This docile bantam combines an exceptionally rare color with an exceptionally astonishing pattern to create a one-of-a-kind Wyandotte variety.

The Wyandottes raised by Greenfire Farms have taken a convoluted route to arrive in your coop: They are American chickens with an Indian name that picked up much of their showy genetics in Europe. Wyandottes first appeared in the United States in the 1870s, the product of chicken breeders in New York and Massachusetts. Scholars debate the mix of breeds that gave rise to the Wyandotte, but it is likely that at the Hamburg contributed the neat rose comb that is evident in the breed. The new breed was named after a Northeastern tribe of Native Americans, the Wyandotte Nation.

Fast forward to the 20th Century and we find British poultry geneticists tinkering with the Wyandotte genome. Dr. Clive Carefoot, famously known within poultry circles for exploiting the chocolate color mutation in chickens, was able to introduce the chocolate gene into bantam Wyandottes. Dr. Carefoot produced Wyandottes that were solid brown but beautiful in their own right. Others in Britain exploited the beauty hidden in the chocolate gene to even greater effect, and the chocolate partridge Wyandotte was created. We first saw these birds in Scotland, but it was years before we able to find and acquire breeding stock. As you can see from the pictures below, it was worth the wait for these brilliantly colored bantams.