Pekin Bantam Chicken
The most popular type of Bantam is the Pekin Bantam. They are very friendly hens who are great with children with their smaller size making them much easier to manage*.
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Pekins come in many different colours including: Lavender, blue, silver partridge, red partridge, blue mottled, Columbian, cuckoo, mottled, buff, black, white and wheaten.
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*Bantam cockerels can be quite aggressive and should be kept away from younger children.
Pekin Bantams can get extremely broody and whilst this does make them great mothers and comes in handy for breeders trying to hatch eggs, it does pose a problem to the health of the hen.
They will gather up every egg they can find and sit on them until they hatch, if there are no cockerels in your flock then the eggs will never hatch so the hen should be dissuaded from doing this by making sure all eggs are removed each day and getting as much daylight into the nesting area as possible.
Pekin Bantams will happily live with any other breed of chicken but care must be taken when first introducing them.
All new chickens squabble to enforce the social hierarchy but as the Pekin hens are so much smaller they are at a massive disadvantage when it comes to defending themselves.
Pekin Bantams are the Jack Russel of the chicken world, although half the size they will still pick fights with much larger birds and will inevitably loose, because of this it does take them longer to integrate into a flock than standard hens. They are also louder then standard size hens and will often issue an alarm call if something worries them.