- ONAGADORI STANDARD
- Japanese Standard for Onagadori - sent to my Julia Keeling,
Asian Gamefowl Society, Contact person for UK and the British Isles:
- ONAGADORI
- Single comb, white earlobes, red brown eye colour
- Weight: cock 1800g, hen 1350g
- Red or White hackled, white or brown (Shojou)
- Tail over 1.5m long, growing 70-90cm per year
- "CARE INSTRUCTIONS"
- Besides the already mentioned need for individual stalls and
tall roosts, cleanliness of the litter in the stalls and constant contact
with their owners, one other instruction was given to me by Anton Huijkman:
to pluck out the main and secondary sickles of the young roosters just
as they come into sexual maturity. This should be done only once, unless
the rooster has been used in the breeding pens and needs to be regroomed
for the individual stalls again.
- After doing this, I then photographed this bird, a white that
was from Goshiki breeding, every two weeks of the summer and the before
/ after shots are remarkable. Please be patient as I have placed 7 images
here to best illustrate the growth of an excellent Onagadori specimen and
to give you an idea of this grooming technique
- My new arrival from Holland: a smallish bird with perfect points
of the comb and wattles and a few broken feathers.
- Immediately after "surgery". All of the main sickles
and couverts were plucked. This is a one-time operation performed to: prepare
a rooster for a later show or, as in my case, to more easily see and judge
the quality of the growth of feathers.
- Regrowth was not immediate. This shot was taken a few weeks
after "surgery" and shows only a small puff of feathers beginning
to emerge around the base of the tail flight feathers.
- This next shot shows the growth of the feathers approximately
two months after the one above. It was obvious that this bird (and his
line) had the gene "gt" for rapid growth. The feathers were the
typical slender and supple feathers and this rooster seems to have had
(I'm not sure) also the 2 to 3 pairs of mutant feathers around the gland
on the tail - I say this because I did not know about actually counting
them back then (1988 - 89). Visually this rooster had a wealth of feathers.
- From this point one, some 4 months later, the rooster's train
of tail feathers grew at a very fast rate - approximately 1 meter a year.
The saddle hackle was also of high quality in that it remained approximately
1/3 in length of the main sickles. This rooster was later passed on to
Knut Roeder in 1989 and he used it in his first breeding programmes for
Onagadori. After receiving high quality imports directly from Japan, he
passed this rooster on to a Bantam Phoenix breeder who used it to greatly
improve the failing feather length and fullness of the whites at that time.
- This particular rooster was also very tame and I would often
bring him into the kitchen of the Swiss farmhouse where we lived and wash
and dry his tial with a hair-dryer. He sat, contentedly still, while we
made a fuss over him.
