Re: Winter lock-down

tonyf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message 
> Hello and welcome Italian Tony from Tulsa. My guess is that you have
> really good rollers. The fifty footers usually end up on the ground if
> you fly them a couple of years. The deep birds mess up a kit real
> fast. Especially if you have more than one in a kit. I always tried to
> concentrate on raising birds that would spin  five to twenty-five
> feet. You will still raise a few roll downs if you have good birds.
> There are a world of people who lock up young birds because they 
> are spinning deep and they want to use them as breeders. The majority
> of these birds would roll down if flown out. In the sixties when I
> first started in Birminghams the rule of thumb was to never breed out
> of a birds till they had proven themselves in the air. The two years
> of flying culled out the roll downs. I have witnessed some really
> great  spins out of young birds only to have them hit by the time they
> were two years old. If they had been put in the breeder loft I would
> have been breeding out of birds that didn't have control. I hear
> people that say they raise good spinners out of roll downs but have
> never accomplished that feat myself. I have always believed that  
> control was a recessive gene in rollers. Likewise I believe that lack
> of control is a dominant gene. Once again welcome to the ng. 
> These thoughts are not gospel but ones I have pondered for a long
> while. 
> cheers,
> Italian Tony from KY

Gosh, I should turn you guys on to my Italian Roller buddies in Boston!%^)
If anyone is waiting for fifty footers to be bred from 5-25 footers,
they're gonna have a long wait..........they need to breed 50 footers from........
50 footers! There are alot of guys around that have stable, 40-50 foot roller
families. The best bet would be to acquire a deeper family.
I ALMOST acquired a very deep family of Neible birds from a great roller guy
in Washington State. I won the bid on an online auction we had on the World
Cup website. The bid was for a pair, and he sent me TWO pair! And of course,
as MY luck would have it, the bottom of the shipping box fell out just as I
was putting it in my car. I managed to snatch one before it flew away. (A cock
bird.) Methinks the rest are improving the feral stock in Lansdowne PA!
I'm gonna wait a few months, then beg him to send me another hen!%^)
But I DO have a super-fast 25 foot family of Taylors and Testa birds.
(Joe Testa from Boston! They were originally Houghton birds, but were bred and
raised by Joe, so I call them Testa birds.) From my main Testa pair, it seems
that one out of every clutch becomes a stable bird. They don't show spin or
depth until 8 months old. But when they come on, they stay there. But so far,
none hold up to my Taylors. They start rolling at 4 months, and give me really
fast speed and depth at 5 months. (Most, at 4 months!) I have not had a rolldown
from my Taylors, yet!
But I want a whole kit of 40-50 footers! And that's a bunch of hooey about
"alot of deep birds in a kit doesn't allow the kit to form back up properly."
I have already had my own birds show me that you can get almost a full turn,
or even a half-turn, and STILL have the kit form right back up, set up and
do it again!
I too thou, have seen my share of birds that were stable for a year, then roll
down every time out the next year. It does not make sense to breed from a
rolldown, thinking that you will get some depth if you mate it to a stable bird.
A keeper out of this pairing, will be few and far between, and will take too
long to know what you have. The old addage of "breed best to best" still holds
true for most.
E-Man