All about the Bielefelder w/Gina

The bielefelder chicken is super interesting breed! The originator is still alive and Gina talks to him as she works on the standard and getting it accepted into the APA.

• Transcript

  Tony: 0:00

  Welcome to the Poultry Nerds Podcast, where feathers meet fun. Your podcast hosts are Carey Blackmon and Jennifer Bryant. Together, they work hard to bring you the latest news and information from the world of poultry. So get ready for eggciting interviews, foul facts, and more. Now here's Carey and Jennifer.

  0:17

  Mhm.

  Gina: 0:25

  Welcome poultry nerds. We're here with Gina again, but this time we're going to talk about Beeliefelders. Is that how you say it? Beeliefelder. Yes. Beeliefelder. You always have these chickens with the hard to pronounce names. I like a challenge. What can I say? So if you missed Gina last time, she was here for the Ayam Cemani correct. I said it right that time, didn't I? I'm Gina Rather, and we take care of Rather Farms in Columbia, Tennessee. We raise Bielefelder, Ayam Cemani, Rhode Island Red, Black Copper Marans, Splash Americana, and Zombie Chickens. Zombies, you ready for Halloween? I am. Yeah. I saw you're hatching again. You're getting those ready close to Halloween, huh? Yeah. Yeah. We weren't planning on starting to hatch in earnest until September. And I've had so many requests. I'm like, I'm feeding these eggs back. And this is crazy. So just go ahead and pop them in the incubator. All right. Might as well. So tell us about the Beeliefelder. Where did they come from? Tell us all about them. So the Bielefelder was developed by a man named Geerd Roth in Germany in the late 1970s. Geerd took a number of different breeds to create the Bielefelder, each breed, of course, contributing a vital component of what the Bielefelder is supposed to be. Bielefelder is a barred chicken. They get their barred color from the Malines or the Michelin. It's they're known by two different names. It is a very large black and white barred bird, similar to our barred rock, but a little bit more body mass. He also used the New Hampshire. He used the Welsumer. And a couple other breeds that escape me at the moment, terrible, but they get their coloring from the Wellsummer. They get their coloring from the Malines. I believe they get a black restrictor from the New Hampshire's which prevents the black in the breast. So this is a big deal for me. When people talk about the Bielefelder, they say, Oh it's a creel colored bird, and it's not a creel colored bird, and here's why. Creel is the barring gene on a black breasted red bird, and the Bielefelder absolutely should not have any black in the breast. Therefore, it cannot be creel. Bielefelder is its own unique color. No other APA accepted breed has this color. Interesting. Yeah, that's pretty neat. So is that what sets apart the standard? We don't have a standard just yet, but we're going to get to that in just a second. But maybe the hatchery pet quality from the, from what you're attempting to make the standard bred? That's a big factor. So if you look at a lot of your hatchery stock photos, black in the breast. It's definitely not what you want. But the thing is, these birds have been in the country for many years. The hatcheries have labeled them a rare breed. And so all the hatcheries wanted to get their hands on them and make as many as they can and charge as much as they can for these rare birds with no standard, no guidelines on what these birds were actually supposed to be. So what you end up with are a bunch of Bielefelder out there that might lay small eggs. They might not be good egg layers. They might not be good meat birds. And a Bielefelder should be. a good dual purpose bird with a deep breast. I love them. Their body type is very similar to a Rhode Island Red. They should have that deep square looking breast, a flat top line, horizontal wing carriage and they lay some absolutely massive eggs. I hatched some eggs last year that were 85 grams. Wow. Those are big eggs. Huge eggs. Yes. Yeah. The hatchery quality, the egg color is all over the place. So a lot of times people describe the Bielefelder egg color as a terracotta color. It is a on the darker side of brown ideally. Egg color is not defined in the standard and nobody's going to hold that color against the bird. It's something that we, me as a breeder will be the last thing that I'm concerned with. I'm working on type right now, and then we'll get the color right, and then we'll worry about egg colors. Speckles on the eggs are common, again, coming from the Welsimer heritage. But yeah, they should be a large egg layer. They should be a good meat bird. And broodies. They are excellent broodies. Nice. That can always be handy to have a broody bird. Yes. So do they come in large fowl and bantam, or just large fowl? They do come in large fowl, so there is also the standard Bielefelder color, and there is also a silver Bielefelder that we're seeing in the U. S. now, and has been in Germany for quite some time. I haven't this one. I'm going to have to Google. Yeah. So you are working on a breed club and a breed standard. Yep. We have the North American Bielefelder Association established. We've got the standard that we worked with Gerd Roth. The breeds creator is actually when I started working with him last year, he was 80 years old, still an active poultry judge in Germany. He is so excited that we love these birds. that they have as many fans as they do in North America. When we started working together, the German standard is really surprising. It is not nearly as detailed as the APA standards are. And so I had so many questions. So even the people that had been using the German standard to try to breed to here in the United States also had the same questions. The definition for the tail, for example, was that it was to be an obtuse angle. That could be anything between 89 and, one degree. Asked Geerd, and Geerd says 45 degrees. And for the longest time, a lot of people were breeding for a nearly flat tail. I had a lower tail angle than the Rhode Island Reds. And so for, as a result, you see a lot of Bielefelder with low tails. You may notice that I never say Bielefelders plural because the plural of Bielefelder is Bielefelder. Like deer and fish. You don't say deers and you don't say fishes. We say Bielefelder in plural. Nice. That's a fun little fact. Yeah. I was corrected by a German. Come straight from the start. You're coming in with the standard, right? You can do it however you want to, right? Yeah, you really can. Yeah. How big do these birds get? I know we say large fowl, there's large fowl Orpingtons that are 10, 12 pounds and bigger. There's large fowl reds that are eight pounds. Like what is large fowl standard proposed on one of these? So the Bielefelder, a lot of places you'll see a lot of hatcheries will boast that the cocks can get, 12, 13 pounds. Bielefelder should never get that big. The standard for the cocks is just a little over nine pounds. And the standard for hens is seven and three quarter pounds. If they're dual purpose, you wouldn't want them as big as you can get them? No, because at some point you start tipping in favor of more bone mass than what you want, when you have that large of a bird, you have to have more bone mass to support that large of a bird. And for a dual purpose bird, you don't want more bone, you want more meat. Percentage of carcass wise, a smaller bird is going to give you more meat than a giant bird. That's also going to consume more feed. Okay. So if I understand correctly, they're also autosexing. Autosexing. Yeah, they're one of the handful of breeds that are autosexing at Hatch, and that's thanks to the barring gene. So the barring gene is sex linked, and females will only have one copy, barred males will have two copies. And what that ends up doing is diluting the chick down color on a wild type base, which is what the Bielefelder is built on, E plus wild type it will cause a head spot the head spot on the males, because they have two copies of this barring gene will have a larger head spot than the females. And that's another thing that, we were a little, we misunderstood. We were told when we, when I first started with the Bielefelder that, choose only your most, clearly marked females and males. chicks to move forward with. And my understanding was if a female had a head spot, then she wasn't clearly marked. It wasn't clearly a female or the white head spot was a defect. The white head spot is your barring gene. And if you get rid of all your females with the white head spots, you're not going to have good barring on your females. And as a result, when you look at pictures of Bielefelders, there are a lot of Bielefelder that. Hens, or pullets, that you can't even see the barring on. That's another thing I'm working on in my flock, is, keeping more of those pullets that have the nice clear head spots. So this year's growouts are looking way better than last year's growouts did. Okay, so they both have head spots, but one is darker than the other? They both have head spots. The males have a much larger head spot and the chick down overall on the males is lighter. They're almost a blonde color. The females are a a dark brown with an even darker brown back stripe with almost black stripes on each side of that back stripe. So how many days can you sex them for then after hatch? All day, every day. Oh, okay. So they always look different. Huh. Okay. So my brain went to my ducks. So I raised the Welsh Harlequin ducks and they're auto sexing too, but it's only for three days. On the fourth day, it's like magic and you can't sex them anymore. And so when you were talking, I was like trying to envision it. And my ducks was on my brain. Yeah, no, the little boys, they'll stay blonde. And then when their first set of juvenile feathers come in, you can already see, they're clearly barred and the females will have a wild type, almost autosomal barring looking, they get black barring on their brown feathers in their juvenile plumage, but the boys will definitely get the white barring that we're used to. Yeah, so they, they are clearly sexable from moment of hatch. How about their temperament? Bielefelder is known to be one of the best tempered roosters. When I first started with Bielefelder, my neighbor said, Hey, I got some Bielefelder chicks over here. You want some? I said, I've never heard of them. And what is that? I don't even know how to pronounce that because he had sent me a text. And I'm like, I got to Google this. And so I'm reading up on them. And all I found was that how great these Bielefelder roosters are. And I was like, they sound pretty cool. So I said, sure, I'll try some. And I grew them out and I loved them. And then I found some more kind of locally. And I went and picked up some more. And I said, these birds are clearly better quality than what I started out with. And So I got rid of the birds that I started out with, which were small egg layers poor confirmation, but still wonderful temperaments. I experienced the wide variety of quality in this breed in my short time with them. So I hear a lot of people that get frustrated with them. I tried Bielefelders, they were terrible. They ate all day. They didn't lay any eggs. And that sort of thing for those people, I hope they give the Bielfelder a second chance. Once we really start coming together as a group and as a breed organization and making the improvements that Gerd Roth feels like we need to make to bring this breed back into his vision of what it should be. In standard birds, a lot of people, They expect a standard bird to lay 300 eggs a year. And that's more in your highlines and birds that are commercially designed specifically to lay eggs. The standard bird is not going to lay 300, 300 eggs a year. Typically. No some would get in the two hundreds, but. I would say my Bielefelder are definitely in the 200s. They're said to be excellent winter layers and granted my birds were first year pullets this last winter through the dreadful freeze. They didn't miss hardly a day of laying. They laid right through that freeze. They've been laying, as long as they're not broody or now molting, they've been laying. I cannot fuss about their laying abilities. So what's the status with the APA? So we have a lot of work to do before we ever really get down to business. So we have confirmation meets that we need to get the judge to sign off on the rules for The path to APA acceptance are a little muddy. And I was talking to the standards committee about this. They're going to help us, through it, but there's a qualifying meet we need to have, I think, 16 birds and a judge sign off on those 16 birds before we can ever schedule our first we need a confirmation meet before we can ever. schedule our qualifying meet. Then once we have a qualifying meet set up, we need to ensure that we can bring in 50 birds in equal numbers of cockerels, bullets, cocks, and hens. And that will be held at a regional show somewhere. I'm hoping that we can maybe get that scheduled for sometime next fall. Then no less than a year after that, we would have a second qualifying meet where again, we would have to bring in 50 birds, equal numbers among the ages and sexes. And then the APA would make the decision on whether to admit us into the standard or not. So how many breeders in the States is working on this with you? How many breeders are working in the United States with you on this project? Right now, the North American Belofelder Association has about 40 members. We really haven't. there yet. We're still working on getting the website set up PayPal, financial accounts set up and all that sort of thing. I expect this organization will grow a fair bit. Bielefelder has a lot of fans. So one of the Bielefelder groups on Facebook Geard Roth was actually told that it had 3, 300 members and he was floored. And he said, do 3, 300 people really love my birds? It was cute. Wow. Good for him. Does he speak English? He does some. But it's easier for him to correspond in German. And I told him, you correspond in whatever is comfortable for you. I have Google Translate. And thank goodness for Google Translate, because that's how we go back and forth. Yeah. Yeah. I like, I use that quite often too. Yeah. And I can't believe out the fact that the secretary of the German Bielefelder Association has also played a huge role in getting our APA style standard written. Monica Keller Dicci. She's been the liaison between Gerd and I. She's really great about, she's on Facebook, he's not. So she's really great about fielding our questions as an organization back to him and getting some answers from us. It is just the coolest thing to be able to have the breed's actual creator to bounce questions off of. That's a, not many breeds can say that. No, I can only, the Buckeyes But I can't think of anything else. Yeah. Other than the newer breeds that they're trying to get APA accepted, like they are mines or something like that. Oh, it is pretty cool. So for a new person wanting to get into Bielefelder's where would they be a good place for them to get started? Our website is nabielefelderassociation. org. We will have a breeders list there for our members that are also breeders. That would be where I would ask them to start. I definitely would not order birds from a hatchery. Is the breeders list available to the public or do you have to be a member to see it? The breeders list will be available to the public once we get it up. So I will put a link to your website on our website for the podcast when it airs, because I can't spell Billy filter either because Carrie keeps it where I've spelt it wrong on my notes. So text me, I'd love to join your organization and read more about it, but I can't find it. So we're going to put that link in the show notes. You don't have to spell it either. Alrighty. It's been a joy to have you guys back or have you back again. So Carrie, you got anything else for Gina? So with the Bielefelder and I said it with an S and I shouldn't have, I apologize. With those, they're hardy birds for the climate. You just have to take certain precautions for their large comb. But aside from that they're just like any other large foul bird. And when it, as it relates to cold weather and hot weather. They are. And last year, you and I talked about having to bring a bunch of the birds inside when we had that dreadful freeze for a week. I did bring the Bielefelder cock inside the tack room and saved him from frostbite. But when I didn't realize that he wasn't out there to herd the hens to bed. And there was one night where they slept outside on the roosting bar in minus two degrees, no frostbite. They were fine, bright eyed and bushy tailed the next morning. So I felt bad for them, but they were just, they were white with frost. That just proves what we always preach that they're fine out in the cold. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For me, winter preparation is more about my water. Yes. Cause it'll freeze and make a mess. Yup. And I made the mistake last year of, We used the five gallon metal waters, the gravity waters, and I had a heater underneath that water, which was fine, everything was great, but I was also using a metal gravity feeder, and I had one little hen that went and got a drink, got her waddles all wet, went over to that feeder, and went to eat, and it was Her little face was just covered in blood all down her neck. And I said, good God, what'd you do? Once I realized what I had done, yeah, metal feeders were gone. Yeah, we all make mistakes. Yeah, we do. I'm a huge fan of trough style feeders. Yeah. I get it. Or do you just make your own? So I have. Most of the ones that I have, I made out of a six inch PVC. And you can, so if you have a, like for my grow out, I have a six inch piece of PVC and right above that is hovering a essentially upside down a frame house. And cause it's six inches. It's a total of eight inches tall with the way the wood is. But I can put 50 pounds of feed in that trough at one time. So for my grow outs, when they're young birds and they're in this huge pan together, I can go in there and I got two of those that are five feet long each, and I can put a lot of feet in that'll last them for a couple of days. The other ones that I have are six inch piece of PVC with the end caps. Screwed to a four by six. That's about a foot long. Screw it to that. So they can't knock it over when they jump up on it and try to perch on it. But yeah, it's simple. We use the PVC pipes to cut in half lengthwise. We, I think my oldest one is going on 12 years now. You can't hardly destroy them. They're PVC pipe and I've had different ways. David's made them different ways, but. My favorite is where he just puts a cap on the end and he screws straight down in a four by four So the four by four stabilizes it so instead of being on the end, which I have some like that too the originals The best ones are where he put the four by fours on the bottom and drilled straight down. Yep That's where I got the idea for mine made that are made like that now in some of my breeding pens I used a three inch Piece that's about three feet long Put end caps on it, screwed it to a four by four for weight to keep it upright. And then I actually have eye bolts on the ends where they come up to a piece that I can adjust the height. Keep the feeder height going up so they don't, they waste a lot less when they have to reach for it. Yeah. I, my big thing is finding something that's less wasteful for the chicks and the growing birds. My big birds. They don't waste hardly anything. And then my babies just are messy. So for chicks, what I have had success with in Hatching out a bunch at once and putting them together is there's a turbo feeder that I actually, I learned about them at the APPPA conference. And I was like, you people are growing two to 300 chicks at one time in your brooder. If I'm only doing like 50, I definitely shouldn't have a problem. And I don't, I'll take these and I've got a couple of one by sixes and. At first when they're babies, I will just sit it on the bottom on the floor. And then when they get a little higher, I'll put another one by six on it. And then I have a one by six. I have to screw together. And then I have one that's three high that screwed together. And by then it's time to kick him out of the brooder. It works really well. Try it. I've been eyeballing them. I'm like, man, I don't know. They're, you can get them real inexpensive. And they're actually some of the more inexpensive feeders that I've ever tried. Yeah. Do they have a lid on them or are they all open top? They are all open top unless you get a, the round ones and you get a five gallon pail lid and you sit it on top of there and you put a brick on it. Okay. Because I've, when I hatch out in the wintertime, when it's really cold, that's what I have that third block for. And then they'll tend to want to get on top of it to roost. And so put a five gallon pale lid on it, put a brick on top of that. Generally they don't knock it over until it's empty. Yeah. I'd want to put something on top of them. Cause by two weeks old, they're going to be having a party inside there. They will.

  Carey: 26:49

  Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they are released. And they're released every week. Feel free to email us at poultrynerds at gmail. com to share your thoughts about the show. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning, and keep it egg citing. This is Carey signing off from Poultry Nerds. Feathers up, everyone.