Delaware Heritage Breed Chicken

Many of our chickens are heritage breeds--those that have been largely replaced by commercial breeds in modern farming. The flock includes Delaware, New Hampshire Red, Wyandotte, Sussex, and Barred Rock hens. (We've got three roosters, also.) 

This girl here is a Delaware chicken, a breed considered threatened (fewer than 1,000 breeding birds in the U.S., with seven or fewer primary breeding flocks, and estimated global population less than 5,000) by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. We have some other Delaware hens, and one of our new chicks is feathering out white with a few black accents. The new chick is some kind of Delaware mix, since we don't have any pure Delaware roosters.We'll have wait a little longer to see if the new part-Delaware chick is a rooster or a hen. 

There's more information about heritage breeds at the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy website:  http://albc-usa.org/.