Katherine Reece Wrote:
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> Not that I can tell !! .... I'd love to know
> more about the blue egg chickens in Europe though!
>
> Kat
>

All I've got on that is the mention of a (Spanish?) historian named Cabot, who described a Spanish breed laying blue eggs in 1526..... and some uncited references and poorly translated articles on Hungarian/etc chickens (for some reason, Magyar is NOT a language for which online translation is available) that really make it sound like the latter had blue egg laying types among them. There used to be an English mirror of one of the Hungarian chicken websites, but it fell offline perhaps a year ago.

Mind you, the vast majority (90%?) of the European Poultry genepool has been lost during the last century, so they may no longer exist. White (and to a lesser extent, brown) eggs had social/commercial appeal, and offtypes were gradually abandoned by commercial poultry raisers. "Improved" American (U.S.) poultry breeds were also imported & crowded out most of the traditional meat/egg breeds.

Likewise, the world wars did a lot of damage.... one scientific article on Hungarian poultry germplasm said that WWII almost entirely wiped out the traditional Hungarian strains..... they'd have lost it all save that one dedicated researcher went hunting (with govt money) and managed to scrounge up one chicken here, two elsewhere, and so on until he had the makings of 1-2 small-to-medium flocks for "most" of the original breeds. They managed to save the Transylvanian naked neck chicken (sometimes called a "Turken", looking like a Turkey-Chicken cross!) & most of the Hungarian Frizzle breeds this way (mostly Asian chicken ancestry in these, dating back to the 9th century).

Heh, even the U.S. has lost most of it's old breeds (via "modernization"). I know some people in the heirloom poultry business (I can give you contact info if you ever want to grow heirloom poultry.... they're up in Iowa). Funnily enough, certain of these have survived in Asia (as cockfighting breeds, or as parental strains used to produce certain types of cockfighting hybrids) while they died out in the U.S.

Kenuchelover.