[FeatherSite]

FeatherSite - The Poultry Page

An on-line zoological garden of domestic poultry, including photos, video and information about various breeds of fowl, such as chickens, ducks, geese, guinea fowl, peafowl, pigeons, and turkeys. Various wildfowl are also included.

And by my counter, you're visitor number since January 31, 1999!
There were 108,350 visitors between 31 Jan. 1998 and 31 Jan. 1999
and 92,850 visitors in the two previous years (from 31 Jan. 1996 to 31 Jan. 1998).

The Poultry Pages were last updated on 27 October 2009

The Poultry Page is brought to you, in large part, by me, with the generous support of

Muscovies are more than meat!

Important and time-sensitive information for people keeping Muscovy Ducks

Due to the range change of wild Muscovies, which have moved naturally into south Texas, and secondarily due to certain treaties with Mexico and Canada, Muscovy Ducks must now be included under the Migratory Bird act. Thus they will have to be protected under the relevant laws. However, when the Dept. of Interior made the new rulings they were aware of Muscovies as a meat bird, but they were unaware of the number of domestic Muscovies, and their use as showbirds and in backyard flocks. The rulings that were thus set in motion did not include these uses. (Try to understand the problem here: they don't read Backyard Poultry and we don't read the Federal Register, so there was a large, though understandable, communication gap.) However, now they are aware of this and they are making an exception to their normal proceedings and allowing us to make suggestions as to how Muscovies can still be kept as we've been keeping them all these years. Making all this even more complex is the problem of seeing feral Muscovies outside their natural range as an invasive species and working out ways to deal with controlling this.

I'm guessing this also means that those who keep wildfowl and happen to breed wild Muscovy stock will now need a permit, as for Woodies and Canadas and other native species.

All suggestions can be emailed to George T. Allen at George_T_Allen@fws.gov. He is trying very hard to work with us on this, so please send positive suggestions, not complaints.

The law as presently worded can be found here. They are willing to consider this a temporary fix and work with us to get it right. Let's work with them!

The SPPA on Avian Influenza

If you know what you're looking for, you can search for it here. Otherwise, there's a Table of Contents below.

There's a Table of Contents below

Meet the Breeds

An oddly annotated tour of poultry varieties follows.

[A photo of Leroy Brown]
"Leroy Brown," my Gold-laced Polish

I keep all sorts of fancy and not-so-fancy poultry. It's sort of a sample collection for people to see all the different breeds that are available, but mostly just 'cause I love the quilt of colors and shapes moving about the place. There are also a couple of sheep.

This started out as a listing of the birds on my farm, but has evolved into an online poultry encyclopedia.

Help!

There are lots of breeds that I haven't been able to come up with photographs of, or even much information about. I'd like to make this site as complete as possible, so if you have pictures of breeds or varieties that aren't shown here, especially breeds that are not kept in the USA, and you'd be willing to share these with the world, please contact me at FeatherSite -- questions and comments.

A Note on Graphics

The photo images are mine unless otherwise noted. Some of the images are of birds that are, or have been, in my possession. Feel free to use any of MINE for nonprofit purposes as long as credit is given adjacent to the image! Credit must be given both to the photographer and www.feathersite.com. (Note: This means you can use a few for school projects or educational purposes, but you cannot take a whole bunch of images to use on a web page -- I want to be clear about that.) Should you wish to use one for profit, please contact me and we will arrange a contribution to the Feed Fund. Regarding those here "courtesy" of other folks, they are also available for nonprofit uses in the same way, again with credits as above, unless they have a copyright (©) notice -- in which case they can't be used without the owner's permission. If you wish to use one of those (someone else's non-copyright images) for commercial purposes, please contact the photographer (you can do this through me at: FeatherSite -- questions and comments). My "Dancing Victor" logo is ©Paper House Productions.

Awards this page has garnered!

Baby Chicks

Book Store: Books on Poultry

Breed Club Homepages

Broodiness and Broody Hens

Chickens

Coop Plans (links)

Ducks

Eggs -- comparison of chicken with duck, goose, turkey, etc.

Exotics with links to wildfowl sites

Geese

Guinea Fowl

Hatcheries

Health

Hybrids

Incubation & Hatching

Links (to other poultry sites)

Non-domestic Species with links to wildfowl sites

Peafowl

Pigeons

Poultry Equipment Supply Houses

Raising Chicks (including turkey poults, peachicks and guinea keets)

Raising Ducklings and Goslings

Rare Breeds (and poultry conservation societies)

Sex Changes

Showing

Suppliers

Swans

Turkeys

Wing banding

Poultry Glossary: mostly US terminology

All chickens are chickens!!
They all hatch out as chicks.
Young males are cockerels, and become roosters, or cocks, at 1 year of age.
Young females are pullets. At 1 year of age they're called hens.

bantams -- miniature breeds of fowl
large fowl -- well, er, the large breeds of fowl (sometimes called standards, but this term should really be used for birds, large or bantam, that reflect the published standard for their breeds)
chook (rhymes with "book") -- Australian term for a hen, also applied to all chickens, as in "I've a flock of chooks."
broody -- a hen who has laid a clutch of eggs and is now sitting on them full time
comb -- the fleshy red protuberance on the top of a chicken's head
dewlap -- the single flap of skin below the beak of turkeys and some geese
wattles -- the fleshy red things hanging under a chicken's beak

Here's a larger online poultry glossary

Or how about a poem?

A GLOSSARY OF CHICKEN
by
Gary Whitehead

There should be a word for the way
they look with just one eye, neck bent,
for beetle or worm or strewn grain.
"Gleaning," maybe, between "gizzard"
and "grit." And for the way they run
toward someone they trust, their skirts
hiked, their plump bodies wobbling:
"bobbling," let's call it, inserted
after "blowout" and before "bloom."
There should be terms, too, for things
they do not do--like urinate or chew--
but perhaps there already are.
I'd want a word for the way they drink,
head thrown back, throat wriggling,
like an old woman swallowing
a pill; a word beginning with "S,"
coming after "sex feather and before "shank."
And one for the sweetness of hens
but not roosters. We think
that by naming we can understand,
as if the tongue were more than muscle.