Updating: They're continuing to give me a lot of eggs, so I'll leave this deal available until they taper off. Thanks so much to those who have purchased!
UPDATE: New for 2017, they are laying like crazy. People who bought them lasts year had a great hatch, and some got buffs out of them.
Beautiful big eggs from my mixed Toulouse and Buff flock. The ganders are Toulouse, and the geese are Toulouse and Buffs, so you will get a mix of purebred...
That's not actually how blood works. It doesn't thicken or thin, unless the animal is really sick and having major kidney issues. It is possible in the cold weather that the tiny blood vessels right under the skin will constrict and not bleed as much when cut, but the blood draw for testing is...
According to the Dept. of Ag, the youngest they will do is 12 weeks, but the normal cutoff is 20 weeks. It requires about half a teaspoon of blood per test, and many birds continue bleeding after the test, so you can imagine how much that would affect the smallest chicks and bantams.
Since I am one of the ones that tested positive, so I KNOW I had MG in my flock, and I have a very long background in livestock and a degree in biology, here's what I know. These are things I know, not surmise:
- MG makes your birds sick, and in some flocks it does decimate the flock. We lost...
For those wondering -
All of our birds tested positive for MG, negative for MS. We're culling this weekend. Our 70 birds are legbars, marans, gorgeous giant frizzles, seramas, dutch and old english, Foley wyandottes, blue barred rocks, deliberate crosses, etc. Every single one carefully bred...
NH Dept of Ag just left - we tested every adult bird on the place. Now to wait... I had two rattly breathers even as he was testing, so we should know for sure.
Snakedoc is correct - the worst thing is wondering which birds it'll be today. Which batch of babies will suddenly look droopy, which...
It cannot be passed to humans, which is why it is safe to eat the eggs. The eggs are full of mycoplasma, but it's not a type that can infect humans so it won't hurt us.
That doesn't mean the birds aren't infected and it doesn't mean it's safe to sell them or spread them around. One flock may...
She has what we call egg disease in our house - egg peritonitis. The soft and swollen abdomen is because she's full of serum and infection. I am sorry that I don't have a better answer for you, but she's on her way out. We usually put them down at or before the stage she's reached.
We didn't lose any, though we were sweating it for a few days there when we saw bantam combs start to get purple. The littlest Seramas came into the living room in dog crates. The large fowl in the outside coops did great - they didn't skip a beat.
Were you asking about me? We do mix our own food, but we don't do organic. At that point it would be so expensive we'd never be able to maintain it. We feed a mixture of whole grains, high-protein supplements, and alfalfa.
What breed(s) of bantams are you looking for? There are definitely breeders in northern MA and southern NH, but it depends on what your priorities are. If you want to show, you're better off getting birds at one of the shows. If you want egg production in a cute package but not necessarily show...
When she first posted the ad, she had some pictures of both breeds. The difference was very obvious. When she (I assume) got enough orders for the Orloff eggs, she took the Orloff pictures down and edited the ad to remove the possibility of someone ordering them. But you can't edit a subject...
...long and nobody tells you that what you're selling isn't a Marans (as long as they have the body style and the dark egg). Flame Jaerhons, splash *anything,* chocolate wyandottes, and dozens more are sold and advertised and accepted as purebred even though they're not a color accepted by a...
I own very nicely bred Lavender Ameraucanas. I don't show them and don't ever intend to show them. They are intended for nothing more than a backyard flock. Are they EEs?
Consistency in type is pretty much the ONLY condition for calling a chicken purebred. There's no such thing as...
I don't think it's wrong of her to say that they're not EEs, honestly. Unless Lavenders are EEs too.
They don't seem to have very green shanks, the egg color is obviously gorgeously consistent, and they are abundantly purebred looking and consistent in type. Not mixes. If they were wheaten...
The fertility issues in homozygous rosecomb Wyandottes are so well known that Wyandottes are used as low-fertility controls in poultry experiments (in other words, when poultry scientists say "Hey, we need a bird we absolutely know will have crap sperm so we can compare our experiment bird to...