silkie chickens

[knabe]

starting with chickens a while ago.  have a silkie rooster, so he was created from two carrier parents.  i guess i'll keep him.  my daughter named him messy cause he looks like a mess.  i'm going to cross him with some game hens as they are extremely good mothers though small.  one of them raised all the babies this year.  she also is very careful and walks along the edge of things not silhouetting herself on anything as we have a couple of types of hawks that snag the oblivious males once in a while.  finally recovered from when the neighbors dogs came trotting over and killed all my setting hens at the time.  thankfully they were a foreclosure nightmare and couldn't afford the loan they got from the housing bubble.  things are about back to normal around here with housing prices as only people with real money can get a loan.  i guess farmland is still going up though.

 

[Shady Lane]

Kanbe, when I was a kid I had several varieties of Fancy Chickens that I raised and showed and sold and used the money to buy my first PB cattle. It was a really great way for a young kid to learn a lot of things about animal husbandry, genetics, marketing and business.

While I never did raise any quantities of Silkies I did have a couple of hens that I used as setting hens to raise chicks (along with a fairly large incubator)

The Silkies are a really neat animal and seemed to have the strongest setting instinct of any poultry I have ever seen. They could often be found sitting on a small chip of wood, a rock or a golfball waiting for them to hatch! It was very easy to just add the eggs from hens you wished to raise to the Silkies nest and away you would go, they would raise those chicks easily.

Good luck with your project.

 

[ROAD WARRIOR]

I have been told that they use silky hens to harch eagle eggs because of their exceptional hatching abilities. RW

 

[Shady Lane]

RW, I have never heard about the eagle egg hatching thing but I would believe it!

I've used Silkie hens to hatch Turkeys, Ducks, etc etc.

It is almost comical to pick one up off of a nest after weeks on end and discover she has been waiting for a stone to hatch!

 

[knabe]

It was a really great way for a young kid to learn a lot of things about animal husbandry, genetics, marketing and business.

my daughter takes "care" of them.  i charge $5/dozen to the city folk who pay roughly that at farmers market/albeit larger eggs. 

so far, they have more than paid for themselves.  a bag of feed is $15 and it lasts about $40 worth of eggs, not to mention the fertilizer they dump and the bugs they eat. 

i'm thinking about selling them as i have a few inquiries as they are smaller birds due to how they were bred.  i have them now so that the females have pompadores and the males have spikes with rounded tail feathers as the one's with straight up tail feathers seem to rape the hens and never dance.

 

[jamesgang892]

I have a pair of blue splash silkies they are what got me startd in poultry. From there I started raising bantam cochins which have become my favorite. I currently have blues and black mottleds but since I'm going off to college I'm gonna be getting rid of them.

 

[hamburgman]

Never been a fan of silkies, the really good ones are just to much work to show.  Cochins are easy to raise and fun to show, but i grew tired of them.  Moved onto large breeds pretty much, sumatras and Med breeds.  Sumatras are the hardiest chicken i have ever been around without a doubt.  $5 a dozen for silkie eggs, ur doing something right Knabe