Standard
Varieties of Chickens:
Comments on the Internet Version
The original version of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture Farmer's Bulletin No. 51 was published
in February 1897. This 100+ year old paper
gives the reader a chance to get acquainted with
dozens of both common and unfamiliar breeds of
poultry.
The text and drawings are taken directly
from the original Bulletin, but some changes
have been made to the original to make it more
accessible to the American and international
student.
First, all American system weights and measures
(inches, pounds, etc.) have been updated to
include their metric (SI) equivalents. The
metric units follow the original American units and are
surrounded by parenthesis. This should give the
international reader a better grasp of the sizes of
these birds, and should help familiarize American
students with the metric system.
Second, each image is hyperlinked to a higher
resolution copy of the same image. These images are
often large (on the order of hundreds of kilobytes),
but give much greater detail.
Third, color drawings or pictures of the breeds
described have been added when available. Since
these color drawings were not part of the original,
they are placed at the bottom of the individual
documents and their sources have been
documented.
Due to this document's age, some of the information
may be out of date. New breeds of animals have been
created over the years to fill specific needs and
purposes, and to emphasize certain traits over
others. Obviously these newer breeds would not be
mentioned in an bulletin of this age.
Some of the classes of poultry described -
specifically the Game classes - were bred for the
sport of cock fighting. This sport has been banned
within many of the United States and in several countries
for years. These fowl are raised today primarily by
poultry fanciers.
Finally, two excellent web sites external to the
Chickscope project describe modern breeds of fowl -
including turkeys, geese, ducks, and ratites. The
Oklahoma State University's Department of Animal
Science sponsors the Breeds
of Poultry page, which details many domestic
and barnyard fowl. The FeatherSite poultry page contains hundreds of photos and descriptions of all manner of fowl, domesticated and undomesticated.
We at the Chickscope project hope you enjoy this
paper and find it useful in discovering the
fascinating diversity of poultry around the
world.
Daniel
E. Weber
09 April 1998
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