Wild Type Hatchery

10/16/2026

I’m just gonna come right out and say it: this Lavender Birchen Marans craze is difficult to watch.

These birds have become extraordinarily popular thanks to their pink-bloomed eggs, lavender feathers, and the Marans name. Hatching eggs have recently sold at auction for $2,000 or more. THAT’S FINE—I have no problem with people paying what something is worth to them.

However, I do have a problem with people popping up out of nowhere, doing one of these 🤑🤑🤑, buying a few chicks, and immediately taking preorders for next spring.

I’ve said it before: anybody can make birds hump in their yard and call themselves a breeder.

Since many of my followers and customers are interested in these birds, I will offer a warning…

Some people are openly jumping on this trend to make money. Some are showing, in their own photos, birds with incompatible color genetics being bred together—pairings that won’t even produce what buyers think they’re purchasing.

I don’t think these people are even deliberately misleading customers. They simply don’t know what they don’t know.

This isn’t about established breeders fearing competition. It’s not really even about breeders at all. It’s about knowing customers trust breeders and wanting to prevent them from paying hundreds of dollars for one thing and actually receiving something else.

So before you buy Lavender Birchen Marans eggs or chicks, ask how long the seller has kept them, how many generations they’ve bred, and whether they’ve actually evaluated offspring. Can they demonstrate that the chicks will resemble the parents? Do they have evidence that the daughters will lay those pretty pink eggs?

(Picture borrowed from Evergreen Acres LLC with permission)

10/16/2026

Bart “helped” me replace the nets on my chicken-catching net frames

10/15/2026

I resist the belief that dark brown egg color has to fade as the laying season progresses.

If you have a hen who lays a few 7s in the spring, but spends the rest of the season laying 5s, is she really a dark egg layer?

I’m not saying I don’t see hens who fade in my lines, because I do. But those hens are removed as I evaluate them throughout each season.

My most valuable birds are 2-3 year old hens who are wrapping up another season and they’re still laying eggs as deep and saturated as they were in April of this year, or of their first year laying.

Each year I breed back to these hens to perpetuate whatever combination of genes make them hold their color like they do.

As I’ve selected for hens who continue laying dark eggs month after month, I see more and more offspring who do the same.

Do you have a hen who always lays a bitchin’ egg after everyone else has faded? Show me! 🤩

10/15/2026

I have a pen of pullets who are working together to give me one of everything every day 🥰

I’ve been thinking about cataloging every egg from every line as all my 2026 pullets start to lay.

I’ve done this for years in my own notes, but I’ve never done it in an organized and aesthetic way I would ever want to show anybody else 😆

One thing that gets lost when people see pictures of beautiful eggs is how much variation can exist within a single line.

I think showing that variation, rather than just showing off the prettiest eggs, would make the breeding process a little more transparent to the outside observer.

Before I embark on such a task, is that something you’d want to see?

10/14/2026

This fall marks five years of Wild Type Hatchery (previously Sad Scientist Farm) and it has been a while since I’ve explained who I am and how I got here.

In 2021 my husband and I were remodeling our kitchen, which meant many trips to our neighborhood hardware store in Minneapolis. Guess what our hardware store has every spring…yep, chicks.

It was actually my husband who had been talking about getting chickens for years. At that time, we had a 7 year old and 4 year old, and I kept saying I don’t need any more creatures that need me.

So, naturally, I went on to create a situation where hundreds of creatures needed me.

Anyway, I kept receiving pictures of adorable little chicks with every trip my husband made to the hardware store and eventually I couldn’t resist any longer. We got 5 chicks and started building a coop in our backyard.

Having purchased “female” chicks, you can imagine my horror when I realized one of them was a rooster. I was so completely not prepared for that possibility, and my brain started churning up ideas about how I could prevent the same thing from happening to others.

It was also at this time that I discovered that chickens can lay colored eggs and that’s when it was really over.

I spent the spring and summer of 2021 hatching eggs from all over the place and by fall, the pullets were laying and I was disappointed. The eggs they laid looked nothing like the pictures used to advertise them.

That’s when I said, “FINE. I’LL JUST DO IT MYSELF.”

The problem was we lived in Minneapolis. The city of Minneapolis actually has pretty generous laws regarding backyard chickens, but breeding flocks with multiple roosters was still a no-go.

I wasn’t willing to move out of the city (I’m still not 🤣) so I made a post on Craigslist looking for land to rent outside of the city.

Enter Larry. A man my parents’ age with 80 acres in the St. Croix River Valley—my very favorite place in Minnesota. He had only ever leased his land to vegetable growers, but he was willing to let a complete stranger from Minneapolis put chickens on his farm.

We built four chicken tractors and I began traveling two hours roundtrip everyday to care for my chickens and build something that has, frankly, consumed my life for the last five years.

Things have certainly changed since 2021, but the original mission has remained the same:

✔️ Breed chickens that lay beautiful eggs
✔️ Create chickens that can be sexed at hatch so people who can’t have roosters—people just like me in 2021–can have those beautiful eggs too

10/13/2026

Say Breeder A buys a dozen hatching eggs from a breeder with one rooster and eight hens. Seven chicks hatch—4 males and 3 females—all full or half siblings. Once those females start laying, the breeder puts one male with all three females and sells hatching eggs to Breeder B.

Breeder B repeats the same process and sells eggs to Breeder C. And on and on. Soon you have hundreds of birds spread across the country, all descended from the same nine founders, who were almost certainly just as closely related. But I had to start this story somewhere 🙃

Anyway, then people wonder why eggs hatch poorly, why the chicks die, or why they can’t seem to raise more than a couple birds to maturity.

There are many possible causes, but when these issues keep circling around very scarce and sought-after varieties, we’d be wise to consider inbreeding depression.

The chicken community generally says you can inbreed chickens indefinitely without consequences, but there’s a huge piece of context missing from that advice: successful long-term inbreeding hinges on having a large founder population, enough genetic diversity within those founders, and rigorous selection for reproductive fitness.

However, hundreds of birds from a handful of founders isn’t a diverse population and you can’t select your way back to diversity that no longer exists.

Wanna know how I know?

Because I followed the community’s advice when I first started and I watched more than one line collapse over the course of 2-3 years. I learned the hard way that producing another generation of birds is not the same as maintaining a genetically sustainable population.

So next time you see a rare variety with hatch rates dropping and chicks dying, don’t assume something went wrong in the incubator or brooder. Ask how many founders stand behind those birds and how much genetic diversity those birds actually have to work with.

10/12/2026

My current egg shippers look totally ratchet.

This season I’ve been testing new materials for shipping eggs and I’ve found something that is looking like a winner in my tests, but now it’s time to test it under real shipping conditions.

If you’re receiving eggs from me this fall, please forgive me for how bad the shippers look. I haven’t yet invested in having the material cut so I’m cutting each shipper myself. But give that shipper a squish and tell me it’s not amazing!

Be on the lookout for an email from me about 21 days after you receive your order. If this material significantly improves average hatch rate, I will start having it cut professionally so it no longer looks like it was cut by a kindergartner 🤣

10/11/2026

Ever wonder how wing banding works? I’ll show you how I do it!

10/10/2026

10/10/2026

I received a bad review on Google earlier this year.

⭐️⭐️ Two stars.
“5 star chicks! Sad Scientist Farm has doubled their prices for chicks the past two years. We purchased an Easter Egger for $18 in 2023. Won’t be buying from them again.”

Weird review, but I’ll bite.

First and foremost, I’m struggling to think of anything that hasn’t increased in price since 2023. And this review came in *before* gas prices doubled this year.

Even if my input costs had not increased since 2023, let me explain why the chicks I sold in 2023 are different than the chicks I sold in 2026, even though they look the same from the outside.

In 2023 I was selling birds from lines that were still early in their development. In 2026 I sold birds that represented three additional years of breeding, evaluation, selection, and improvement.

I’m not breeding the same chickens I bred three years ago, literally or figuratively. I’m breeding chickens I’ve improved by every measure I evaluate them for.

That means hatching and growing out significantly more birds than I intend to keep every generation. It means paying to feed and house many birds who will never earn me a dime because they don’t meet my breeding standards. Then I do that all over again the next generation.

Across all of my lines, I have improved egg production, reduced or eliminated broodiness, selected for resilience to hot summers and brutally cold winters, and made progress towards producing birds who are more and more consistent every generation.

If I’m doing my job correctly, the chicks I sell today should be worth more than the chicks I sold three years ago. If they’re not, what have I been doing for the last three years?

And what keeps me going, hauling feed and water to hundreds of birds everyday, whether I’m sick, soaked in sweat, or so cold I can’t feel my face, is knowing that I’ve barely scratched the surface of what these lines can become.