Coffee Table Book of: Chickens (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Chickens is a large-format coffee table book about chickens, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. Most are breed portraits, set on a plain ground or in the farmyard, the fields and the barn.

It begins with the rooster: a black Sumatra with a long, flowing tail, a Welsummer crowing, a white Leghorn with a tall, deeply serrated comb, the long curved spur on the leg of an Old English Game rooster, and a Rhode Island Red standing alert in a farmyard at first light.

Then the breeds, grouped by their roots in Asia, Europe and the Americas: the soft, fur-like Silkie, the black Ayam Cemani glossed with green, a Phoenix with its white tail streaming far out along a branch, the great white crest of a Polish hen, a gold Sebright with each feather laced in black, Hamburg hens in a row along an oak bough, the bare red neck of the Naked Neck, a Buckeye rooster in autumn corn stubble, and an Araucana with tufts of feathers at its ears.

Then feather and comb: a feather laced all round with black, crisp grey and white barring, a hen pencilled with fine dark rings, a Frizzle with its feathers curling outward like a chrysanthemum’s petals, the tall comb and white earlobes of a Minorca, a comb shaped like two horns in a V, another ringed with points like a crown, and the long red wattles of a Sussex rooster.

Then the chicks: a row of chicks in different colours, one peeping out from under a hen’s wing, one newly hatched and still wet beside the halves of its shell, striped Cream Legbar chicks huddled together, two gangly half-grown birds in patchy young feathers, and a chick asleep in straw.

Toward the end, the year: hens under an apple tree in blossom, hens resting in the shade of a summer hedge, a rooster among fallen autumn leaves, Buff Orpingtons in fresh snow by a red henhouse, a wet hen sheltering under an old cart from the rain, a rooster on a gatepost against the evening sky, and a hen standing on one leg in the snow.

Short notes run through the book. They are about chickens rather than about the pictures: why a Silkie’s plumage stays as loose and soft as fur, which birds set off the craze for breeding and showing poultry known as hen fever, what a Polish chicken’s crest grows from, and how a hen and her chicks begin calling to one another before hatching.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.