The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Can chickens and turkeys mate?

Turken chick up close and cute


What do you get when you mate a chicken with a turkey?

You can get a turkey/chicken hybrid, but for some reason they only produce male eggs.

We recently got a turken mixed in with our austalorp eggs, which is not a fancy hybrid, just a breed of chicken that has a neck like a turkey.

I wonder what effect a misfit like this has on the other young chicks in the mother hen mini flock? My guess would be that a little diversity would help and each breed could teach the other some foraging tricks the other might not be aware of.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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Turkeys & Chickens mating
I was under the impression that Turkeys & chickens could not and would not interbreed. I have 10 turkey eggs in the incubator & what is hatching does not look like a turkey. They look more like a Chicken.....a very large chicken, but a chicken none the less. Very similar to the picture shown at the top of this Comment. I house my chickens and Turkeys together & I am wondering if my female turkey is allowing the Auracana mix Rooster to mate her?? The Turkey tom doesn't seem to be interested in her......he has his favorite girl, which is not her. But she is laying and they are fertile, but they do NOT look like turkey poults!
Comment by Berle — Fri Jun 7 12:00:07 2013
Do your research
That is no hybrid that is a pure chicken called a turken or naked necks these are not turkey chicken hybrids at all
Comment by Everett — Sun Mar 25 18:26:40 2018
My turkey mated with my chicken...
I am male turkey mated with my female chicken is that normal? Her eggs are fertilized and we have no males, except for the turkey...
Comment by Krystal Kasper — Tue Feb 12 12:34:17 2019
comment 4
No. Chickens have 6 chromosomes, Turkeys have 9
Comment by Gary — Mon Dec 16 15:20:07 2019
Chicken and turkey
We recently got a pair of turkeys, the Tom is courting the chickens. I checked the last batch of eggs, the are viable. We only have the Tom to care and protect them! Will these eggs hatch? What will be our results, if any
Comment by D cattell — Tue Mar 1 13:05:32 2022
comment 6
They can't produce offspring but they can technically "mate" There's been only like 10-12 studies done and none of them have hatched. They did find out they only produced male eggs or something wild.
Comment by EB — Tue Oct 31 22:39:12 2023
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