GREENFIRE
**RHODEBAR**
First Time at Auction!
Despite their unusual good looks and solid record of production, today rhodebars are virtually extinct! It is estimated that fewer than a hundred hens remain in Britain, and until now none were known to exist outside that country. The threat to this breed potentially creates the loss of a wonderful genetic treasure since a hen from a good strain of rhodebars will produce over two hundred very large tinted eggs a year.
Rhodebars are perhaps more effective at auto-sexing than any chicken breed in the world: Light-colored chicks (often with white spots on the back of their heads) are males and chicks with ‘chipmunk’ stripes on their backs are females. The visual distinction between the two sexes is striking.
Greenfire Farms was able to import some of the last remaining rhodebars, and we introduced into the breeding flock both production and traditional strains of American Rhode Island reds. These American birds injected some much-needed genetic diversity into the rhodebar line and produced birds that are extremely prolific egg layers. By back-breeding these crosses to pure rhodebars we were eventually able to produce a rhodebar bloodline with all the characteristics of pure rhodebars (including auto-sexing) and the productivity of a modern commercial chicken.
Arguably, this makes our rhodebars the ultimate fowl for homesteaders and small-scale producers: a bird that is prolific as it is beautiful with the enormous added benefit of being auto-sexing. These traits are sure to quickly endear the rhodebar to America’s poultry enthusiasts.
Greenfire Farms raises some of the rarest poultry breeds in the world; for more information about our breeding program, please visit:
The birds pictured on this auction represent the quality of the stock we are raising. The winner will be receiving an unrelated pair about five to eight weeks old. Buyer pays $60 shipping. We will ship USPS Overnight Express within one week of the close of this auction.
Thanks for bidding, and good luck!
A note on auto-sexing vs. sex-linked chickens: If you go to your local feed store and want to buy visually sexable chicks in the spring, you are buying sex-linked –as opposed to auto-sexing– chicks. Sex-linked chicks are the first generation hybrids of two separate chicken breeds. They are produced by the hundreds of millions each year in large commercial hatcheries. If you allow the sex-linked chicks to reach adulthood and breed with one another they will not produce visually sexable chicks in the second generation. In other words, until recently if you wanted to buy visually sexable chicks in America, you’d be traveling to that feed store year after year to buy sex-linked birds produced by large commercial hatcheries. Your flock of sex-linked birds will not be a self-sustaining flock that can produce visually sexable chicks.
By contrast, auto-sexing chicken breeds like the rhodebar breed visually sexable chicks generation after generation. You can buy a pair of rhodebars now, continue to breed their offspring with each other, and eventually your grandchildren can one day be breeding their progeny and still be producing visually sexable chicks. In this sense auto-sexing chicks are like heirloom vegetables. They have a stable genome that always breeds true, and by saving a little seed stock with each generation you are ready to begin anew each year. |
Hatching Eggs (7)
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