The first few eggs of the 2026 season have been laid by Corona!

We are not letting Corona hatch her own eggs, but they'll hopefully be replaced by eggs from Earl, Heather, and Wendy. This will mean a second year of hatching from them, and will hopefully give us some more hens compared to last year- 14 males and only 5 hens! Maybe we can do it the other way around this year....

We finally placed our second-to-last mouse line (the blue tricolors) with Brandi Rowley, one of the two folks running the Jackson Reptile Expo. She will be continuing the line and hopefully be able to offer texels after she's cleaned them up! This leaves me with ONLY the self black line, my favorite line. The mice from this line are large, calm, and strong, and the does tend to have large litters, perfect for making selections from, and giving the peafowl some treat variety.

We also acquired some Otala lactea snails from the local reptile expo! I am looking forward to seeing if they will make more of themselves.

The quail are doing well! We just hatched the first of the EE line celadons, with a large hatch due at the end of the week! Two more steps (one breeding and one testing phase!) and we'll have clean wild feather, wild pattern homozygous celadons!!

The incubator is running full steam ahead, with over 100 babies already hatched out! Most of them have gone to the freezer for feeder animals, but we have some in the brooder and even some out to new homes already!

This year is going to be really important for the farm. I'm finally wrapping up my wild type celadon project (I have all the girls, and I'm two steps from having the males!), which involved combining quail from six different bloodlines in five different states into one diverse, clean line of wild-feathered birds. These birds will be easily feather-sexable and lay a beautiful blue egg. Once I have them established, I intend to spend a little time quality-checking the eggs and birds, and then I'll be using them to clean out at least three other colors in celadon- fee, roux, and fawn. I may also create a sparkly fawn and roux fee celadon line. Once the rest are doing well, I intend to clean out my original celadon line to produce SLB-free tibetan celadons.

It's going to be a lot of work, but thankfully a lot of it can be done concurrently once I have the wild type celadon males. I will be selling project birds off and on all summer, but will hopefully be able to offer the wild types by midsummer.

Outside of the quail, the European violet ladies are growing out and I'll be repeating the breeding of Earl x Wendy/Heather again this year to produce a few more EV hens.

For the first time, I had enough extra plain-blue males to take them in for processing, and I'll be trying my first peacock for dinner in a few days! I'm pretty excited about it; while I have given a couple of temperament culls to others over my 16 years of breeding, I've never kept one for myself. So, hopefully it will be yummy!

Well, the end of 2025 kind of sucked. We lost Aurora (cancer) and Arcana (aspergillosis) one after the other. Aurora was one of my founding birds, purchased the first year I ever owned peafowl, and she's been a real cornerstone of our farm for its entire existence.

On the brighter side of things, we did welcome Jasper and Beryl to the farm from Irish Springs Peafowl. They've been our sister farm for years, and these two are from a collaboration of our breeders- Their Indie and my Eclipse and Arcana. I like to think that one of them is Arcana's kid. They are also siblings to the two ladies I brought home in 2024, who are simply gorgeous and have great personalities.

The downscaling of the mousery finally wrapped up, leaving me with just a couple maintenance cages. I'm looking forward to taking this break, and I already feel the relief from having most of the mousery off my plate. I kept just my two favorite lines- the self blacks and the blue tricolors. I did keep a couple of blue tricolor texels, so I am hoping to combine that with my SH and better both into one line.

The lucorum snails got a major upgrade, moving from a 29g tall to a 36g long. They have a big display tank in my front room so I get to see them more often, and I've added some Mourning Geckos to their cage to help control the isopod population a little. This does mean I'm making flightless fruit fly cultures now! But that's kind of fun, too!

As of writing this, I just yesterday fully cleaned and turned on the cabinet incubator for the year, and placed the first hatching eggs in from our RE quail line. I only need one single roux male from that cage, so I've got my fingers and toes crossed I get at least a little development and a few chicks. With this bitter cold weather, there's every possibility that the eggs get too cold to develop at all, despite that the birds are certainly going at it now that I've turned their lights back up!

All in all, I am looking forward to a good 2026!

Starting October 7th, I will begin reducing my mouse colony with the aim to eliminate that portion of our farm. It's been a great 15 years, but between leaving my job at the University, and starting up with breeding quail more heavily, the mice have sort of fallen to the wayside.

Some of our breeders will be relocated to Stygian Exotics, a friend of mine who also breeds, though mainly as feeders. I've been putting out feelers for other breeders locally who might want to take portions of (or entire) lines, in order to preserve and continue them. The rest of the does will be cleared of pregnancies, and then adopted out to homes.

I have been trucking right along on my wild type celadon project!

This project started back in 2021, when I first ordered celadon hatching eggs from a 100% line. The birds that hatched were... unwell. BAD quality eggs, bad quality birds. I would spend the next 2 years carving off the bad traits, to forge a better line of healthier birds with better eggs- better size, better shell quality, better color, better everything. I eventually got to a point where I needed some outside information, as I had done everything I knew to do as a breeder in general. I now had a solid line of homozygous EB celadons, with the Roux, Fee, and White-wing Pied genes floating around in it, all laying large, solidly blue eggs.

But I HATED the fact that it took so long to sex them. I was struggling with the advancement of a jumbo line due to not being able to choose breeders at the right time.

So, in the spring of 2023, I ventured into the online community to look for information about making them into wild type feathered birds, which would allow me to sex them much sooner. Surely it would be an easy task! Just find someone who already has the wild type, and cross those into the CE birds, and weed the wild egg color back out!

I was WRONG. I was so dead wrong. I could not find anyone that had a wild type line. PLENTY of sex-linked brown jumbos, but no one with a solid wild type line. And forget a wild type celadon line. I found ONE person in california with feather sexable celadons, but she wouldn't ship eggs. Luckily, I had a friend in her area that picked up eggs for me, raised a generation to have a look at the birds, and eventually shipped me a couple of dozen to aid in the project.

But, before that, I purchased 60 SLB jumbo hatching eggs, hatched 62 of the 70 that arrived, slimmed the groups down into 2 breeding groups, and continued the hunt for any wild types. I finally found a breeder in Wisconsin in 2024, and made the 7 hours drive out to pick out 4 SLB het Roux boys (the breeder only had males available). Upon seeing them in person, I had serious doubts that they were actually wild type, as they looked identical to my SLB at home. But, the breeder was well-known, and I had come a long way. So, I took them home, and set up a project to get some girls from them.

While that was going, I found another well-known breeder was finishing up testing for her wild type line! I ordered 2 dozen eggs through a friend, in order to compare between these birds and the birds from the Wisconsin breeder. And Reader, let me tell you- there was no comparison. The two birds look starkly different. The new TN birds were very clear wild types.

By the time those new WT eggs were ready, I had used the het roux males from Wisconsin to pair to a group of CE hens from my EB line. This gave me my CEX jumbo line (all het EB roux birds, het for ce). The CEX breeders produced a large group of roux pharaoh birds, and a quarter of those hens lay blue. It's only about 3% of their total offspring, but I hatched hundreds and hundreds of eggs from the CEX birds, to get a group of roux pharaoh celadon hens to use for this project.

The roux hens are now under a pharaoh male from the California group. I do think that the cali birds could be wild types, or at least some of them are, but I don't trust the lineage enough to bet the farm on it, so I am crossing them to a roux pharaoh celadon hen group, and will breed back a male offspring from that breeding to get a roux pharaoh celadon male. From there, I will use the WT celadon hens I have gotten already from crossing the WT het CE male from the TN breeder (who included 2 celadon eggs, as her WT project did still have CE in it, the project was for WT feathering only). The Roux CE male over WT CE hens should give me WT het CE males, which I can then put back over WT CE hens to get some clean wild type celadon males. I will have to do some test breeding from there to see which ones actually are WT and which ones are het roux, but that is simply tedious, not hard.

Once I have the clean wild type feathered celadon birds, I will be able to use them to make the single-color lines I want: clean fee celadons, clean roux fee celadons, and clean fawn celadons. It will also be easier to make these lines jumbos, once they are created.

Here's one of the current het Fawn celadon males, who is almost certainly SLB. I'm hoping to clean the SLB out relatively quickly!

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