Rare breeds

09/03/2020

Beautiful rare breed Swedish Flower pullet & young cockerel enjoying the morning sun after a cold night. It’s now turned to rain once more. Hardy breed who lay large eggs throughout the year & are also very pretty & each with unique colours toon... #

19/02/2019

What a lovely story! !

The schoolboy from Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, bought the £2.30 Gladys-May’s Braddock Whites free range duck eggs and placed them under a £40 incubator bought from eBay in his bedroom.

17/02/2019

Well despite smashing Gerty’s egg yesterday, her morning offering got safely to the egg box -ready to go in the incubator next week.

16/02/2019

The Swedish Flowers hens are laying good sized eggs for pullets -but note to self-don’t put eggs in your pocket then bend over!!!

08/02/2019

The first rare breed on my ark will be Swedish Flower hen & cockerel.
I like the idea of landrace chickens. Evolving naturally to suit their habitat & climate. Un interfered with by humans trying to “bred in” or “bred out” certain characteristics for aesthetics, egg production or carcass weight.
Swedish flower hens are one of Swedens largest native fowl & were kept for table as well as egg production. This was one factor when the breed had become dangerously rare through large scale commercialisation of hybrid breeds, that their survival in three remote Southern Swedish villages (that still appreciated their virtues) that the flower hen was saved from possible extinction, through a concerted breeding programme in the 1980’s by Swedish Genetic Project to save them.
The birds have a variety of colours, & gain their name from the tips of their feathers resembling petals from a flower. Crested & non crested birds are present in all colours, though crested to crested breeding should be avoided due to potential skull deformities. I think some of the colourations have the look of a legbar or a speckled Sussex the final two photos in the collection. There are so many colour combinations that appeal to me.
They are friendly confident birds with a healthy life span of about 10 years.
I’m looking forward to many years of learning about this wonderful breed first hand.
Do please share your favorite rare breeds.

10/01/2019

With so many native breeds on the at risk , critical & endangered lists which rare breeds do you support & breed?
Sheep

04/01/2019

04/01/2019

Whilst researching breeds of farm stock & poultry for my future smallholding, I was saddened by just how many breeds were rare, endangered, critical or almost extinct!
Please help expose these wonderful animals & poultry to others like me, to enable these rare breeds to continue to survive beyond the demands of intensive farming.
Many are native to our shores, or brought over in days gone by sailors & traders.
Please post photos in visitors posts onto this page, of your rare breeds, why you love them & a little bit about them-including their gene pull if possible-& what success you have had if
breeding them, so we may all learn & source some quality outbred stock to ensure their survival.