The media says it most likely does not pose a threat to backyard flocks. Phew!
Well 21 days later at about 9:30 tonight there are two new little cream legbar chicks in the world. It was great fun watching them zip ( one we assisted.) Kids loved it and so did us adults.
Welcome to the world little ones!! Btw, I've been looking for cream legbars for the past year. Just one or two, possibly one being a roo. If you're ever willing to sell please let me know, I would pay more bucks for these lovies.
@Cearbhael the chickens you're researching and going to establish will be stunning and I truly appreciate efforts to revive and preserve older heritage rare breeds. I'm excited to see down the road!
The avian discussion with you all, good point about the concentrated farms. I agree about taking precautions as much as reasonable and not a burden or excess. The avian flu is not new and it has had affects outside of the turkey population before, maybe this strain will not. The points you've brought up here do introduce some skeptical thinking of how this did get here. It's catastrophic for the farmers that are right now having outside agencies come in and kill their entire flock, thousands of birds. Then, as some of you are saying, we do have the real issue that when we coop up thousands of birds in closed, tight quarters, unchanging what is expected. The other side of that condition I thought of is the sterility, in a sense. The very risk of buggy turkeys and slimy junk rambling around our backyard flocks, makes them exposed to such diverse bio, from all over the state and the nation, without leaving our backyards. That's then tempered by rich complex nutrients from the insects, grass, and soils from where they do live. Equals = whopper immune possibilities. Not bulletproof, and we have endless variables and risks. I kind of think of this like watching my kids in the ball pit at Chucky Cheese, where my friend runs home to get her kids in a bath with a quarter cup of bleach added and my kids play in the yard even when I had a suppressed immune system. I also have a child with severe food allergies, and although we use precaution because he is anaphylactic, we do not sterilize surfaces in our house as recommended from particles of the allergens. With seven, sometimes more if we foster, in our house we do not have illness come through even when our kids are in three different schools all with illnesses raging through the school populations. None of them. And I'm an herbalist so they don't have antibiotics in them except rarely. But who knows, and chickens aren't the same thing. Nothing is guaranteed and nothing is the same case here to there or absolutely known why always.
The contrast to backyard flocks is significant, the only commonality could be that their poultry and possibly feed sourcing depending on what you choose there. Regardless, we're all devoted to our flocks or we wouldn't be on a chicken forum lol, so we can keep an eye on it and it's going to do what it is.
