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Welcome to the forum and good luck with the search! Have you tried PreLoved? I've gotten in touch with a few breeders from there, although quality varies quite a lot.

Hi all, I was just wondering what you candle your eggs with? The OvaView looks like the most practical product available but £25/£40 + £23 for the OvaScope seems excessive, in line with other Brinsea products. I was previously using a lava lamp bottom inside a small cardboard box with a round...

Hello all, quite a sad update this time. The bigger of the two cockerels was taken by some animal a couple of nights ago so. Whatever it was managed to undo the latch on the coop so they have been moved into the bigger coop with the other hens now (it has a sliding latch rather than a rotating...

The gammy-legged girl became chicken soup today as the others will be moving outside tomorrow morning and she would have been unable to get into the coop for the night. At 14 weeks, she weighed 1.2 kg with an empty crop which isn't bad considering how she was always the smallest and she had been...

As of a few days ago, the chickens have been going from the lounge into the conservatory during the day. The daytime temperatures in the conservatory have varied from about 12°C to 17°C as opposed to the 16°C to 22°C that they have had in the lounge. Last night, they stayed out there overnight...

We have been feeding our chickens Marriage's organic pellets and corn for almost as long as we had them. We started the ex-battery hens on crumb as per recommendation, but turned out that they were more interested in food than what form it came in, and I've used the Marriage Flubenvet medicated...

Hi Jan, just received the 5th edition of the breed standard in the post today and it's great. I can highly recommend it!

You inspired me to buy the 5th edition for £25 second hand… that's more than I've spent on any book in many years! If you want to treat yourself, I can recommend Katie Thear's "Incubation: A Guide to Hatching and Rearing" (ISBN 090613725X): I bought it for about £2 delivered second hand and it's...

Hi, it sounds like you may have a "Janoel" incubator… is that it? I have the same and have dry incubated in that with success. The British Poultry Standard 6th edition is rather pricey and I haven't been able to find it second hand yet. The ISBN is 1405156422 if you want to have a look. If...

Hi all, back in warm September I was about to set my first eggs for hatching and had some questions about incubators. Marigold reminded me that it would be a good idea to follow up on that hatch (which I am usually very lazy about) and I think it might be good for me to give some background for...

Chris, are there any resources that you can recommend? My other half is interested in keeping more animals at some point in the next few years so I think we'd need to go through all the hassle. Dave, I would be interested in reading about your experience setting everything up!

Marigold, it looks like it's bookable only two months in advance: I can only see the dates up to 3rd of January!

I just saw Chris mention in a different topic about separating cockerels into a small pen as early as possible to restrict movement so that they are most tender for eating. I am wondering if there is anything else that others do to prepare the excess cockerels? What is the optimum age for...

I have my fingers crossed for a hatch on Thursday, which leads me to a feeding question. I have raised two lots of chicks so far and my last lot of chicks picked up coccidiosis when they were relatively young, which resulted in poor growth (so they are smaller than the first lot of chick was at...

The air in the house (around the incubator) currently has 60% humidity while outdoors, it is around 90-100% (daily fogs, pretty much solid walls of water, grass wet for the whole day even in full sun shine and so on). When I first tested the fan-assisted incubator prior to starting the...

They would make a dinner which had a good life. Short of hatching sex-linked or autosexing eggs and culling the male chicks on hatching, there really isn't any other reasonable way to raise only hens. I also always got the feeling that they do best raised in larger groups anyway, so it doesn't...

I was planning to use sterile disposable gloves for handling the eggs at all times, which I hope would reduce the risks associated with handling. My backup plan for a power failure is a gas fire, although we normally have only 1-2 power cuts per year and they've always lasted less than 3 hours...

Hi Chris, I'm going to be manual turning as the "12 egg" incubator only takes 6 of my hens' eggs for autoturning. The seller recommended 24 hours as well. They also just told me that some of the older eggs were collected between last Thursday and yesterday, so getting a bit worried about how...

Mostly that we're needing more eggs than our current hens produce as the ex-battery hens are pretty much at the end of their egg laying lives (and in some cases, very likely their lives). I suspect that we have ISA Brown which used to produce 1 egg each per day when we first got them (with the...

Thanks for the link, I'll give that a read! We actually raised the Wyandottes indoors, so we have an idea of what to expect. We bought them in two age groups, one of which was indoors until 8 weeks old and the other until 10 weeks old (free ranging outdoors during the day as they got older) and...