Yellow Shoulder Turkeys

Turkeys were not exactly my first choice of animals to keep. I have never been a fan of what is widely sold as turkey meat, and the birds themselves in my opinion were hideously ugly. After a first attempt to hatch goose eggs failed, I tried to obtain more only to find that geese were no longer laying, and acquired some turkey eggs to try instead. I was pleasantly surprised to find turkeys are rather personable animals. They rarely bully each other, unlike chickens and geese, and you can generally mix and match turkeys of different ages without much aggression. The only drawback is a tendency to drown themselves in troughs or any other source of water deep enough they have access to. Traditional turkeys as the centrepiece of a roast dinner are entirely different to the factory birds sold in supermarkets. The appearance is something you just get used to, rather like having Skeksis from The Dark Crystal wandering about the field next to the house. After discovering more about the colour genetics of turkeys, it also developed into a pet project to breed a yellow shoulder type in the UK.


Yellow-shouldered hen 2020, called Po

Our turkeys are the heritage type, not the commercial strain that can't fly or mate normally. Heritage turkeys are considered by many to have better flavour than the commercial type. The carcass has an even distribution of flavourful meat, rather than being a huge pile of dry breast meat on legs.


Yellow-shoulder stags 2020

I'm concentrating on trying to develop the 'yellow shoulder' or 'calico' pattern found on the Ronquieres turkey from Belgium that doesn't seem to have occurred widely, or at least no longer exists today, in native British turkeys. The Ronquieres turkeys are apparently relatively small so I'm aiming to produce something with a bigger carcass from stock available in Britain while preserving the heritage type. The yellow-shoulder pattern was seen historically, as this skilled painting (below) by 18th-century German artist Johann Wenzel Peter shows. Although there isn't a variety of turkeys in the UK that exhibit this coloration, the genetics to make it are available in other varieties and it is possible to deliberately produce them if you know what you're doing (or to serendipitously produce them if you don't!)


In the absence of a current breed standard, I'm using this great illustration!


The first yellow-shoulder stag I bred. This is the same one as behind the gate in the image further up the page, but his son in the foreground has more vivid colours and shows the results of selective breeding