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- #11
That does not surprise me, unfortunately. Thank you for sharing. There were red flags on their website too that I overlooked simply because I was eager to get some chicks of this breed. Dumb choice on my part! The pictures of their SFHs show, in my opinion, low quality birds which are tethered by their feet. Narrow with flopped over combs and poor flowering. They also look fearful to me. This breed is supposed to be pretty happy and interactive around people. These are probably examples of their best birds too I’m sure. Ugh.I've been to Bresse Farms, because I was excited to find a breeder so close that carried a few of the breeds I was interested in. They didn't really have any biosecurity protocols in place, which was the first thing that made me uncomfortable. They had me come into their 'office' (I was there to get some hatching eggs) which was a large shed with brooder boxes lining one wall and cages in rows on the other side with juvenile birds. They then offered to give me a tour, which really isn't a great idea for several reasons...they don't know me, I'm from out of state, and I have chickens myself.
I actually had brought along a separate set of shoes to change into when I got there to protect my own flock as I had no idea how seriously they took things (lucky I did) and being both curious and awkward enough to have a difficult time turning things like that down, I took a look. I am not surprised that you ended up with some chicks with vaulted skulls. They have open air coop/runs (closed on only one side with a roof) for each breed; not that surprising for the South but these things were not large enough for all of the chickens they had in each. Each pen had several roosters and hens...I remember wondering how they kept all the boys from fighting because there were like 40-50 some odd birds per pen and these things couldn't have been more than 10 foot by 15...maybe 20 ft but I doubt it. The only exception was the Deathlayer pen, but according to him that's because they were not having a lot of luck keeping them alive.
If I remember correctly, most of the birds in the Swedish Flower Hen pen were crested. He made a comment about people loving the crests, so that's probably intentional.