Cream Legbar, A Rare Delight

CHRIS GRAHAM introduces a rare British chicken with a friendly disposition – but warns us to beware of imitations

- Chris Graham

FOR anyone involved in breeding chickens, the number of male birds being produced is a key aspect. Unless you’re rearing for the table or specifically for the show pen, then males can be a bit of a problem, if only that they can be noisy and finding new homes for surplus cockerels tends to be struggle.

One problem is that often it’s not possible to sex chicks until they are several months old so keepers incur the cost of rearing birds they may neither want or be able to keep.

Enter the Legbar, one of a range of autosexing breeds developed by Professor R.C. Punnett and M.S. Pease working at Cambridge University. This meant that the gender of day-old chicks could be reliably identified.

The crossing and careful offspring selection of the brown Leghorn with the barred Plymouth Rock produced gold and silver Legbars. When the Araucana was added to the breeding mix, the cream Legbar was born.

Looks aren’t everything

The Legbar, in all its forms, should be a sprightly and alert character; these are birds that are constantly active. But the two aspects that set the cream version apart are its striking, swept-back head crest and the wonderfully coloured eggs it lays.

While the gold and silver versions both produce white or cream-shelled eggs, this one lays eggs with most attractive pale blue, green or olive-coloured shells. This, together with the good number produced overall, is probably the breed’s biggest selling point as far as the back-garden keeper is concerned.

To look at, the cream Legbar isn’t a spectacular bird, but showiness was never the objective. As far as plumage is concerned, the clue really is in the name. In the case of males, the neck hackle feathers should be cream, with sparse grey barring, as should the crest and saddle feathers.