Interesting Inheritance

There are many different genes and mutations that make fancy chickens interesting. Grant Brereton takes a closer look at some quirky ones...

- Grant Brereton

THE BEARDED CHICKEN

It sounds strange doesn't it... a chicken with a beard! Most breeds of chicken aren't bearded, but a select number of them are required to have this unusual feature, which is often referred to as 'muffling'. Such breeds include: the Faverolles, Barbu d'Uccle and British Araucana. In the Silkie breed, a beard is an option, meaning they have a separate breed standard and classes at shows for both bearded and non-bearded Silkies, respectively. In the Poland breed, all colours except the White-Crested varieties are to have beards.

So just what is a beard? It is visually as obvious as it sounds - a bearded chicken has feathers below its beak where you'd normally expect the wattles to be that run through to sometimes beyond the back of the eyes, but not obscuring vision. The bearded mutation is regarded as dominant, so a pure bearded chicken bred to a non-bearded chicken would produce all bearded offspring; though their beards aren't likely to be as fully expressed as their bearded parent.

A problem for bearded varieties can be feather-pecking, especially where the male's beard is a different colour from his pure-breeding females. A case in point would be the Salmon Faverolles, where the beard of the male is primarily black in colour, in marked contrast to the cream-coloured beards of the females. This makes the Salmon male's beard a potential target for feather-pecking, and once the vice begins can be difficult to eradicate. For this reason, people who show bearded varieties tend to be extra careful with whom they let the intended' show birds mingle.

FOWL WITH FIVE TOES