We have some good and bad news about our Salmon and Blue Salmon Favaucanas.
Juvenile Favaucanas are so pretty together! These are mostly blue salmon Favaucanas.
We’ve had nearly 400 people (at the time of this writing) sign up to be notified about when our Salmon Favaucanas—our new “designer cross”—will be available to order. Those of you who have been following the blog will remember this is a cross breed I started hatching at my WV farm, and which I promptly fell in love with. They’re beautiful and calm, social and friendly, hardy and productive. They lay beautiful sage green eggs in copious amounts, and are great foragers.
And friendly. Did I say friendly? Did I say sage green eggs? Did I say lots of them?
Also look at how beautiful the roosters are. Here’s our Favaucana rooster D’artagnan.
When I provided our CEO (Chief Eggsecutive Officer) Traci with eggs so she could hatch her own Salmon Favaucanas, Traci promptly fell in love with them, too. That’s when we hatched a plan to develop designer Favaucanas for My Pet Chicken to sell—we wanted everyone to have the opportunity to experience how awesome Favaucanas are! Once the breeding program was set up, I shared the good news here on the blog, and we provided a place for people to sign up to be notified about when Favaucanas could be ordered.
But you know us. We wanted our Favaucanas to be raised with access (actual, meaningful access) to the outdoors, where they could forage and be… you know… chickens, rather than just egg producing machines. And so they were: our set up was probably very much like the type of set up most of you have at home, lots of space and sunshine and outdoors.
Here are some Favaucanas in my mixed flock at home
Unfortunately, having access to the outdoors also means the outdoors has access to the chickens. Wild birds can get in the chickens’ area, for instance, and while that’s not usually a problem, it CAN be… and it was in our case. My home flock is fine, thank goodness. But the Salmon Favaucana breeding flock contracted an illness from wild birds and had to be culled. This was tragic not only on a business level, but on a personal level. You know we love our chickens, and having a flock die on us was just tremendously heartbreaking.
Winter sunset and Salmon Favaucana hen
That’s the bad news: we lost the whole Salmon Favaucana breeding flock, and have to start all over with the Salmon Favaucanas.
But on to the good news: the Salmon Favaucanas were not our ONLY Favaucana plan. We’re tricksy that way. We also developed Blue Favaucanas. The Blue Favaucaunas have the same wonderful characteristics of the Salmon Favaucanas–down to egg color!–but with the pretty smoky blue plumage that’s all the rage right now. And the Blue Favaucanas will be available very soon, so soon we’ve already listed Blue Favaucanas on the My Pet Chicken website.
Blue Faverolles photo, courtesy of Beanwood Faverolles in the U.K. The blue Favaucanas will be similar, but with a pea comb and a slightly less profuse beard
So… we’ll do the same things here that we did for the Salmon Favaucanas: if you would like to be notified when the Blue Favaucanas are available for ordering, please comment below. We’ll notify you FIRST by email!