Blue Slate Turkey Hatching Eggs

We began raising Blue Slate Turkeys in 2019 and our original flock is still active and productive at 7 years old. We love their sweet and curious personalities and beautiful feather colors that range from light to dark blue with and without dark flecks. Any time we have visitors the turkeys are right behind the guardian dogs in greeting them and our Tom loves to show off and puff up his feathers and gobble.

In our experience Turkey eggs are harder to successfully hatch than chicken eggs and also take longer to hatch, a total of 28 days. To be successful with hatching the eggs in an incubator, we’ve found it necessary to really crank up the humidity at lock down while making sure there is plenty of ventilation so the poults don’t drown. Turkey poults are also very fragile when young, and need special attention to make sure they don’t eat things they should not eat, fly into places they get stuck in or otherwise get themselves into trouble. Careful and attentive brooding will help get them through this fragile stage. Once they are grown they are very hardy and rarely even seek shelter, preferring to roost in trees. We do offer our turkeys shelter and occasionally insist they go inside a shelter for the night, for example when it is forecasted to be a long night of freezing rain.

The variety is named for its color, a solid to ashy blue, with or without darker flecks. The hatch colors on Blue Slate Turkeys are slightly different than blue chickens. For example our Blue Silkies and Blue Ameraucanas hatch either solid blue or white with blue spots (they do not hatch black unless one of the parents is black), Blue Slate Turkeys on the other hand, can produce poults that hatch black, blue, blue with black flecks or white with blue markings on the tail. In order to produce black poults, both of the parents must be blue with black flecks. Because our Tom is solid blue with no flecks of black, none of our poults can hatch black. Most of the poults hatched will be solid blue or blue with black flecks but when an egg hatches from our one hen who is also solid blue with no black flecks, there is a chance that poult will be white with blue markings. The grown turkeys’ feathers also fade to a lighter and lighter blue throughout the summer but their original darker blue color will grow back in when they molt in the fall.

Turkeys will automatically be at the top of the pecking order in a mixed species flock with chickens and ducks just because of their size. They can seem to dominate at feeding time, but they don’t eat as much feed as a chicken, relative to their body size. Our Tom also has taken on the role of ending rooster squabbles. If he ever sees two roosters fighting, he gets between them and holds one of his wings out like a shield between them.

Accepted by the American Poultry Association in 1874, blue slate is a heritage breed of poultry that does well on pasture and is said to have superior flavor. The Standard weight for a young tom is 23 pounds and 14 pounds for a young hen. According to the Livestock Conservancy, careful selection for good health, ability to mate naturally, and production attributes will return this variety to its former stature. We have butchered a few of our turkeys’ offspring for Thanksgiving dinners. Though our mature turkeys are as heavy as the standard, they are a slower growing breed. When we butchered young free ranging turkeys, the young male we butchered was 14 pounds and the two females around 5 pounds.

We were captivated by the beauty of the Blue Slate Turkey and hope to help maintain this breed.