what age young birds weaning

what age are you going to wean your young birds im going for a longer stay with the parents than the normal

i went for 28 days last breeding season seemed to work well even though plenty people said it was far to long so will do the same if it aint broke dont fix it jmo

Some are far quicker than others, but pigeons are very quick learners. But I just keep an eye on them and watch em picking. The drinker is the most important thing, I usually dunk their heads in it and use an old shallow tray type drinker, and drop small seeds in it.

think that extra few days dose them good daz im going to leave mine as long as i can make sure there all strong and robust feeding them selfs befor they go over

i dunno how meny days but i didnt remove mine last year still they fed and drunk on there own and the perants didnt wanan know them any more

i did wean at 30 days but found that by doing this they were too strong on the wing and i lost a lot off the loft............now i wean at 28 days and this seems ok for me.

David ur bird must be rubbish tehe coz I never lost one haha

i wean them at 21 days old

some wean them into the yb section at 14 days old with the hens, all the ybs are then fed by all the hens........

My mate does this, he has a mesh pen in the stock loft, and the hens can still feed em through the mesh if they like.

i think you will find that more and more people are going back to basics ie open hole less meds but the number 1 factor is to keep less birds its the bigest cause of stress and desease to many go on the darkness and get it all wrong the ventilation is poor hence desease crops up y/b sickness etc and many only start to look at there y/b once the old bird racing is over well thats to late its no good putting birds in a basket 2 weeks befor the first race and thrashing them down the road playing catch up cus all you will do is stress them and loose them
this is only my opinion others may tell you differant

i think yb sickness has something to do with ybs on the dark........maybe stress because it alters their hormones, plus its forcing nature to speed up the moult. im not saying this is definate but i think it does contribute to it,

also when i had what i thought was yb sickness it seemed that they were holding corn in the crop, and then been sick, would darkening the loft slow down the digestive system if the birds were fed not long before darkening ? i dont know, this is something ive been thinking about so if anyone could give their opinion it would be good.

this season tho i fed lightly with 50/50 widowhood and super diet and at one stage i thought i had ybs sickness....but it turned out they didnt and the bird was ok in a couple of days, so this season i didnt get ybs sickness and i put this down to the feeding.

i was gunno try the darkness systerm but i dont think i wanna just i bred my ybs early so i think they start to moult when racing starts

I only suffered with it once and that was the one and I only time we tried the darkness system, it may just have been coincidence.But it was horrendous. My racing partner at the time, came down the loft with a bin liner.
After some discussion, he agreed to give it four days, if they never improved, then bin liner it was. I managed to pull them round and they did score a few firsts, in the earlier races, but we had some hard races and the strong winds combined with with them falling apart on the neck an head, their performance went right off. Our second team next door that were on the light out performed them, never got sick and flew great as yearlings.
But saying that, a good friend of mine, hammered the other club with his darkness pigeons, but he did have a good ventilation system with extractor fans in his loft.
Not all systems suit all fanciers, that's what makes this great sport so interesting.

i did ok on the light last year only got 2 races in tho due to me being stupid but hopfuly they be better this year

lvlasked wrote:

i did ok on the light last year only got 2 races in tho due to me being stupid but hopfuly they be better this year

light ? you mean natural...?

yer david

ah right...............

as sson as they are feathered under the wing i put mine over,i have put some over eariler but i try andget a batch over togethere if i can

yes same here ray