~Mille Fleur~
(French for "multitude of flowers)
One of the Belgian true bantams, the bearded and booted Mille Fleur d'Uccle is one of the prettiest of fowl. The d'Uccles also occur in other color varieties, such as Porcelain, Black Mottled, Self Blue (self means solidly; one color), and Blue Mille Fleur. The Mille Fleur pattern consists of a ground color of mahogany, with each feather marked with a crescent shaped bar of black and tipped with a V-shaped white spangle. The true coloring does not usually appear until the first adult molt. The Porcelains are patterned the same way, but the ground colour is straw, and the barring blue with a white tip. In French, Mille Fleur means "multitude of flowers" and refers to the colorful feather patterns.
As a breed, they rank within the top 16 breeds for popularity out of the 58 breeds recognized by the ABA.
As a whole they are quite tame, non flighty, and generally quite except for the occasional crow of the cock (rooster). The hens are fair layers of beige colored eggs. Maturity usually begins in 5-6 months after hatching. The hens will set and raise a brood a year if you let them. In the 1997 11 hens set and raised broods from a flock of 14 hens. A total of 75 chicks were hatched for a hen average of 7.4 chicks per hen.
If you are hatching your own chicks --RELAX--. They will hatch out with different color patterns that look nothing like their parents. And they will have several different color patterns as they grow. But by the time they get their adult feathers, they will resemble the parents. In fact the color pattern generally improves with age.
