Danny Feathers Talks Leghorns-Part 2

In this special episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, Rip Stalvey uncovers a valuable conversation with poultry expert Danny Feathers. The episode dives deep into Danny's techniques for maintaining and breeding white leghorns, from identifying ideal bird traits to breeding strategies and maintaining line purity. 

 Originally recorded for the American Poultry Association, this insightful interview was rediscovered from a forgotten computer, preserving Danny's wisdom and offering listeners practical tips on nurturing a productive flock. The episode emphasizes the importance of understanding breed standards, careful selection, and strategic breeding to achieve consistent results.

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Transcript

Rip Stalvey: 0:00

Hi! Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast. I'm Rip Stalvey, and together with Mandelyn Royal and John Gunterman, we're your co hosts for this show, and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy, and productive flock. In this special installment of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, we unearth a treasured conversation with Danny Feathers. Our conversation traverses the art of nurturing and showcasing the elegant white leghorns, a breed that captured Danny's heart and expertise. This interview, has become a part of Danny's enduring legacy. The audio captured by a telephone conversation may not boast high fidelity yet it carries the weight of wisdom and passion originally preserved for the American Poultry Association's educational archive. It faced oblivion when the site underwent a digital renovation. Against all odds this interview resurfaced from the depths of a forgotten computer alongside another gem. These recordings, once all lost, will now grace our upcoming podcast episodes, allowing these voices to resonate once more. We invite you to join us in this poignant journey as we relive Danny's dedication to his beloved white leghorns.

1:22

So you look in the standard, that's just a a two point deduction, so if you've got that, you understand you're already at a 98 point bird if everything else is perfect. But in a front end on them. That bottom line is just as important as that top line. And need heart girth just like anything else. Legs on the outside of the body. You don't want them not knees. You don't want them legs close together. And I like to see some bone to them. Not just spindly legged birds, but it's not, my, my breeding program isn't rocket science, it's it's knowing that standard, knowing the picture in my mind's eye of what I want, and then understanding the weakness and the strength of every bird that I breed. Like to sit and watch, I'll watch for a long time before I ever make up my mind, I want to see how that bird carries itself across the ground. Does it drop its tail? Does it drop its wings when it's walking? Does it stand different than it does when it walks? No. It all So many times Go ahead. I was just going to say, so many times I see people put them in a show cage to pick out the best bird. Honestly, I don't see how you can do a really good job of that. You need to see that around what does he look like when he is walking? He, it's just totally different bird, right? I had somebody tell me one time I like videos better when I look at birds,'cause I can tell. I said I take a lot of pictures, I post a lot of pictures, but I don't pose a damn bird one. When I throw it up on that bill, I let it gather itself, and those are natural poses. And that's because I've picked for that stuff, I don't have to sit there poking prod. And I'm not going to sit there and poke and prod. I won't do it when I'm judging, and I won't do it when I'm picking brood cots for brood fowl. When you've got a That's interesting. When you've got to when you've got to sit and mess with a bird up on Champion Road five, ten, fifteen minutes to get that bird to look like it's supposed to, there's two things that's happened here. Either we're helping a buddy, or we don't understand what all's up there, and I tell you one thing that I think will really help new people is that they need to learn this. If it's not on one side of that mating it's not going to be on any of that offspring. You know if you don't have, if both birds have got no breasts. Don't sit there and hold your breath because you're going to turn blue and you're not going to have a chick come out of there with any breasts, exactly right. And, don't buy birds from me and then buy birds from a leather leghorn breeder and cross them because you don't know what anything is going to do, usually what you're going to wind up with is a big mess. Yeah, you're going to end up with a bunch of eaters. So what's worse than that is They'll take them offspring and they'll put whoever had the bigger name between the two teeth on them and go, Oh, these are so and so's birds, and that's wrong, when you add somebody's name to it, you're generally trying to sell birds, And I try to let the birds speak for themselves, go and just breed what you buy, and breed them for several years, three, four years, and understand what they produce. If the trio you bought, and I would say my favorite way of doing it is splitting them, so I breed a single mate, the male over the two females that came, and therefore I've got two lines. I don't care if them females are Full sisters. They both don't carry the same genes. Exactly. Now I've got two families, okay, I've got two families right there. The next year, I can take the best son out of one side and breed back to his mama, and do the same way on the other side, and then I can take that cock bird, and I can breed to the best females out of each one of them, single mated. And I can split this sucker way up, and guess what, I don't ever got to go out and get something again. Because if I keep breeding them like that, look, they're not dogs. I I bred brother and sister seven years in a row, and I never lost layability, hatchability vigor, fertility, any of that. Even in the UKC you're allowed to breed brother and sister every four years. But how can you set a line and start expecting consistency when you're adding something new to them all the time? It's just like making a milkshake. You just keep stirring it up. Exactly. You need to understand. That's all that happens. On a minimum it's three years for the blood to settle when you add something new. And more people pay attention to the male than they do to the female, they'll spend, let's come up in a discussion with another guy. But I did a show with, and he said, I've had guys come to my house and spend three or four hours picking out the right rooster, and then they wanna buy a female. And he said, they just go and buy one that's got the prettiest feathers. And he said, I'm thinking to myself, wow, you have no idea what you're doing. And he's exactly right. Spot on. But if you buy a trio of chickens, and even if you don't separate'em and do, as I, I do. If those birds can not produce at a minimum, as good as they are, then you're probably not ever gonna have nothing there. Exactly. You know I've heard stories, a lot of guys will sell, They win a lot with this, and they, or this male, this male line, old English people seem to be really big on female and male lines, which I don't understand. I don't know why you can't get both sexes from one bird, but I don't wanna I don't want to try to get the whole world mad at me, so I won't go into that. People is both standards, ABA and APA, are breeder manuals. If you will pick females that match whatever variety of bird or whatever breed of bird, If you pick a female that meets that written description in color and in type and the same on the male, then you should be able to produce both sexes. That's not, a lot of new people go that's what they judge by. That's what you need to breed by. They're trying to see how close you came to that standard. Exactly right. I know a lot of people don't like to get into it as in depth as a lot of us do, but, and I think that's part of the problem. If you don't get into it in depth your birds are going to be the one that's paying the price for that. Oh, exactly. They're just going to amount to hardly anything at all. I'll tell you a little story. Years ago I lived in town just a mile from where I live now. And, wintertime, I had a shed back there, and I'd bring all my leghorn and rock bantam males home, and I'd put them in that shed where it was heated, and as I'd cull out birds as they matured when I considered the number twos, I had two buddies, one liked the Plymouth Roths and one liked the Leghorns, and I'd give them the number twos because I was assuring myself that if something happened, I'd have some place to go back. I wouldn't have to go get blood from someone else, and Add in to my birds and start, basically start over. As bad luck would have it, I had a fire, and I lost I lost every male and every flung clock male I owned. Rip, is there any way we can hold on here just a minute? Sure. I got a phone call coming in. Alright, Rip, are you there? I'm there. I apologize. That's okay. But anyway, okay. My a big fear for me, and it happened. And I didn't know what to do, and then I got thinking, you know what? I put them birds out on them farms just in case something like this happened. So I went back and I took my toe punch book with me and I went back and got birds in those white rocks that I run. Four main families and then I have four sub families that are crosses out of them. And in the Leghorns I run four families and then I've got four sub families out of them. And I went back and I found birds that, maybe they didn't have the best comb, but everything else was there. And I brought them back, and Rip, I never missed a beat, I I went right on. And it was by cause I put them out. I put some insurance out somewhere, and them white leghorns, he got them in the late 30s, early 40s. He never added anything to them. I've had them since 1970 when I gathered eggs from him. I've never added nothing. Now, I've tried some crosses. On different, from different lines, but they don't ever stay. But if you take and read one panel over here, And I gave you the exact materials out of the same family. I can come to you five years later and get a burden from you, and put that in mine, and guess what? That duty will stay with you as long as you haven't added anything to that. And that is the best way to bring vigor back to your line. Agreed. Is by putting the same blood back in it, I'd like to loop back to, we were talking a while ago, or you were talking about heads on birds. One of the things that I'm noticing down here on, in the south is a lot of the females, Or not getting that nice, long comb to it. It's just a perfectly straight comb. What we call a hard comb. Yeah. How would you fix that? Let's discuss combs before I go into how I fix that. I'm seeing a lot of large spout, and I see bantams do it too. Where the female's comb gets big, straight. But it's got a thumbprint in the side of it, so the whole cone flops. It doesn't lop, it flops. It flops over because there is a thumbprint, okay? Otto Niehaus had a strong disdain for females that did that, or females that had the double lop like a Menorca. Okay, now, if you look, a lot of them are going to argue with me, but it doesn't matter how hard and how loud they yell, they're still wrong. A double locked comb, whether it's single or not, is not a leghorn comb, that is a Menorca comb. Exactly. Okay, now, Otto believes that should be a disqualification. I've thought on it for years and I'm not sure, but I do agree it is a Menorca Cone, where it starts one way and then flips the other way for the double off in the front. But when they have, the females that have these big cones and it gets that thumb print and it's flopped, It flops. It's not a lock. Let's look at a lock comb. A lock comb will have the first two points standing erect with the third one tilting, the fourth one tilting a little further, and the fifth one tilting further yet with the blade going ahead and laying over. That is a lock comb. Now, if you'll pick that comb up and look at it, you'll find that there's no thumbprint there on that. Now, you can get two There's two two, two reasons that I've noticed that females cones won't walk. One is they're too small. They don't ever get any size to them. And two is that they are too beefy, and they really have a wide base but get too beefy, there's too much comb before you get points. Exactly. And I agree with that. What I look for when you want a lock comb female is look at your male's head, and, stay away from them beefy comb males. Look for a male that's got a blade. That is lively is what I call it. But it has a jiggle whenever he turns his head and he's on alert, he's looking around, okay? And that blade is wiggling, okay? And those are what I breed to get that lop comb. I used to sell, I want to show up at South, Southeast Kansas one time at Girard. The guy had called me and he wanted to buy a Leghorns. I got mail for his daughter and asked me if I had one. I said, yes, I do, because I got one for your daughter. I said, I'll let you have it for 15. When the dust and the feathers had settled that bird was show grand champion. He come up to me and goes I bet that bird's not for sale anymore, is it? I said, that bird's still for sale for 15. He said, you're gonna let me have that bird for 15? I said, yeah, that's what I told you, ain't it? I said, first of all, I gave you my word. I won't go back on that. All we got is our word. And I said the second thing is, he don't fit my breeding program. What do you not like about him? I said I don't like that cone. He goes, that cone's beautiful. Yeah, it's pretty. It sure is. But I said, you see how beefy it is? And I'm not saying that it was overly large. It was just too beefy before I got to the point. I said, that bird will never produce a lop toed female. Ever. And I said so therefore I'm not going to fight that problem. So now you understand why I don't like it. Oh yeah, I still want it. I said, then, give me 15 and get him out of that cage, cause he's yours. But that, here again, Rip, these guys aren't paying attention. I judged down there at Fort Payne, Alabama, and I got to judge the single combs, and there was two different breeders of leghorns and bantams there but the leghorns were, they were really poor though, they were way too soft feathered, and they had no bodies to them black front end, they were just white chickens, and but all of them had that beefy comb, but if there's no competition, if you've got no competition, What's gonna make you try harder, nothing. There's nothing. There's nothing, for years, I had competition in both, both the rocks and the bantams, and I run everybody out down here. But then I had, I was just competing against myself, I still didn't settle for, I'm winning. Because I don't think that I'm done yet. I still learn something every year. And again, like I said, I don't, I pay very little attention to judges placings. Because I'm the one feeding them and I'm the one that's going to put them together and I know where I'm headed. Exactly right. No sense in feeding a bird you don't like and you can't use. No. No. No. No. A little off topic, but when I had the red bantams I learned the first couple years, I raised just dang near everything to maturity, and I let the school have a bunch of them, and then I let, a few friends have some. And I eat a ton of them. Them and the rocks are both good birds to eat. They both got a lot of, having four kids, and they will eat a farm fresh chicken a lot faster than they'll eat a store bought chicken. But I got to where the reds were just staying right there in that one spot. I wasn't movin forward like I should be, and I finally decided that the reason I wasn't was because, I'd go catch a bird. And I like to free range young birds once they get up so big, I'll open the pens up and let them run on the grass. And I watch them. And I watch how they walk. And I'm telling you, a red should walk like a brick, and so I got to where I started culling them with a 22 rifle. And I didn't let them just lay there and die. They were dead. I'd butcher them. But I didn't want to go grab one and say her back has a little bit of an incline to it, but look at her wing. Look at this. Look at that. No, she didn't have type. And type was first and foremost. In the standard, and in my brood pen by me shooting them, I didn't have to worry about me ever breeding that chicken. They didn't care what that toe punch was. I didn't care how that wing was or none of that. She didn't have something in her type to begin with, or his type. I shot them. And for long, Rip, I couldn't shoot no more. I didn't have any birds with any incline. I'd never, ever raised a red that sloped, had the rainy day carriage, now, gotta be careful of that 22. Sometimes they'll go through them and get one you didn't want to get, but but I didn't worry about I went and caught that bird, I didn't like the way she walked, but man, that wing is outstanding, or, man, her feather quality, type comes first, it doesn't matter what breed of chicken that I'm working with. Exactly right. So Exactly right. My, like I said, before I put this house here the rocks stayed on the south side of the driveway, and the leghorns were on the north side of the driveway. And it wasn't, I'd come out here, I'd come out in the morning and turn everything loose. And I had an old bulldog that ran loose, and he didn't bother chickens, but he'd keep anything away. And I'd come out to feed in the evening, and there'd be a thousand young birds come to me, meet me at the feed barrels by the driveway. And leghorns on one side, and rocks on the other side. And they didn't cross that driveway. And They ran on fescue, and I don't, I went years, I didn't even have to wash a chicken. That's how clean they'd stay, but, by running loose, the bird did a far better body. Nice little light rain at night on them really helps them feathers. Oh man, does it ever, and it also tells you about your feather quality, but, like I said, for me, it's not rocket science, it's understanding that standard, understanding where I'm going and how am I going to get there, the and that's the key to it, yeah, and when you really become a good breeder, You hell have screwed up, and you got a breed out of that problem that you created. You've bred yourself into a corner, now you need to figure out how to get out of it. And that's when you're really going to learn something. Exactly right. Danny, I sure appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. I know you're a busy guy, and you got things to do, and I don't want to hold you up all day, but I, I'm like you, I could talk chickens pretty much all day long and it wouldn't upset me at all. That's right, I do it. Look forward to talking with you another day here before too much longer on white rocks and rocks in general. I know you've bred more than just white rocks, and I know you've had bards, and no telling what else you've had thrown in there with it. I've had Colombians, blacks, busts, partridge, silver penciled just, at one time, I had every color recognized in The ABA on rose comb bantams. Wow. Wow. That would have been back in the early 80s. But I've had just about every breed in both standards. That's what you get when you got a dagget. It's just as bad about it as you are, ha! Are you trying to say it didn't fall too far from the tree? That nut's right there at the bottom of that trunk, I'll guarantee you. Ha! Danny, thanks again so much and I know the folks are gonna get a lot out of what you have to say here. It's just So good that you would take the time to, to share with that and hopefully help some other folks along their journey in chickens. I hope they can understand that it's not, I'm not building a spaceship going to outer space, it's just chickens. And the good thing about it, the mistakes you make can be ate, so it's a win any way you look at it. Exactly right. Bud, you have a good rest of the day and we will talk to you again real soon. Alright Rip, have a good day, hope it helps. I'm sure it will. Thanks Danny. You bet buddy.

Rip Stalvey: 21:13

Thank you for joining us this week. And before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released, and they're released every Tuesday. And if you're enjoying this podcast, we'd like to ask you to drop us an email at poultrykeeperspodcast at gmail. com and share your thoughts about the show. Thank you again for joining us for this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. We'll see you next week.