HomeEgg ColorTinted Eggs → Indio Gigante
This legendary breed is the world’s tallest chicken breed that battens the gap between chicken and velociraptor.
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Indio Gigante Day-Old Chick Unsexed69.00
Indio Gigante Eggs18.00Sold Out




The Indio Gigante is a Brazillian, hard feathered chicken breed. This means their feathers are held closely to their body and they only have a little fluff, or down, under their feathers. This gives them a lean and narrow appearance. In Brazil, these birds are measured in a fully prone position with their necks and legs stretched along a measuring board. With the help of their enormous outstretched feet roosters routinely clock lengths in excess of 36”, and some substantially more. We enjoy watching our pack of pocket velociraptors foraging in large field pens, and you’ll amaze yourself and your friends when you display these remarkable birds.

Appearance and Behavior

This breed has the long torso and neck typical of the Malayoid breeds, but in achieving its unique height it has the added benefit of ridiculously long legs and huge feet. The height measurement is gathered by measuring from the tip of the toenail on the middle toe to the tip of the bird's beak. While the roosters can easily reach heights of 36" the hens will typically measure in at reaching 30". Cue the Jurassic Park intro soundtrack...or should we say "Jurassic Peck"?

The hens are all about nestbox drama. No matter how many nestboxes you offer, the hens tend to select one or two as their favorite. Sometimes that means you will find several hens all piled on one another in one nestbox. How they all fit into that nestbox is a mystery, but the hens say "Challenge accepted!". We have seen that while one hen is waiting for her turn in the favorite nestbox, she will lay her egg while standing on the nestbox perch. Sort of like, she just couldn't hold it in anymore. This makes for a not-so-efficient egg-collecting routine. We use regular-sized nestboxes and we don't think that you need to go out of your way to purchase or make extra large-sized nestboxes as the common nestbox will suffice. The hens will lay about 200 large-sized, tinted eggs per year on average. The hens continue to lay fairly well year after year. We have hens that are reaching 4 years old and lay about 3 eggs per week.

Even though these birds are huge, they tend to be fairly calm. We haven't found the roosters to be human aggressive, except for one rooster which we did not use for breeding. The birds are very curious and love to explore. Here are a couple of examples for you. If we enter the pen, we now expect to be immediately surrounded. They will be right under our feet as we are trying to walk around their pen. Since we give out treats from time to time, they now expect to be given treats every time we enter their pen. Also, when we do have the opportunity to let them out of their pen for the afternoon, they scatter. We've had some jump into our farm vehicles, explore the shelves in our garage, and find the best sandy spot to take a dust bath...even if that spot is right in the middle of our dirt road. It is safe to say, you will not be bored if you add this bird to your flock!

We have had great results with a rooster-to-hen ratio of about 1:8. The fertility of the breed is higher than originally expected and typically we see viability results of 80% or greater.

Bird Integrations

We often are asked how the hens and roosters do when introduced to an existing flock. The short answer is yes, you can add a Gigante hen or rooster to an existing flock and yes, they can do well in a mixed breed flock. Typically, the hens are fairly simple to introduce. Not much to elaborate on, it's pretty straightforward forward and normally there are no issues. You should expect the roosters to fight some upon meeting new roosters as they need to establish a new hierarchy. This will be the case with any new addition, no matter the breed. We haven't noticed the Indio Gigante roosters being overly aggressive when meeting new roosters, however, the flock dynamic should always be considered - how much space do the birds have, how many hens are with the roosters, what is the age of the birds you are trying to integrate, etc... We haven't had issues with having the Indio Gigante cockerels or roosters in our grow out pens, once they work out the hierarchy the birds coexist fine. We've even had the Gigante in a pen with bantam roosters and they coexisted peacefully. If you do experience a bad integration attempt, you will need to remove the new bird, make some changes to the pen setup or flock dynamic, and try again once the birds have had time to recover and rest. We are happy to answer specific flock dynamic questions if you are concerned about integrating your birds.

Hatching Eggs

We incubate at 99.5F and 55% humidity. Typically the average hatch rate from eggs that have been set into our hatcher is about 80%. After the chicks have hatched you will notice a variety of color patterns. The most common patterns are: yellow, yellow with orange, brown with a stripe down the chick's back, and red with brown and yellow. But other colors may be observed as well. We recommend that you thoroughly check the chick's combs. Ideally, the comb should be flat and wide on the day of their hatch. If you notice any combs that are single-ridged, we recommend culling them. This breed is also clean-legged, so check thoroughly for that as well.

Notes

According to the Brazillian Association of Indio Gigante Breeders, this breed is expected to achieve recognition soon as the first Brazillian pure-breed chicken.

Since they are hard-feathered, they don't tolerate harsh winters well, so if you live in a place with harsh winters you should expect to take extra steps to make sure the birds are safe.
Egg Color tinted
Egg Size Large
Average number of eggs per year 160 - 250
Gamefowl no
Country of Origin Brazil
Cold tolerant no
Year of import(s) 2019