The Book of the Hamburgs / A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs

Transcriber Note
By L. FRANK BAUM.
HARTFORD, CONN.:
H. H. STODDARD, Publisher.
1886.
Copyright, 1886, by H. H. Stoddard, Hartford, Conn.
Long before what we now call “fancy fowls” were known or recognized (in fact, long before the memory of any person now living), Hamburgs were kept and bred to feather among the peasants of Yorkshire and Lancashire in England, and by them exhibited at the small town and county fairs in their neighborhood. Of course they were then known under different names, the Blacks being called “Black Pheasant Fowls” and the Spangled varieties “Lancashire Mooneys” and “Yorkshire Pheasants”; while such a variety as the Penciled Hamburgs were either wholly unknown or else were so little thought of that they have left no record of their origin, if, indeed, they are natives of England at all.
Mr. Wright, who has traced these fowls back still further, inclines to the belief that at some period whereof we have no knowledge the Penciled varieties formed a part of the Hamburg family, although our earliest positive knowledge traces them to direct importations from Holland, where they were brought in great numbers, and were originally known under the names of “Dutch Everyday Layers” or “Dutch Everlasting Layers.”
As such a thing as a black or spangled variety of this fowl was utterly unknown in Holland, it is presumable that at some period the penciled varieties were exported to Holland and there bred and cherished, while they were allowed to run out or sink into insignificance in England. We cling to this belief so tenaciously on account of the wonderful similitude which marks the characteristics of the Hamburg family, in spite of the fact that one branch came from Holland and the other is emphatically English. These two branches, namely, the Penciled and the Spangles and Blacks, resemble no other varieties of fowls in the slightest degree, while their common characteristics are the absence of the incubating instinct, clean, slender legs, neat rose combs, small, round and white ear-lobes, and the light, but sweeping and graceful, lines of form which are wholly their own and unapproachable by any other breed of fowls, no matter how fine their symmetry. If this were not enough to stamp them with certainty of having one origin, we mark the fact that spangled chickens are frequently penciled in their first feathers; while, as they mature, the black spangles or moons are often surmounted by a light tip beyond them, thus again approaching the penciled character, while conversely it will be found that if penciled birds be bred too dark the last bar has a strong tendency to become too wide , thus approaching a spangled character.