Friday - April 22, 2011

Easter Basket Answers

Adopted on April 14, 1939, the Blue Hen chicken had long been used as a motif in numerous political campaigns and in many publications. During the Revolutionary War, the men of Captain Jonathan Caldwell’s company, recruited in Kent County, took with them game chickens that were said to be of the brood of a famous Blue Hen and were noted for their fighting ability. When not fighting the enemy, the officers and men amused themselves by pitting their Blue Hen chickens in cockfights. The fame of these cockfights spread throughout the army and when in battle, the Delaware men fought so valiantly that they were compared to these fighting cocks.

The University of Delaware names their teams The Fighting Blue Hens. I’ve known that factoid for ages. I never gave it any thought, just assuming it was a cute name. I didn’t even know that Delaware had taken on a domestic fowl as their state bird until today, although I did know that for a very long time chicken farming was big business in that state. But blue chickens? Come on. No such beastie. Animals come in lots of different colors, and some can be specially bred to come in some rather unusual colors, but you don’t get blue much at all. Sure, there is a breed of Siamese cat called a Blue Point, and that some of them have silvery gray fur that is said to be “teal”, but they really aren’t blue. Once you get away from the fish and reptiles, you don’t get much green either. Who ever heard of a green dog? Or a purple cat? Is it even possible?


So I was quite surprised yesterday when I was reading Stoaty’s latest post, in which she and Uncle Badger acquired some new chickens for their backyard farm, and that one of the chickens was blue, although in chickenology this colored bird is called a lavender. Naturally she named the hen Violet.

I know next to nothing about chickens. Why should I? I have heard that white chickens lay white eggs, and that red chickens lay brown eggs, but this could be some chicken shit story told to me, the guy with EPN, Extreme Poultry Naivete. So to answer that childhood Easter basket question, Do blue eggs come from blue chickens?, I looked it up. And the answer is: it’s possible.



The Araucana chicken is “native” to South America, mostly in Chile. It lays blue eggs. This chicken is an ancient crossbreed between a Polynesian chicken that has no tail, called a Collanca (pictured left), and a Quetro, a small regular looking chicken that lays pinkish brown eggs. The Araucana already existed when the Conquistadors showed up, and is one of the main supporting bits of evidence in the anthropological theory that South America was first populated by people crossing the Pacific on rafts, long before those other folks came down from the land bridge up in Alaska during the last Ice Age. You could be a wiseguy and say it’s a big bullet in their chicken gun. A chicken without a tail can’t fly at all, which is a good thing when crossing the Pacific on a raft because it saves you the embarrassment of having to yell “Chicken overboard!”. Araucanas came to the awareness of the outside world (white folks) in the early 20th century and became quite popular for awhile. By chicken fanciers. Whose existence is also news to me. Not being a farmer or ever even knowing anyone who was, it never crossed my mind that there were show chickens and people who were mad about chickens as a hobby. Well, outside of those weird Japanese who raise those chickens with the 10 foot long tails, but come on, the Japanese specialize in weird and I won’t put anything past them. So the Araucana chicken was soon bred with other kinds of chickens, so much so that pure Araucana birds have become hard to find. There is another crossbreed called the Americauna, which is a dreadful pun on “Americana” that can’t be blamed on me. That bird also lays blue eggs, but it has a tail. Many other breeds were crossed with the Araucana and the Collanca, but the crosses don’t lay blue eggs. They lay colored eggs, which tend towards olive green or reddish blue. There is even a somewhat genetically stable bird called an Easter Egg chicken, which is a bit of a catch-all name for any polyglot bird that carries the blue egg gene. They can lay eggs of any color, but rarely if ever lay the pure blue eggs that the Araucana and the Collanca lay.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/22/2011 at 10:29 AM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff •  
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