Tuesday, July 10, 2007

weird chicken genetic thing

This will probably only interest the chicken people...

I spent the morning sorting birds in preparation for auction this week. That took a few hours. Looks like I'll have around 60 to get rid of (if anyone wants pet birds and can pick them up soon, by all means let me know!) There is this one pullet I noticed a while back that has extremely short legs. She just looks... too close to the ground! I've seen this before in my birds, not often, but a few birds over the years. I can't remember what color variety it's happened in before though. The current bird is a black pullet from the cuckoo breeding pen. It's like all her limbs are short, but her body size is fairly normal. So it's not just that she's a small bird.. hard to explain. I took some photographs with a same-age normal pullet for comparison (short bird on the left):


Her wings are also short but I didn't have enough hands to photograph them.

Her head is different, more round, and her eyes are funny, like there's extra skin around them. Her beak is short and thick.

Normal bird:

Short bird: