For the person who wanted to know more about those of us on the thread, I have 12 cream legbars, 4 trios. I ordered half this; GFF and fate kindly brought extras. I've lost none, even my littlest gal. My #1 male has been crowing for weeks. He started at around 9 weeks. Spring warm weather with lots of grass and bugs is perfect for raising legbars. They have been free foraging since they were 4 or 5 weeks. My back and side pastures have fence lines down, (I'm changing things), so they are free to be anywhere. I think I may have eggs earlier than the 22 weeks. What is the earliest folks have seen eggs?
My legbars are seemingly disease free (knock on wood), healthy, and thrifty. Since about 3 weeks they've been raised with 10 blue laced red wyandottes that are a week older. My roosters are visually more mature looking and appear to outrank the single wyandotte roo I have. However, the wyandottes are, of course, mellow, larger, and fluffier. I'm looking at small flock certification after everyone hits 16 weeks. Only drawbacks are that I have other hens, plus 3 rogue mallard crosses from my neighbor, and a stray peacock (no one claims) that want to make my place home. Drawbacks being I've been worried about disease as the ducks raid the hen house. With too many stray birds liking our place, plus the wild ones at the pond such as heron, egret, grebe, Canada geese. I'm wondering if I can met NPIP. For those of you that have it, can you still free range your birds? How problematic is all this potential contact from other birds in terms of adding more disease to the flock? Will NPIP mean my birds need fenced? Thanks for any replies.
