This giant lays an enormous number of eggs. With its feathered shanks and cuckoo feather pattern, it's one of our most popular dual-purpose breeds and for good reason!

Malines were created in Belgium in the 1800s through a strategy that seemed to involve breeding a native Belgian chicken, the Flemish Cuckoo, with almost every other large chicken breed that existed in Belgium at the time; breeds like Brahmas, Cochins, and Langshans. The result was a new and improbably large chicken breed with feathered shanks and herringbone-patterned feathers that on a practical level was mostly known for the quality of its meaty carcass. The Malines’ fine attributes were enough to make it a coveted bird for the barnyard –and alas, the dinner table– in the latter half of the 19th Century.

Malines are an excellent bird to add to your flock, with their hardiness and impressive physical appearance. Whether your desire is to raise meat birds, harvest jumbo eggs, or simply watch a strikingly beautiful chicken actively go about its daily business of foraging in the grass, few breeds are better equipped to meet your needs than the Malines.

Appearance and Behavior

Malines are huge and lay tan-colored eggs that are large in both number and size. An adult rooster will typically weigh around 10 pounds and hens may weigh around 8 pounds. There are several color varieties of Malines, but the black cuckoo pattern is the most common. Other varieties included a gold cuckoo and a bareheaded bird. In 2013, Greenfire Farms imported into the United States the black cuckoo variety.

We recommend a rooster to hen ratio of no more than 1:10 as more hens than that per rooster can result in inconsistent or poor viability from the flock. In terms of behavior, the hens are extremely curious and the roosters are protective of the hens. We have had some roosters become human-aggressive however, not all of the roosters exhibit this type of behavior. We are working to only breed the roosters that have calmer dispositions toward humans. The hens are also not very broody, so if you plan to hatch eggs from this breed we recommend that you find a good quality incubator.

Breed Standard

The breed standard for Malines calls for white skin, and the birds imported by Greenfire Farms often meet the standard but occasionally we see a yellow-skinned chick produced in our flock. We have culled for that trait and we only breed white-skinned birds, but we assume the gene for yellow skin is something that could pop up from time to time in the offspring of our birds.

Hatching Eggs

We incubate at 99.5F and 55% humidity and typically we see about a 70% hatch rate from the eggs that are set into the incubator. The most notable defect is inconsistent leg feathering so please check the chicks for that as they hatch.