds i pay particular attention to ensuring that I have sufficient numbers of quality hens. I conduct the same process with the hens as the cocks, and after a fair degree of deliberation usually find I have a breeding team I'm happy with.

Taking all of the above into consideration the final area I'll look at is the future shape and pedigree direction of the stud - by this I mean what birds I'll need to run next year to ensure there are suitable birds from which to select from for the following breeding season.

The Outcross

At this time of year (October) you can also judge what birds you may need to bring in to your stud. Advice on bringing in outcrosses (Birds from other breeders studs) differs, I have heard of some breeders who will only bring in a hen as an outcross, where as others will bring in a strong cock bird to improve a particular fault.

Avoid bringing in too much new blood to the stud each year, the odd cock or hen can be a useful addition, but if your breeding lines are continuing to produce quality year in year out the introduction of complete new blood could set you back.

Breeding Techniques - Pairs or Trios?

This is one area that I have developed most over the course of the last ten years. Many of the top fife breeders will run a mix of pairs and trios - there are advantages to both. The advantage of running a pair of Fifes together are relatively straightforward - assuming you've got the pairings right and both birds are in condition, you should have very few problems for the rest of the season as both birds will help rear the youngsters.

With trios you can maximise the number of youngsters a quality cock produces for the show bench.The second area and an outcome of running trios is the opportunity to start your own line breeding programme the following season - using the half brother, half sister parings.

Up until a few years ago I used a combination of pairs and trios, and even today there are a number of birds (mainly in my cinnamon and white lines) that I will run as straight pairs or trios. With the remaining birds I'll run a cock over a number of hens (sometimes as many as five), I may do this for one round (and use an alternative cock for the following round) or in some cases if i like the look of young will run him again for the second round.

This technique requires a great deal of time, patience and of course luck. Sometimes a cock will successfully fill all of the eggs, on other occasions the hen will reject her intended mate regardless of her breeding condition. Using this approach requires an acceptance that the yield of young per hen is likely to be reduced, and therefore I would advise keeping more hens than you would normally.

Inbreeding or Line Breeding

Many of the UK's top fife studs have well established line breeding programmes in operation and my own stud is no different.

Line breeding is the breeding of birds within one line of descent - ie nephew to auntie, half brother to half sister, cousin to cousin etc etc. The benefit of a line breeding programme is that after a number of years the vast majority of the birds will possess similar characteristics - obviously the key to a successful line breeding programme is to ensure that the characteristics are ones you want your birds to have!.

Inbreeding is the pairing of father to daughter, brother to sister, mother to son I have used this with increasing frequency where I have wanted to "retain" the genes of an exceptionally good cock by pairing him to a number of his daughters.

Neither technique will guarantee success on it's own, its all about knowing your birds, understanding what type of qualities they are capable of re-producing and ensuring the fertility levels of the stud are maintained.