Saddle feathers, wing bows, muffs, ear tufts, beards, feather stubs, pin feathers, angel wings..
Chicken breeders and those who show chickens use quite a bit of specialized terminology when referring to specific parts of the plumage, especially when talking about defects.
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Knowing what the different types of feathers are called is helpful when reading a breed’s standard of perfection as laid out by the American Poultry Association.
This article will explain the meaning of some commonly used — but rarely defined — terms describing various aspects of the chicken plumage.
What Are Saddle Feathers On A Chicken?
A chicken’s saddle feathers are those feathers at the base of the back or start of the tail.
They’re sometimes also called the saddle hackle (as opposed to the neck hackle).
The shape and length of saddle feathers are useful for determining whether young chickens are male or female.
The saddle feathers will be pointed on a cockerel and will start to grow long and drape down from the back on either side of the tail.
A pullet, on the other hand, will have saddle feathers that are shorter, fatter and more rounded.
Just to confuse things, males can be “hen feathered” which means they have oval instead of pointed feathers in the saddle as well as the hackle, wing bow and sickle.
Sickle feathers are the dramatic long, curved and sweeping feathers of a rooster’s tail.
Where Is A Chicken’s Wing Bow?
The wing bow on a chicken is located on the shoulder or bend of the wing.
Wing bow refers to the distinctively colored feathers, also known as the lesser coverts.
Moving away from the bird’s body, the first part of the wing is known as the shoulder butt or scapula.
The wing bow comes next, followed by the wing bar which is a band of color across the wing, also called the speculum or the lower wing coverts.
Wing bay is different again to wing bow and wing bar, referring to the triangular section of wing, below the wing bar, formed by the portion of the secondary feathers that are exposed when the wing is folded.
The feathers known as the primaries and secondaries form the outermost part of the wing, with a single feather called the axial feather between them.
The 10 primary feathers are the main ones involved in flight and the ones trimmed during wing clipping.
Lack of an axial feather is the defect known as “split wing”, a condition that looks the way it sounds.
What Is An Ear Tuft On A Chicken?
Ear tufts, not to be confused with ear muffs, are a kind of feather unique to the Araucana chicken.
Tufts are feathery protuberances that grow from a flap of skin by the ear called the peduncle.
Controlled by the ear tuft gene (Et), this trait is caused by a dominant gene that is also what’s known as a lethal gene.
Lethal genes can prevent development or cause the death of an organism.
In the case of the ear tuft gene, chicks that are homozygous for ear tufts (have two copies of the Et gene) usually die in the final days of incubation.
A few homozygotes hatch but most of those die within a week.
Even chicks with just one copy of the Et gene experience increased embryonic and post-hatch mortality.
The Ameraucana reflects American breeders’ attempt to create a version of the Araucana that was free of this lethal gene.
In the Ameraucana, ear tufts are replaced with ear muffs and beard.
What Is A Muff On A Chicken?
A muff is the (exceptionally cute) fringe of longer, fluffy feathers beneath the eyes and on the cheeks of some chickens.
Examples of chicken breeds that have muffs include:
- Polish
- Araucana
- Ameraucana
Olive eggers are a crossbreed that often have muffs due to the blue egged parent frequently being an Araucana.
Why Does My Chicken Have A Beard?
Beards are a feature of certain chicken breeds such as Polish.
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If a chicken has a beard it means the feathers beneath the beak or “chin” and on the uppermost front portion of the neck are fluffy and elongated, creating the impression of a beard.
In bearded breeds, both the male and female chickens have beards.
The bearded phenotype is encoded by the same genetic mutation that cause muffs, which is why beards and muffs often occur together.
Muffs and beard, designated as Mb in genetic shorthand, are autosomal (i.e. non sex-linked), incompletely dominant traits.
Incomplete, or partial, dominance is a form of gene interaction in which both forms of a gene are partially expressed, resulting in heterozygotes (individuals that have two different alleles of a gene) that represent an intermediate state or a blending of characteristics of both alleles.
Chinese researchers in 2016 traced beards in chickens to a gene called HOXB8, known to have a role in feather development.
The scientists discovered that clean-faced chickens had just one copy of HOXB8 while bearded chickens had multiple copies.
It’s thought that HOXB8 creates the beard by extending the growth phase of facial feathers.
Other genes in the HOX family also affect feather development, such as the HOXC8 gene which is associated with the growth of crest feathers.
The scientists didn’t think beards conferred any evolutionary advantage to chickens.
Instead, they speculated that beards originated via domestication and hundreds of years of selective breeding, to please the human eye.
What Are Feather Stubs On A Chicken?
Feather stubs are very short feathers sometimes found on a chicken’s legs or between the toes.
They’re a disqualifying fault in clean-legged breeds.
Stubs are not the same as the leg feathering which is a feature of breeds like Marans.
Whereas leg feathering is a dominant trait, feather stubs are recessive and can be very hard to eliminate from a bloodline because of their capacity to lurk, hidden in the gene pool.
Birds featuring this trait should not be bred from, but can be useful to test whether other birds not showing feather stubs are carriers of the trait.
If the offspring from a mating between a bird with feather stubs and a bird without feather stubs include any birds with feather stubs, the parent without feather stubs must be carrying the gene for feather stubs.
In other words, the parent without feather stubs is heterozygous for feather stubs, carrying one recessive allele for feather stubs that is hidden in the phenotype (appearance) due to the presence of a dominant allele for no feather stubs.
While you can mostly hide feather stubs in a line of birds by always breeding to birds with totally clean legs and feet, the potential for feather stubs will always be present in the genome and in danger of popping up in future generations if birds carrying the recessive allele for this trait are included in the breeding program.
This is why it’s worthwhile to test in order to identify and weed out the carriers of the feather stub gene and establish that all brood fowl are homozygous for no feather stubs i.e. possess two dominant alleles for no feather stubs.
Are Blood Feathers The Same As Pin Feathers On A Chicken?
Pin feathers are feathers that have just begun to develop.
With the base a blue-ish color and encased by a protective keratin sheath, pin feathers have a spikey appearance resembling a porcupine quill.
Actively growing, these feathers are often called “blood feathers” because they, unlike fully developed feathers, have a rich blood supply.
Blood feathers can be highly sensitive to the touch — even painful — and birds may resist handling.
The feathers may bleed profusely if damaged or pecked.
Once the feather is fully developed, birds peel off the keratin coating during preening.
Why Are My Chicken’s Feathers Twisting?
Twisted or ratty looking feathers can be associated with lavender plumage in chickens.
Sometimes referred to as the shredder effect or the shredder gene, the poor feather quality usually affects the tail or neck region.
Though the exact mechanism is poorly understood, lavender birds with good plumage can be created through careful selective breeding away from shredded feathers.
The lavender gene can also be associated with a condition called “shoulder patch” in which the feathers in the shoulder region fail to develop, leaving a hard patch of pin feathers that never grow out.
Shoulder patch is another trait that’s thought to be recessive and therefore very persistent if it gets into a bloodline.
The defect only expresses in males — their sisters will look normal.
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These birds should be excluded from any breeding program.
What Is Angel Wing In Chickens?
Angel wing in chickens is slang for the condition known as slipped wing.
Slipped wing in chickens is where the wing fails to return to its folded position when opened out.
Instead of the primary feathers tucking under the secondaries as they’re supposed to, the opposite happens.
Slipped wing is a recessive trait and a disqualification in the show ring.
True angel wing occurs in ducks and geese and is a musculoskeletal deformity where the flight feathers at the tip of one or both wings turn out instead of lying flat against the body.
Angel wing in water fowl occurs when the flight feathers grow faster than the underlying wing structure, the weight of those feathers causing the outermost join of the wing to angle awkwardly outward.
It’s purely cosmetic, not affecting quality of life.
Angel wing in water birds is also called airplane wing or sometimes twisted or crooked wing.
Wild water fowl do not show this defect, except when humans interfere with their diet.
What Is The Difference Between Soft And Hard Feathered Breeds Of Chicken?
Chicken breeds are broadly classified as soft or hard feathered.
You will see this distinction made at poultry shows.
Essentially it’s a reference to the stiffness of the feather shaft, which creates differences in the overall appearance of the bird.
As the name suggests, soft feathers are more pliable than hard ones.
Soft feathers are fluffier at the base, giving soft feathered birds a fuller look than hard feathered chickens.
Hard feathered breeds are generally the game birds such as Indian Game, American Game, Old English Game and Asils with athletic physiques and prominent musculature, originally developed for cockfighting.
Their feathers tend to sit more tightly on the body, creating a closer fitting plumage that shows the contours of the body.
The soft feathered breeds encompass most of the chickens kept in backyard coops and those bred for meat and egg production.
They have a layer of soft fluff between the skin and the outer plumage, with feathers angled away from the body and more loosely held.
Conclusion
Aside from eggs and clucking, nothing may be so quintessentially “chicken” as the feather.
But it turns out a feather is not just a feather, not even close!
Saddle feathers, for instance, refer to the feathers at the base of the back and start of the tail, which are pointy and begin to drape in roosters but stay shorter and more rounded in hens.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg that is chicken feather terminology.
Knowing what’s meant by the different jargon used to describe chicken feathers makes it much easier to communicate with other chicken fanciers and to understand the breed standards.
You’ve heard of flowery language.. Well, now you can also make sense of it when chicken folks lapse into “feathery” language!
References
Andrews, D K, Glossary of Poultry Production and Breeding Terms, Washington State University Cooperative Extension, 1984
Damerow, Gail, How To Prevent Angel Wing In Ducks And Geese, Cackle Hatchery, 2020
Guo, Ying et al, A Complex Structural Variation on Chromosome 27 Leads to the Ectopic Expression of HOXB8 and the Muffs and Beard Phenotype in Chickens, PLOS Genetics, 2016
Peterson, Victoria J, Silkie Wings: What Makes Show Quality?VJP Poultry, 2018
Poultry Hub Australia, Chicken Breeds In Australia, Downloaded March 2023
Somes, Ralph G, Jr, Ear-tufts: a skin structure mutation of the Araucana fowl, Journal of Heredity, Volume 69, Issue 2, p 91-96, 1978
Somes RG Jr, Pabilonia MS. Ear tuftedness: a lethal condition in the Araucana fowl. J Hered, Mar-Apr;72(2):121-4, 1981
Sofia, Madeline K, Solved: The Mystery Of The Bearded Chickens, NPR’s The Salt, 2016
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