Trev wrote: ↑Sun Aug 25, 2024 8:28 am
That sounds plenty big enough to me Pete, you don't need loads of room for youngsters or they can become wild and uncontrollable. Are you having averies on the front of your loft ?? One of our members does just as Murray suggests and let's his youngsters have the corridor as well during the day so that they have access to the aviary as well.
As for needing to breed 30 youngsters each year !! That's a bit of an emotive one and open to opinion, I know plenty of fanciers who still only breed 20 or less each year and do well with you them, you just need to be extremely selective as to what you breed from.
All the very best.
Discussing needing more than 30 youngsters makes me grin.
Where i live the normal number is about 100. Some start with 150 and others with 80. I tried racing with only about 20 to 25, couldn't last the season. The last couple of years I had about 35 and didn't have many left.
Racing in the country with smaller entries is very tough indeed. Unlike the big cities like Melbourne and Sydney that send 5 to 10 thousand every week, even the Combine races in the country are only 750 to 1500 pigeons. Club races often have less than one or two hundred. Pigeons that are followers don't make it because often they have nothing to follow.
Greetings from the land down under.
Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for verily, he shall not be disappointed.
My Young bird section was in one of my lofts, It was in a 3 section loft with a corridor. The 2 end sections had traps on them. and i would open the doors on the 2 end section giving more room daily. I had two sets of boxes in the end sections, so this gave me enough room for 48 youngsters if needed.
MIL wrote: ↑Mon Aug 26, 2024 8:26 am
What I've seen and learned over the years Pete is this
You can put an extra 10 YB into a YB Section - it's dead easy
It's always the case though that Mother Nature will step in and you'll lose the 10 one way or another pretty quickly
I had a 8ft YB Section with about 50 perches in there; but I never went more than 36 babies in there
If a pigeon can't find a perch it needs the option of another
I have to totally agree with you, Mike.
I've done it myself. With a small set up I can only house so many pigeons, but I have made the mistake of keeping one extra pair of stock birds to give them "one more chance", and put extra perches in for the extra youngsters that I was too soft to remove. By the time I started racing them the number had always been reduced to as many as should have been there to begin with.
Mike is right. If you have too many youngsters, nature will reduce them.
Greetings from the land down under.
Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for verily, he shall not be disappointed.
MIL wrote: ↑Mon Aug 26, 2024 8:26 am
What I've seen and learned over the years Pete is this
You can put an extra 10 YB into a YB Section - it's dead easy
It's always the case though that Mother Nature will step in and you'll lose the 10 one way or another pretty quickly
I had a 8ft YB Section with about 50 perches in there; but I never went more than 36 babies in there
If a pigeon can't find a perch it needs the option of another
I think this is one of the main reasons for heavy losses. Fanciers think that because of the hawk problem they need to breed mor3 youngsters. The trouble is they put these youngsters into the same section used for fewer pigeons in the past.
Back just enjoying club racing for the time being.
