Porter's Rare Heritage Turkeys

The Royal Palm is a strikingly attractive and small sized turkey variety.They are white with a sharply contrasting,metallic black edging on the feathers. The saddle is black and the tail is pure white with each feather having a band of black and an edge of white. The coverts are white with a band of black, and the wings are white with a narrow edge of black on each feather. The breast is white with the exposed portion of each feather ending in a band of black to form a contrast of black and white similar to the scales of a fish. The turkeys have deep pink shanks and toes, light brown eyes, and black beards.

The first known bird in America to have the Royal Palm color pattern appeared in a mixed flock of Black, Bronze, Narragansett and Wild turkeys on the farm of Enoch Carson of Lake Worth, Florida in the 1920's.

This bird was a tom and he bred it to off-colored bronze (actually Blackwinged bronze) hens from similiar crosses. He got BWB toms and RP hens. He took the RP colored F1 hens and mated back to their sire, the original RP tom, to develop the first large flock of true breeding Royal Palms. Others soon followed suit.

My line of royal palms are strictly black and white like the standard calls for.

I have seen many so-called pure royal palms from hatcheries that had a light reddish tint to them or ended up looking like calicos, which is a fault.

 Any birds that show this off-color in them are genetically a tricolor and should not be used in a breeding program of pure royal palms.

Poult color/pattern at hatch is yellow downed with or without a single black strip going down it's back.

 ( Standard adult weights: toms - 22 pounds, hens - 12 pounds.

Homozygous recessive genotype: (b'b' cgcg ngng) Black winged bronze base with gray and narragansett genes. True breeding.

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