"The most important thing no one should forget is that this is a hobby and a hobby should be for fun!
The pleasure in the hobby and the friends are more important than the quality of your birds."
Heine Bijker - 4 time World Cup Roller Fly Champion
BREEDING/FOSTER LOFTS
FOSTER LOFT
This is the foster loft. Fostering is a breeding system that uses "foster", "feeders" or adoptive parent birds to raise the babies from your actual breeders. I will explain fostering in more detail later. Since this loft is only used for fostering it is of an open loft design. I am not concerned about the foster parents not breeding true with their mates.
The loft is 16' wide, 6' deep and 7' tall. It is built in a duplex design, where the right half is the same as the left half. There is a removable door between the two sections that I install after the breeding season to make this loft into a holding pen for seperating the sexes. There are two 4' by 6' by 6' aviaries on the ends with the actual breeding compartments in the center.
If you look at the front of the loft you will see the water containers. They are placed in a protected area that is accessed from the outside. This way the birds cannot soil the water or the containers. It also makes it easy to change the water without entering the loft. You can also see a low wide doorway on the front bottom of the aviaries. This access is for placing the bath pan into the aviaries.
This is the interior of the foster loft showing the breeding compartments. There are two of these compartments both 4' wide, 6' deep and 7' high. Each side contains 8 nest boxes which are 24" wide, 16" deep and 12" high. The nest boxes are installed through the back of the loft and does not extend into the loft. Installing the boxes this way does not decrease the space inside of the loft as it would if the boxes were just hung onto the back wall of the loft.
The nest front frames are approximately 1 3/4" tall which helps to create a barrier on the floor of the nest box. I fill the bottom of the nest boxes with about 1 1/2" of clay cat litter. I don't use any nest bowls and the birds just create a nest in the litter. To clean the nest you just use a litter scooper and scoop out the droppings. Nothing sticks to the floor of the nestbox and everything stays a lot drier.
INDIVIDUAL BREEDING PENS
These are my individual breeding pens. There are 8 pens that are 3' wide, 3' deep and 4' high. The pens are facing east so the birds are exposed to the direct morning sunlight for a several hours daily. I feel this is very important for the health of the birds.
The reason I use individual pens is that right now in my program I am still sorting through the birds and attempting to evaluate them as breeders. I want to be sure that the babies are from that certain pairing to properly evaluate the birds. Eventually after a few more years I might be in the position that I can just put them in an open loft to breed but I am not in that position at this time.
Another reason that I used individual pens is that I also like to mix up the pairings during the season. I will let a pair lay 3 or 4 rounds and then break them up and put them on different mates. In an open loft it would cause more stress for me and the birds than it is worth. In the individuals I can just pull and switch the mates with no problem.
When I first started, I used individuals that were 30" wide, 24" deep and 24" high. While these were adequate and the birds seemed to do ok in it, I wasn't happy with the smaller individuals. One thing I did notice with these larger pens is that if the breeders do raise their own babies they are able to get away from the babies and are not constantly harassed by the babies. One other reason I like these bigger pens is that it is easier to get the breeders back into the air and flying with the kit than if it was in the smaller individual pen. I like to pull a yearling or two every year to try in the breeding pen. I will usually get 2 or 3 rounds off of the bird and then put them back into the kit to finish up proving itself the second year. With these larger pens these birds are usually keeping up with the kit within a week.
Each pen has 2 perches and 2 removable nest "boxes". The boxes are 1 foot square and about 4" deep. I fill the boxes with about 2" of clay cat litter. If the breeders do raise their own babies, once the babies are about 2 weeks old, I would move the box that the babies are in to the floor and put the clean box up on the wall. This way the pair will have a new, clean box to lay the next round of eggs into and the squeakers will start to learn to eat and drink.