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    The Illustrated Guide to Chickens: How to Choose Them, How to Keep Them
    The Illustrated Guide to Chickens: How to Choose Them, How to Keep Them
    The Illustrated Guide to Chickens: How to Choose Them, How to Keep Them
    Ebook447 pages1 hour

    The Illustrated Guide to Chickens: How to Choose Them, How to Keep Them

    By Celia Lewis and HRH The Prince Charles, Prince of Wales

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    About this ebook

    Chickens are fun, useful, and easy to keep. If you have ever considered raising your own backyard flock, The Illustrated Guide to Chickens is the book for you! It offers practical advice and contains all the information you need to choose from one of the 100 most familiar breeds of chicken in North America and Europe to raise. Each breed’s profile is written in engaging text that covers its history and main characteristics. You’ll also find practical advice about poultry rearing and husbandry and the pros and cons of pure breeds, hybrids, bantams, game foul, and the like.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateSep 1, 2011
    ISBN9781628731026
    The Illustrated Guide to Chickens: How to Choose Them, How to Keep Them
    Author

    Celia Lewis

    Celia Lewis is an accomplished artist and the author of the bestselling Illustrated Guide to Chickens, Illustrated Guide to Pigs and Illustrated Guide to Ducks and Geese and Other Domestic Fowl as well as the wonderful An Illustrated Country Year. Celia started her art career studying life and portrait charcoal drawing with Signorina Simi in Florence. She is now a member of a dynamic art group and several art societies in Surrey where she lives. She has won several prizes including the 2005 Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour (RI) medal and Royal Watercolour Society (RWS) Winsor & Newton Prize 2009. Living in the country Celia is lucky enough to be able to keep hens and pigs in her garden and, along with nearby cows and sheep, this is where she finds her inspiration. Although working mainly in watercolour she has now branched out into acrylics.

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    • 5/5
      Even if you have no plans to keep chickens, the lovely watercolor illustrations on every page will bring delighted enjoyment of this little book. If you do plan to keep a backyard flock, then you will find good information here, including temperament and nature so that you can decide which variety is right for you. The book is small; about 61/2 inches by 8 inches and has a sturdy soft cover so it's easy to pick up and lose yourself in the interesting world of domestic chickens.

    Book preview

    The Illustrated Guide to Chickens - Celia Lewis

    CLARENCE HOUSE

    As Patron of both the Rare Breeds Survival Trust and the Poultry Club of Great Britain, I could not be more pleased to have been invited to contribute the foreword to this beautiful book, An Illustrated Guide to Chickens.

    My family's interest in poultry goes back to my Great Great Great Grandmother, Queen Victoria, who was presented with a flock of the first Brahmas ever seen in this country. I understand their great size caused quite a stir! My Grandmother, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, kept Buff Orpingtons and was enormously proud of her Patronage of the Buff Orpington Society. In my own case, ever since I was a child and used to collect eggs from the farm at Windsor, I have had an interest in chickens and have continued the family tradition at Highgrove with both Marans and Welsummers.

    It is a mark of the times in which we live that some fifty breeds of chicken are now endangered and I hope and pray that this book, which is filled with practical information on keeping birds, will draw attention to their plight and encourage existing and new breeders to play their part in rebuilding their numbers.

    Introduction

    Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Science has now come up with an answer to this riddle. It seems that all new species develop from a genetic mutation; if this is successful for survival then the new genes are passed on to following generations and a new species is born. The first chicken was a mutation of its avian parents and its life began in the egg before it hatched. So it was the egg that came first and hatched into what eventually became the Red Junglefowl or Gallus gallus of Southeast Asia, one of four distinct wildfowl, which is thought to be the ancestor of all domestic fowl.

    There are historical references to some kind of domestic fowl as far back as 3000 BC, and by 1400 BC the Chinese and Egyptians had invented crude incubators from clay that hatched vast numbers of chicks at a time. Alexander the Great is credited with introducing chickens to Europe around 500 BC and the Romans continued to spread them far and wide. At first they were raised more for cockfighting than anything else, a sport that was popular worldwide.

    Cockfighting is a fight between two cockerels whose natural aggression causes them to fight to the death, either using their own natural spurs or, more commonly, with razor-sharp blades known as cockspurs or gaffs attached to their legs. The fight only ends when one bird is killed or is too tired to continue, and in many cases the victor is so severely injured that it dies as well. Cockfighting is now illegal in the USA, the UK and most of Europe.

    Eventually poultry reached Britain, probably introduced by the Romans, though it is possible they had already arrived by other means, and were eventually introduced to the New World. The conquistadors found poultry already established in South America, probably brought by Polynesian traders when they arrived in the early 15th century. They soon spread north and were added to by the French settlers in Canada and colonists from England.

    Nowadays there are literally hundreds of breeds of chickens all over the world. The following pages will give you an insight and hopefully help you make a selection.

    Chickens are a joy to keep; they are adaptable creatures and whether you are lucky enough to be able to let them free range or have to keep them in a coop, there will be a breed to suit you. There can be little that compares with the sight and sound of a magnificent cockerel or mother hen with her 12 little troopers following obediently in her wake. They will eat up all your leftovers and turn them into delicious, nourishing eggs—finding your first new-laid one will be a thrill and collecting them daily will remain a pleasure.

    Sadly many of the older breeds are now in danger of extinction, but some stock does still remain and it is within anyone's power to help preserve them. The rarer the breed the more you will be able to ask for any surplus stock if you wish to sell some, but equally they may be difficult to rear—which, indeed, is why they are suffering in the first place.

    Choosing the right chickens

    Having decided hens are for you, your next decisions will be hybrids or pure bred, large fowl or bantam? Do you want eggs or meat? Are they for show? Nearly all breeds of hen have a bantam equivalent; there are also several breeds that are pure bantam with no large version. Bantams make delightful pets and can become very tame—and they obviously need less space than their larger cousins. Most breeds will go broody frequently, making very good mothers, but they do lay very small eggs.

    Adult hen

    Pullet

    Bantam

    A hybrid is a cross of two or more breeds that have been carefully selected to produce birds with prolific egg-laying tendencies. There are many well-known hybrids and there will be a breeder near you that stocks one or more. A hybrid will be the most economic egg-producing machine, so if you don't want chicks or a cockerel then these are for you as they very rarely go broody and would not breed true.

    Pure breeds won't lay quite as many eggs as hybrids and some will tend to go broody, but you will be able to breed from them. It can be very rewarding to keep a rare breed and help preserve a species. Pure breeds come in an amazing array of colors, characters, shapes and sizes, some being better layers than others, some producing better carcasses, and some just looking extraordinary.

    Yamato-Gunkei

    Thüringian

    Transylvanian Naked Neck

    Pure breeds are broken down into soft feather and hard feather. The soft feather again comes in large, small, and bantam—these are predominantly layers, though some are termed dual purpose if they produce a good meaty carcass as well. The Mediterranean breeds, such as Ancona or Leghorn, tend not to go broody, have white earlobes, and lay good numbers of white eggs. Asian soft feather are characteristically large with fluffy feathers and feathery legs, such as Brahma, Cochin, and Langshan. The Asian gamefowl all have hard, tight feathering, are aggressive (as they were developed to fight), and tend to go broody frequently while laying few eggs—this is not to say they are unpopular, as even though cockfighting has been banned since 1849, there is plenty of competition in showing and these birds have strong and charming characters that endear them to their owners. It must be borne in mind, however, that they have been bred as fighting birds and this they will do. They can only be kept in pairs or trios and no new birds can be introduced as they will simply not be accepted.

    How the book works

    Over the following pages, 100 breeds of chicken are described, with illustrations. All individual breeds have different character strains within them, so please note that the descriptions given are a guide only and where a hen is described perhaps as being flighty, this will be the general characteristic of that breed; certain lines of the same breed may be calm, but they will be the minority.

    The illustrations are typical types of each breed, but if you are thinking of showing your birds, then you should consult your country's breed standard (see below).

    TYPE: whether the breed is suitable for laying eggs—layer—or will lay few eggs but produce a fine carcass—table. It may lay plenty of eggs and also produce a good carcass, known as dual purpose, or could be purely ornamental.

    CLASS: game birds and Asian gamefowl are classed as hard feather, which means they have short feathers so tight to their bodies that in some cases the skin shows through. Soft feather, where the plumage is looser and fluffier, comes in two sizes, light and heavy—light being mainly birds of Mediterranean origin that are excellent layers, and heavy those larger breeds that are frequently dual purpose. True bantams are birds that have no large equivalent—most large breeds having a bantam equivalent.

    ORIGIN: where the breed first originated.

    EGG COLOR: which color or colors of egg are produced by the breed.

    STATUS: whether the breed is common, fairly common, or rare. In this context, rare means probably fewer than 500 breeding females in existence—in some cases considerably less than that.

    COMB TYPE: breed found with one

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