06/02/2026
Not many breeders of poultry out there...us Fanciers that make improvements on the lines of birds we acquire are often alone until we find a few singular souls to exchange ideas with...shoot the crap and meld experiences.
Lots of propagators...millions of those who sell "purebred" (unlike pure blood) poultry and have NO clue whatsoever the injustices they create. They do nothing to make improvements in the breeds of birds; they are selling for $ and have invested the least amount of resources in doing so.
We have been given Call ducks...the breeder of that stock sending on birds they were curious to see what we here in Pear-A-Dice could do with the line...a line they gave up on and were making no progress forward with.
Here is a very coarse chocolate drake, standing beside what I have created with this male...and yes, that 3rd photo is of my Chocolate Call duck beside a pound of butter and a golf ball so one may see size, type and self-colour.
Breeders are not made, we are born this way. We are uncommon as the birds we have a hand in creating.
Our labours of love are not instant, we take many generations to figure out the goods and the bads within the birds...the birds tell us and birds never lie. Find the goods and the bads, inbreed to know what is laying just under the surface to be scouted out...retained or tossed.
Many persons refer to breeding as both an "art & a science," and indeed this is correct. A breeder must have a vision of the work of art they are trying to achieve and they also must have the backing of logical sciences to achieve their goals. We also need to embrace luck and understand that things do not always go as planned...it is the ability to recognize the lessons in the failures so you can go forward with the successes.
The pursuit of excellence takes time, thought, education, resources and tenancy, never mind that the creatures must assist one as well. So many will waffle and quit, so many outsiders looking in will doubt the breeder, try to intimidate them to release projects before the creator is ready to forward the creation onwards. We do not waiver, we do not succumb to pressures that do not suit our goals. We are steadfast in our devotions and understand that a decade or two, is nothing in the life of a line of poultry that will give the creator, eternal life even after they pass; how persons like Murray Mitchell continues to live on in his Brahmas because he set his mark in the birds and we can see and acknowledge, appreciate and remember; the work he did was not fleeting...the decades he invested lives onwards in the very flesh of a Brahma, out and about on the lawn to grace our worlds going forward.
People talk about standing on the shoulders of others that came before us...yes, that is a way to reach heights that a mere human lifetime could never achieve by itself.
We are on a mission to take that visual image of an artform and bring it into the very flesh of living, breathing, happy creatures. So often I hear of relatives recounting that "Dad or grandpa had some chickens..." Yeh, no. A rare few of us participated with some of the greats, the oldtimers, the persons that earned their knowledge the hard way...even before genetics was so common place they just knew of certain rules and did the best able.
A friend of mine purchased this book and gifted it to me...the take that Ralph has on things like inbreeding are both insightful and logical.
What I do know is that breeding "good to good makes more good" and while there is inbreeding depression, there is also outcrossing depression. Go study these polar opposites if you have not already understood why commercial industrial mush meat and swill egger producers must outcross continuously to maintain production. The path they have chosen to take is not about good birds, it is about profits and to supply the cheapest food possible with no expectations to enrichen the Earth, the people eating the products, or the birds themselves. There is a book title that comes to mind, "You are What You Eat." So many just want something for nothing or near nothing and they certainly get what they want. Not all humans strive for higher expectations with goodness as a goal.
Those of us who know that inbreeding fixes the good within a strain, also know that heritage poultry are productive in both meat and eggs. That over time, the solution to overcoming the production of unhappy meat and sad eggs is to follow where the Fanciers already are. We have the birds, we continue with the expectation of much higher levels of goodness. We choose to go above and beyond because we are humans that know the value of doing what is right by our birds and by our levels of knowing humans are able to achieve greatness.
With heritage heirloom poultry that is glad to be alive, that lives in the real world and blesses us with the bounty of what Nature always intended...not excesses of poor quality or tasteless fare, but joy & happiness; windows into a world where we live in harmony with creatures, and while we may harvest a few the majority of our creations are more than we could ever imagine living a real, honestly happy life and allowing us, the Fanciers to see the benefits of the inputs directed towards improvements.
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"START WHERE YOU ARE WITH WHAT YOU HAVE - A Guide to Poultry Breeding" 2019
By Ralph H. Sturgeon
"CLOSEBREEDING FOR EXCELLENCE
"Those whom I consider bona fide breeders represent only one-half of one percent of all those who would take the name. No one has the right to call himself a breeder if he does not leave a breed that bears the improvements his work has made. The only way I know to do that successfully is to inbreed, or closebreed. Merely multiplying the same traits already present in a species is not breeding. Actively searching for weakness and strengths, selecting those qualities which will create a breed-these are the foundation of the art.
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"Inbreeding is simply like placing a pot on the stove to boil, stirring the mixture, and skimming all the dirt off the top. The breeder hopes to stir all the possible germ plasma combinations to the surface, thus identifying what is there and where. Many would-be breeders throw up their hands after the first unsuccessful trial, wail "I told you so!" and give up right there. Why is that; what have they seen?
"Defects. That's right. Swimming around in the top of the pot are all the concentrated faults carried by the ancestors of the present birds. Perhaps it is surprising to know that we inbreed for that very purpose-to make visible the inferior or crippled or nervous. Only in that way will the breeder be able to identify the weaknesses and direct his efforts to removing them."
