Keeping Records for Breeding

[RossAcres]

G ood morning everyone

I spent a good part of yesterday organizing all of my birds digitally. I keep a record of who's who and where they currently are (conditioning, breeding, sick, etc.). I'm not very creative, so making a record book from scratch is difficult for me. I ended up finding a pigeon breeding software for about $20 a year that has so many different options. The only thing I don't like is that you can't assign more than one hen to a rooster. I know this is due to the inability to know which hen laid the egg and such. So for now, I only use the pigeon software to keep records of my Wyandotte bantams. My call ducks and other ducks are in trios, so I have to make a record book from scratch for them.
Through my job I learned how useful ChatGPT is for this. I am not a huge fan of AI, specifically around art. But in other uses, it's been a great tool. I can tell it what I want and it will create it. It also has the option to save or "remember" the things you say so that it has context in the future. Anyway, just thought I'd share a few ideas I had.

 

[ChickenCanoe]

Thanks for the plug for ChatGPT, I'll have to look into it.
I usually just tracked the rooster and assigned a flock number with a list of hens in that group. Not ideal but simple. There are ways to track the mother, the most commonly used one has been trap nesting.
I'm working on another but I'm keeping it closer to the vest at the moment.
If you look, you may find a program designed for record keeping breeding fighting cocks. I'm not interested in fighting but I've learned a lot about things like line breeding from those SE Asian cock sites.

 

[ChickenCanoe]

I wanted to add that I used numbered colored leg bandettes for years. The color was to denote the year of hatch, the number was the order in which each bird hatched each year. It worked pretty well but the birds would somehow lose the legbands. For a couple years I bought redundant sets to put one on each leg. Some still managed to lose both. I finally relented and used wing bands. (what all serious breeders use)
My birds were pretty wild and unless I picked them off the roost after dark, I couldn't get thee wingband number. I could still color(date) the birds from afar with colored zip ties. I used the same color scheme used by beekeepers for marking queen bees with the year they became the hive queen. It is a 5-year system repeatable each half decade.