five more are coming!

Swedish Flower Hens are becoming a favorite around here. Gentle, kind, quiet, and striking in their appearance, these medium size laying hens from the land of tiny wooden horses are just darling. Five more are coming to live at Cold Antler, a barter with Greenfire Farms down in Florida. So these imports are joining us in the North Country, and I can't wait to get the call from the post office. They always come during the work week to the Arlington Post Office near work. My boss is so used to me heading out at lunch for livestock pickups it no longer even raises an eyebrow. Not a bad trait for a homesteader's manager to have. Not bad at all.

Here's more on Swede's from the Greenfire Farms website:

At 2:35 in the afternoon of June 17, 2010, a jumbo jet from Stockholm landed at JFK airport in New York carrying in its vast metal belly a most unusual cargo: 15 Swedish flower hens. This breed, for more than half a millenium isolated in small villages in Sweden, had made the leap across the Atlantic for the first time as part of Greenfire Farms’ ongoing program of introducing rare chickens to America. Until now, very few people in the world (including most Swedes) have ever had the opportunity to see living examples of this breed, let alone the ability to own and raise them.

Swedish flower hens emerged as a landrace several hundred years ago, the product of a now forgotten mix of primitive breeds that were brought to Sweden by settlers and conquerors. As a landrace, this breed was not intentionally created by a breeder carefully selecting birds as part of a structured breeding program. Rather, this breed was created through natural selection and random pairings as the breed adapted to the climate and conditions of the Sydskånska Plain in southern Sweden...Read the rest at GFF