11/11/2025
This year I embarked on trying to safeguard a few chicken breeds as in recent years covid and, more worryingly, bird flu lockdowns meant that shows haven’t gone ahead and many people stopped keeping birds altogether. It may not sound like much but this has had a massive effect on the numbers of birds and breeds kept. On a recent Rare Poultry Society census several breeds now appear to have been lost altogether with not a single breeder returning records of breeding birds.
One of the breeds I passed on myself following covid was my Ayam cemani. They’re truly beautiful birds but they lay relatively small eggs and they’re not a meaty breed so they have little value as a utility or dual purpose breed. Traditionally they’re kept as a medicinal bird in Indonesia, used for its perceived mystical powers, as a status symbol, for shamanic rituals and for traditional medicine to boost energy and the immune system. I had quite a lot of success with these birds, winning best of breed at the PCGB National and Federation shows plus rosettes at a local level in mixed rare classes too.
I still have a few really good quality hens in my mixed flock so this year I decided to get some new stock in to try and build the numbers up again. This was not an easy search. I looked high and low for good quality birds and I was surprised at just how hard this was. There are a lot of bad quality and crossbred birds out there, advertised for very high prices, but I finally found some chicks that caught my eye (pictured now in their scruffy adolescent stage). I plan on breeding these to my older girls next year so we can have plenty of these beauties running around in the future 🤞🏻
