Blue Slate

I have two lavender hens. They are easily my favorite out of the turkeys, constantly harassing me and following me around. They are also the only ones who will generally walk within petting range of me. However, unfortunately they both suffer from partial blindness from genetics. Thankfully they survived, and are 2 years old and doing well. They both eat and drink rather easily (I feed in a large bucket and water in a large bucket to help). One of them is the smallest out of my turkeys, but I wouldn't say she's unhealthy. She also can only see out of one eye, while the other one can see out of both, just at a lower quality. The bigger one is head of the pecking order and absolutely RELENTLESS when she's angry, the other one is timid and will run from being attacked mostly because she doesn't know what's going on.

Overall sweet, wonderful, amazing turkeys... but the blindness is sad to witness.

I love my lil' tom, Slater. He is such a people turkey. He can scream quite loud, though, and does so frequently...especially when no person is in the room with him (even though he's not alone, because he's being brooded with chicks). He gets along well with my chicks, too...at least at this point.

I have one slate turkey (lavender/self-blue) and, unfortunately, she's going blind due to a genetic fault which is very common in the Penn State line. As the breed was nearly extinct, most Slates are related to the few birds which were used to try to bring them back from the brink of extinction, and this means that quite a number of deleterious alleles are floating around in their gene pool at high frequencies. Lavender females are more likely to have this progressive blindness. Apparently, their eyes are shaped somewhat differently (little more oblong if mine is an indication, she also seems to have a muscular problem in that her eyes don't appear to focus on anything in front of her). When buying poults of this breed, and especially of this color within the breed, be sure to examine the poults for this strangeness of eye shape.

The jenny I have has fallen more and more behind her "sisters" and isn't even half the size of the bronze jenny I bought at the same time. The lavender jenny is exceptionally small and has extreme difficulty finding her way around the yard, eating and eating. She gets lost easily and has to be manually moved into the coop regularly at night. She's a lovely, sweet little turkey, so it's particularly heartbreaking that I can't do anything more to help her.