Backyard Poultry Forum

Some of my Royal Palm patterned birds. Note they dont match the standard for Royal Palm as they are much too heavy!

still they are nice looking birds jason

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fear makes the weak strong

They sure are pretty Andrew
RP is my fav pattern on a turkey

Really nice looking birds.

They are far thicker framed than my royal palms, particularly in the legs, what is the weight range in the standards for royal palms?

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-Tony
Oriental Gamefowl, Turkeys and Ducks

The upper cut off in the standard is 10 kg for males and about 5.5 kg for females.

This is a picture from Porters heritage turkeys website. http://www.porterturkeys.com/royalpalm.htm

I've added the red circle around the wing feathers. The reason is that all the Australian Royal Palms that I've seen are almost white in this region, whereas the USA ones seem to be almost exclusively like this one. Has anyone seen this type in Australia?

I love these turkeys. Thanks for the sharing the pictures.

Are the Royal Palm good layers? Do they ever hatch their own eggs, or is an incubator job?

Thanks
Chad

Mine are not great layers but are good broodies and great mums.

I've just weighed my hens, wormed, permethrin sprayed and put them in pens for breeding. I'm breeding four lines this year. As people may already know the ultimate target is to have Lavender Palms in a utility meat type but with Heritage turkey characteristics. That means the males have to be fit enough to mate naturally. The reason for Lavender in the marking is to have a bird that looks a bit more interesting than a straight white for backyard use and the light colour avoids black feather stubs left on the carcase.

One line has hens that are 7 kg, two with 9 kg and one with 10 kg hens. The young males have been kept in an exercise yard all year and are about 11 to 12 Kg. Thats bigger than the standard for Royal Palms but fits inside with weights for White or Bronze. Since Lavender Palms are not in the standard I figure this is a new type.

So this is what I think is a speckled version of a Royal Palm gobbler. Apparently this gene only occurs in Australia. We seem to be a bit of a Noah's Ark in Australia for rare turkey genes.

Heres a spotty hen of mine.

The gene is also in the UK where the Nebraskan turkey still exists. The old photos of nebraskans seem to show a bird halfway between the spotty sort we have, and the 'painted turkey' variety bred by Daryl Deustcher, whilst the UK nebraskans seem to mostly look like the painted turkey with less flecks of paint and not much like the old US photos at all.

I'd say lots of folks get this spotted gene showing their palms and most probably consider them culls. I think its important to preserve this type of colouration.

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-Tony
Oriental Gamefowl, Turkeys and Ducks

Yes I have hens that look just like that too. I think the Paint colour is spotted on a black background. I used to have a few but I'm concentrating on just the one colour now.

There might be a different variety called paint or painted turkey, but this is the one bred by Daryl Deutscher which is black on white.

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-Tony
Oriental Gamefowl, Turkeys and Ducks

Pic


(Pic from http://www.porterturkeys.com/variouscolorcombos.htm)

This is what my spotted ones were like, they turned up in progeny from a black hen.