Your best ideas for breeding meat birds...

Or pencils.

Thekla: thanks for solving my problem about what to mark my eggs with! The male pigeon egg is laid the day before the female -- also I play . musical eggs on occasion

Although I do use the hack of keeping some leftover house thepaint in a mason jar,
I also have acrylic artist paints in small tubes so I can even match the paint color to the leg bands on the parents if I am going to foster an egg!

For me a dot is sufficient, and I never thought about the air space but have successfully marked the middle of an egg with auto body masking tape and duct tape before,

plus there's super glue!!:
if a fragile egg gets cracked from being man handled, and the crack isn't too big, I've had successful hatchings

Wow, Ra, you have repaired an egg mid incubation?  That’s impressive.

And you are welcome on the paint.  I never used artist paint.  It was house paint, my little finger dipped in and used to make the ring around the equator.  But artist’s acrylic would probably work.

[quote=Ra KenworthThe male pigeon egg is laid the day before the female --



I also have acrylic artist paints in small tubes so I can even match the paint color to the leg bands on the parents if I am going to foster an egg!


Are you saying the egg that will hatch into a male is laid on day one?  And subsequent eggs will hatch into female?  I’m am in awe of the wonders of nature!

And what a great idea, color coding eggs to legbands when trying to track something.

Thekla McDaniels wrote:

Ra Kenworth wrote:
The male pigeon egg is laid the day before the female --

I also have acrylic artist paints in small tubes so I can even match the paint color to the leg bands on the parents if I am going to foster an egg!

Are you saying the egg that will hatch into a male is laid on day one?  And subsequent eggs will hatch into female?  I’m am in awe of the wonders of nature!

And what a great idea, color coding eggs to legbands when trying to track something.

Yes, a male first, then there is one subsequent egg and it's the female. On the rare occasion there are more eggs, it's usually because one or both of the original eggs is sterile, in which case, attempting to sex the chicks is dubious.

I band the female on the left leg and the male on the right. If I switch pairs, I often leave the original bands as well, plus the offspring get the same color band. They aren't numbered, but I have a good memory.

Thekla McDaniels wrote:Wow, Ra, you have repaired an egg mid incubation?  That’s impressive.
.

Thanks:-) not my idea: the farmer who recommended if I want to breed birds for meat, Lebanese chickens are the best for feed investment and speed.

My first chick born to a super glued egg of course, I named her Super Glue!

I’m having trouble visualizing the glue process.  I’m imagining the membrane being intact,  running a line of glue over the crack.  But then what?  I have glued my finger to an object before, so I don’t want to use my finger to spread or smooth the glue.  

I read online about using elmer’s glue and a single ply of tissue, but can you describe your super glue process, please, Ra?
Thanks

Sure! I use one of my compostable bamboo q-tips to dip in a pot of gorilla super glue, and yes, the membrane is intact. Usually it's just a minor crack but even if a tiny bit of shell is actually missing, I've gotten it to work by crushing chicken egg shell into a small enough piece to make a patch. I've had a few succeed, about 1:2 success:failure

I hope that makes sense

The better plan is to be more careful and not crack them in the first place!

Just to be clear, I'm not sure if it's possible to make money raising pigeons for meat. In the Toronto Ontario Canada farming region, there was a scam where farmers set up operations for utility king pigeons -- and went bankrupt. I do not raise my pigeons for meat -- I breed meat pigeons for soil building, with a sideline of meat security for the dog. The payback is in fertile soil, plus I feed whole grains I want to sprout as volunteers. The designer rodents hide field peas that sprout in little clumps all over the forest as well.