Bantams-Part 1

Hi, and welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast. In today's episode Mandelyn, John, and Rip will explore the fascinating world of the smallest class of chickens, the Bantams. Now, here's Mandelyn Royal to get us started.

Hello poultry keepers. On this episode of our podcast, we're going to be discussing the giant world of the smallest chickens. We're going to talk about bantams and the different types and different size ranges they come in with and how to feed them, how to care for them, and how they compare to their large fowl counterparts. It's going to be packed with a bunch of topics, so we're going to try to get through that the best way we know how.

Talking about chickens. I think probably the best place to start is, what is a bantam? Bantams are basically, for the most part, miniature versions of their large fowl counterpart.

How did they originate? Did somebody keep selecting smaller and smaller birds of their variety? Or were they crossed specifically with the Old English Game Bird and a largefowl counterpart to be created?

There are some natural bantams. Seabrights are, because there's no largefowl counterpart. Nankings are another one. No largefowl counterpart. But there was a lot of mixed breed bantams to begin with. So basically how most of the breeds were created was crossing the bantam size bird with the appropriate breed or variety they were trying to create. As a rule of thumb, bantams weigh about one fifth of what a large fowl will, and that's a pretty good estimate.

there'll be less manure to mitigate, oh yeah, and everything,

absolutely.

When those little cockerels do start crowing though, it is extra squeaky.

I just started saying it does get shrill. That's for sure.

I was actually talking to my audiologist about this. Because I have an Apple watch, started an alarm one day, cause I was working out in the coop and one of the roosters crowed, and it said that I was in a high decibel environment and I should have hearing protection on it. I'm like, Oh my God. Wow, my watch told me that. That's weird. And I asked my audiologist about it. They said, Oh yeah, they, a rooster crows at 112 decibels and the human threshold for pain is below that.

I've never done that. I'll wear a face mask, but I never thought about earplugs.

Have you had a rooster crow two feet away from your head?

Yeah, when they sit on my lap, it's one of those extra friendly ones.

Yeah, but it hurts. It's loud. It hurts.

Yeah. And

then it, so if you're in an urban environment and there's a prohibition against roosters, the bantams, they're not a way around because they're just as loud as their bigger counterparts.

I think they crow more frequently sometimes. Definitely.

Yeah, they seem to be a little extra proud of it. Because when I first got started in the poultry, I had bantams. for years before I got a large fowl chicken of any kind and I had the old English games, some black rose comb Japanese sea brides and those boys would curl more.

But they're outstanding at being a natural alarm system.

Oh, they're extra diligent.

And they will initiate, basically it's a bantam chorus where they'll spread out and become your outer ring of protection for predators and help protect the inner flock. It's a pretty interesting phenomenon that I was reading a research paper on.

And they forage pretty good, as if they have more in common with their jungle fowl ancestors. Yeah, they're

all around

great.

That's why we're talking about them.

And another thing they do better than largefowl is fly.

Oh yeah, they'll get ten foot up in the air just to roost, and they can do that from the ground.

Absolutely. Increased predator protection, because they're tree roosting, they can get away from the ground based predators like skunk and mink and ermine. Those are my threats here.

And I will say to me, bantam females make a bit better broody than largefowl. They're more protective of the chicks. Of course they can't brood as many chicks as the largefowl can, but they can raise some dynamite chicks that way. I know several people that have maintained a flock of silkies just to use the silkies as broody hens because those things see an egg and they want to go sit on it. I've never seen I had

a couple who, they weren't silkies, they were just regular bantams, but if they somewhat just saw three eggs sitting in one spot, they were like, oh my goodness, someone needs to sit on those.

Yep, exactly right

now.

It brought up a good idea, Rip, of using a bantam hen to raise, A group of chicks, because we know hen raised chicks are just the most bestest thing ever. Now if we give some chicks to a bantam hen who's got this natural ability that's just still amazing, I think those chicks could pick up a whole bunch of learned behaviors really fast.

Oh yeah, no doubt about that. Accelerate their education, so to speak. I know a lot of people that raise other breeds of bantams or even other breeds of large fowl That would use bantams as setting hens and that's the only way they'll raise chickens is they use a bantam female to hatch and raise those chicks. Surrogate mother type thing because they do such a really good job.

Great. Another case for the bantams.

Their small size does make them real easy to handle, but I would. Caution on paying attention to the temperament of the cockerels because they're, if they have that mind to come at you, they're still going to do it with all the force they can muster up. And you might just have to knock them back with a little fly swatter because they're so little, but sometimes their attitude can be a little bit more than what their body size is.

And other

times they're perfect pets.

They're and some breeds. For example, in largefowl that are very common sedate, when you get them in bantam size breeds, they can be really aggressive. Matt Lamont and Michael Sayre have a line of white coaching bantams, white coaching largefowl, very calm, very laid back. So what? That's their attitude towards life. They literally nicknamed that line of white coaching bantams white devils because they'll jump on you just looking at your crossways. They don't recommend those for kids.

I don't think I ever encountered a mean old English game bantam and that was the bulk of my flock with beady reds and a couple other colors.

boys would feed me as if I was a hen and they'd do their little dance around my ankle and they'd say here I found this for you.

I had some black old English one time and they were. vicious. I'll just leave it at that. The males were a little bit more aggressive than the average.

get to all these bantams and all these varieties? I get a little bewildered because to me they're more confusing than chicken varieties because they're usually colors and abbreviations and stuff how did they originate initially?

Like I said, some of them were naturally bantam breeds.

Huh.

And then the others were created just from crossing large fowl breeds. On to bantams, and then selecting for size over several generations.

And all the varieties that we have, we've thrown a whole bunch of terms around. Can we describe what those are, briefly? A BB red?

That's just a black breasted red is what that means. BB red is black breasted red.

And it's just the plumage color? That's the plumage

color, that's all tastes like

chicken? It

all tastes like chicken. Great.

All right. And that's Just to set the framework here.

The geneticists will refer to that a lot of times as wild type, because that's the wild coloration of red jungle fowl, and BB reds are sometimes confused by new people as red jungle fowl, because they look so very similar. All right.

Yeah, that's true. Now, when it comes to egg production, it seemed pretty typical for my flock to do an egg every other day, but it was bigger than a quail egg.

Yes.

Probably double the size of a quail egg, loosely.

If I remember correctly, Mandelyn, and I might not, so don't hold me to it too much, but it takes three bantam eggs to equal a large sized chicken egg.

That sounds about right. When I was doing breakfast when I was like 12 years old, I was using at least six bantam eggs to do an omelette.

Yeah that makes sense. And then there's some bantams saramas, for example, and kiri kiris. Both of those lay very small eggs. I mean, Sarama,

they're the smallest bantam, like the smallest of the smallest.

I've seen some of their eggs were just barely bigger than a quail egg.

And I think their breed standard is less than a pound.

Oh yeah.

Where some bantams can go up closer to two pounds.

And honestly, some bantam breeds today, they've gotten them too large. I pick up a, Rhode Island Red male bantam that weighs three pounds plus, that's not right. I've seen Cornish bantams where you'd have to, you couldn't bring them straight out of the show coop. You had to tilt them at a 45 degree angle and bring them out that way to get them out. Oh yeah,

that does sound big for a bantam.

It is, and that's why it's important. To weigh the birds. People are not weighing the birds, and I'm not just picking on bantam people, but I see large fowl people are as guilty of that as anybody, but it's important to weigh your birds. Keep everything in the standard weight.

Here's a breed that was designed to be small. Don't grow them too big through selection or breeding. Currently, there's

work being done to bring bantam marans into existence, and right now, Beb Davis is working on a couple. Color patterns and working on that egg color to get the miniature version of a dark brown layer. That's pretty exciting stuff I've been watching their progress Bantam Marans

I was going to say something, I just lost my train of thought, imagine that Sorry, I had a thought pop

in about those little Marans I'm excited about

No, that's fine. One thing I was going to say is their size You can put more of them in the same size area than you ever could a large fowl.

Space requirements, they're delightful.

Yeah, it's practically, what, 3 to 1?

About that, yeah. Maybe 4 to 1.

The nest box can be smaller, too. Yeah.

Yeah, if you give bantams A nest box that's too big, you're invariably going to go in there and you're going to find two or three or four females in the same nest box.

And four separate nests.

Yeah, one in each

corner.

That's just a recipe for broken or cracked hatching eggs.

Yes, it is.

And they, I like to have a nest box that's just big enough for them to turn around in, but not by much. They seem to do better. With those kind of nest boxes.

So for space requirements, they're actually setting part of it for us. We need smaller nest boxes to prevent this from happening. But overall, you just need a smaller footprint to raise a lot more birds, actually, if you choose that route.

When it comes to equipment, they can use equipment designed for large bowels, feeders and waterers. Just put some dividers in your nest

boxes and you're good to go. So

here's a question. Can bantams be dual purpose?

Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. You can get

quite good meat off a bantam.

Back when I was raising Rhode Island red bantams, honestly, those females were better layers than my largefowl Rhode Island reds.

And I've got a friend here in Florida that has crossed Rhode Island red bantams and New Hampshire bantams, and those things are amazing. at putting eggs out on the table. There was someone

a couple years ago who was posting carcass pictures of Bantam New Hampshire

that was a pretty respectable looking carcass. I was like, oh yeah they do look edible. Look at that.

I think that was Tim Juergens. He had those and he had no,

that was his Chanticleers.

Yeah, he had Chanticleers. And he had reds at one time.

Okay. I've seen his bantam Chanticleers and they're nice, meaty little.

But the dual purpose breeds in large fowl are going to be the same way in bantams. You've got your reds, your rocks, your wind dots, all of those make a good dual purpose breed in bantams.

And with the space and feed requirements being lower if you want to have a breeding pool in the same footprint. Bantams are certainly a great way to go.

Oh, absolutely. And honestly, another advantage of bantams we haven't touched on, we've talked about their size, but their size also makes it much easier for a youth member to handle and to work with. Yeah,

Much easier for kids to handle. And temperament.

Yeah, people, I'm always breeding for temperament because I'm always thinking about that. But bantams, if you know where they come from and have chosen from a line that's noted for its temperament again, ideal situation for youth and for H and FFA.

But, bantams can be Every bit is practical to raise and to keep as large fowl breeds. You said

egg production. I'm always talking about, sustainability and all that. So what kind of numbers can we expect for eggs?

I would say four a week is fair.

It was not uncommon for me. to hit 260 plus eggs a year from my bantam raids

and they're about half the size

no they're much less than that

much less a quarter

i'm trying to

remember off the top of my head what the 25 those bb eggs that i got John,

when was the last time you went to a poultry show where you got to see all the different breeds and all the different classes lined up with each other?

that's when you could really see the striking difference between the large fowl and the bantam.

No, I've never been to a show, there's goals in life.

Just go to one, and it makes a lot of impact on, oh, wow.

We were close this year. CycleCon almost lined up with the National Poultry Show. In Ohio, we were off by three weeks. So I'm going to try and shift that on the steering committee

to

line up better,

but I'll save that for later.

Anything special that we should consider when housing bantams for, coop design or predator protection?

Inflated for sure.

It's, they basically have the same requirements for coops and pens. as largefowl.

Okay,

Maybe some aviary

netting over the top because absolutely and they act stupid like they don't know how to get back in after they get out.

Oh boy, that's the worst. That's

all chickens.

But yeah, not only are bantams good at flying out, that also makes them an easy target for hawks and birds of prey.

And their takeout size too, and I had the misfortune of seeing that when I was a kid. And it was, late spring, I had a fleet of broodies sitting on eggs, and I had this one little rose combed bantam hen who was already out with her four chicks. And a hawk was circling. So all the chickens sounded off the alarm. Everybody took cover except her. She fluffed up, covered her babies right out in the middle of the yard and stared at the sky. At that hawk,

I'm ready.

Mandelyn, that brought to mind a funny story. I was working out in the yard one day and I had a little black old English hen. Running out there was about three or four little chicks, probably a week or two old. And there was a hawk sitting up in one of the trees there and he swooped down and just swooped. He wasn't going for the birds, but he swooped down over the top of that hen. I tell you, that old gal got airborne.

If it would have been a little kestrel or something, she probably would have beat it up and sent it packing. But it was a big red tail, so she didn't really stand a chance being out in the open like she was.

But that doesn't deter

them. Good predator awareness is something to be

proud of. She saw them coming and stood there like a sacrifice.

I don't think that bantams really realize they're a small chicken.

No, they're chihuahuas in that aspect. Oh yeah,

they're bring it on, I'll whip you, just try me.

I'm a real chicken. Especially if you've ever seen a bantam cockerel or rooster chasing after large fowl hens.

Yes.

They don't know. For all they know, they're six foot two.

For one, one thing we haven't touched on is nutrition. And I really want to bring this up because there is a misconception.

Oh, there's a few.

There's a couple. That bantams require a different food, different type of feed, different ration, than do large fowl. Look folks, bantams have the same physiology, the same physical structure, and the same nutrient requirements as large fowl chickens. They're not going to eat as much feed, but as long as you're feeding a nutritionally balanced high quality feed, that's all your bantams need. And somebody asked me. What caused that? What started that? And I've thought about that.

This brings us to the close of another episode. We invite you to join us next Tuesday when we'll bring you part 2 of Bantams, right here on the Poultry Keepers Podcast, where we talk poultry from feathers, to function.