Ameraucana Breeders Club
The Official Forum of the Ameraucana Breeders Club => Breeding => Topic started by: Susan Mouw on March 23, 2016, 01:27:14 PM
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Quick question for those that use the NPIP permanent wing bands - at what age do you apply the permanent bands?
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I believe you can wing band any age of bird, but some ages are way easier than others. Day old chicks just feel too fragile to me. And wing banding adults was too hard and stressful on the bird, (as well as the owner ::)) in my experience. Last year I did my grow outs between 4 and 8 weeks, and well that age seemed to work the best (you're also not wasting as many bands on culls), I'm not really liking the wing bands as much as I thought I would. So I plan to just stick to toe punching and leg bands from now on. If it ain't broke, why fix it.
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Lee, I only know a few people that have used the wing bands but have heard good results from their experience. The wing bands are often difficult to apply to LF newly hatched chicks though some do try and seem to have decent luck. You're method of applying them at 6 weeks sounds like a good plan. It allows you to cull the early "faults" and use bands only for those "keepers" at that stage of development. One down side to wing bands is that they are not visible from a distance. So you have to catch a bird and sort thru the feathers to try to read the numbers anyway. Breeders will sometimes add a leg band to help with easier identity, but they are sometimes lost too.
The toe punch system allows the breeder to keep up with families or breeding sets for a given year. There are 16 different "marks" if you use the true punches and you can double that system if you add "slits" similar to what Paul does. And this system makes the record keeping doable from one generation to another. There are the metal leg bands that some use to indicate an individual bird. These can be applied only as the birds near adulthood since the band size is not adjustable. The breeder may have used different marking systems during growth to keep track of chick color or other specific traits that they are interested in watching. It sounds like you have a good system down pat now that works well for your uses. Good luck with this year's hatches.
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I use the wing bands on the chicks as they are put in the outside grow out pens - about 6 weeks old. So, far that has seemed to work well.
When they are a bit older, I will add the colored and numbered leg bands for easy identification in the pen.
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Thanks Don. Since I already bought a boat load of coloured wing bands (and the handy dandy tool for applying), I've decided to use them again this year. They are great for marking/tracking individuals, no doubt, and I have quite a few chicks with split bases I need to keep track of...I also toe punch by matriarchal family, and leg band with coloured zips around 3-4 months. I like the idea of using slits too, and doubling my ID numbers. It's definitely nice to know who made who in my coops. :) (well, most of the time. Had a little pen mishap this spring, and learned chicken wire does not always keep rowdy roosters out, not when there's females on the other side.)