Help, feather plucking and eating

another thing to try to stop feather plucking is Ukadex which I know Grannie Annie used with her turkeys as they can be very bad for feather plucking.
My bluebell was a very friendly girl as was my blackrock (another first x hybrid). However my amberlinks (again a first x) were awful - very aggressive towards black coloured birds.

 You forgot my favorite breed, the Naked Neck. If you do research on the breed be sure to search Naked Neck Chickens, if you just type in Naked Necks there are sites that pop up that will make your eyes melt. LOL  The NNs along with Egyptian Fayoumi and the Frizzles all have a natural resistance to disease and the NNs have excellent heat and cold tolerance.  Many times when doing research on other breeds the NNs are used as the control group because the breed is so predictable.

 Here in Oklahoma it can get as cold as -20F in the winter without wind chill figured in and in the summer it has bumped 120F pretty hard at times. Our NNs did very well through all temp extremes. The hens will go broody but they are easy to break up, just take the eggs. I have yet to have a NN rooster flog me and we have kept the breed for close to 20 years now, they dress out as a pretty table bird since they have about half of the feather follicles as other breeds but they do take a little longer to get to butcher weight. The size of eggs will surprise you as well as most of ours would grade out large and they have that beautiful brown tint. Toss a bit of Alfalfa meal in their feed and the yolk gets to be a very dark orange even under the artificial light of winter.