Hi! I was wondering where the best place to buy day old chicks is. I need them to be vaccinated for mareks, healthy, and sexed. Do you have any suggestions? We preferably want a turken or frizzle, but hatcheries that sell other chicks would be great too!
You could try McMurray, Ideal, Cackle, Welp, and other hatcheries.
I have personally ordered from each one I named, and each experience went well (most chicks arrived alive and healthy, most were sexed correctly, and the chicks had most of the traits that are correct for their breed.
You won't get perfection from anywhere, but in general I would expect at least 8 out of 10 chicks to be alive, healthy, correctly sexed, and correct in all major traits. This is a rough average over multiple orders and quite a few chicks. Individual batches could be better or worse, depending on the weather and the breed and the hatchery and what happened to their hatch that week. For "wrong traits," I have seen wrong foot color, wrong comb type, missing muff/beard on a breed that should have it, wrong egg color, things like that. "Not healthy" ranges from dead through weak/sickly to things like crossbeak or having an extra toenail or missing half a toe.
Regarding frizzles: due to how the gene works, only about half of chicks will actually be frizzles, and the other half will have normal feathers. There is no reasonable way for a hatchery to produce 100% frizzle chicks, and when they ship the chicks they can't tell which ones will be the frizzles and which will not. So if you want to have one that actually frizzles, plan on ordering several. You could keep the others as layers too, or rehome them, or eat them.
