Ok since my wife has done the communication with this gentleman over the last year, I asked her. She said she placed the original order by filling out the form on the website. She received a call from this fellow and has communicated with him alone about the birds. She did say he mentioned a partner in Oklahoma. My estimation is that this man did not originate the breed, he did not seem on the ball enough and his chickens were not in that good of order. He did have a bunch of these and only these. Don't really know anything for certain.
I think he told my wife he was not getting a good hatch rate. However he had a large wire basket of eggs hanging in the chicken coop. I'm talking several dozens of eggs and the temperature was over 90 degrees, maybe close to one hundred. She said he mentioned setting eggs weekly. So, a low hatch rate under those conditions does not surprise me.
We have the birds and once they and the roos are in good shape we will begin breeding them. As I said earlier they did seem large yet under weight, so we'll see how they fill out. We have several types of Marans so I had a good size bird to eyeball these against. We are optimistic about the birds .... we'll see.
