Wow. They are very nice. I love how mine feather out so beautifully as they head into winter too. I love the black head on that second hen, did you work specifically to get black heads on your BLRs? Really fantastic looking birds, I think you've done a great job!
The solid black head/neck hackles (or blue, or splash in some cases) is a carry over from these guys distant Cornish ancestry. I bred it out in the silver laced line. In the gold laced line I tolerated it in a few birds of exceptional type. But when I bred in the blue, it really seemed to pop, and I started to breed for it. I guess that's an advantage with creating your own varieties, you can breed for what you like to some degree.
The blue laced reds still need considerable work. For example the male I said that will likely head up a double laced pen this spring, I would have preferred he be the darker red/ mahogany that some of the others posses. But he has so much better type and size I will put up with a little orange for a couple years in favor of improving type. As the old breeders say, you have to build the barn before you paint it.
I looked up the high view farms birds. They I am sure are out of a couple of blue laced gold verging on buff birds I gave Dan Powell several years ago to help with his buff laced project. He went a little off his intended use of these along with some gift silver laced I sent him for a spangled Brahma project,. He instead started producing and selling both colors, worse he later tried to claim he had created both varieties, which resulted in me calling him out and setting the facts straight, getting the Brahma thread shut down for a while. Dan removing all his posts, changing his user name, and eventually quit posting here altogether. If you scroll down the page linked below you can read the cleaned up version the moderators deemed fit to leave, considerably more pasteurized, but you can get most of the drift.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/169790/brahma-thread/2990 As you maybe can tell, this still gets my feathers up a bit. A person works too long and hard developing a variety for the results to be muddied after the fact. Back to what got me going on my little rant here is the birds I see on that website are gold, blue laced gold, I see no sign of red/mahogany and should be listed as such.
High View Farm is supposed to have BLRs as well....
