The Red-Shouldered Yokohama (rotgesattelte Jokohama)

This first shot is a photograph by the well-known poultry photographer Josef Wolters and was published in the book he co-authored with Horst Schmidt. This unusually refined hen caused many of us in the Yokohama Specialty Association to drool on and on. She was a bit lacking in breast spangling, but shoulder and carriage were superb. This exceptionally formed, elegantly long and graceful bird was said to have died of "Legenot" (when a hen dies trying to lay her first egg) or to not have been fertile. I can't remember which. Sigh. This bird was 15 - 20 years ahead of her time in graceful lines and form improvements sought in the Yoko's back in the early 1980's.

This second shot of a hen is much more recent, having been published by Wolters Publishers in the late 1990's. It does not have the graceful elegance of the hen in the first shot, however, it does show a more correct colouring. The bird in the first shot is a little too light in pigmentation.

This bird was one of the best show birds in Germany in the late 1980, before Knut Roeder began to pool the three European lines to create his strain of feather-rich and tall-standing birds WITH long saddle feathers. Many birds, too many long tails in general, do not possess the long saddle feathers needed to complete the design of long "featheredness". This exquisite bird, for example has a rather short saddle feather and has the falling back line of the early Yokohamas. It is, however, a magnificent achievement in breeding. This rare white (cream white) Yokohama is out of Knut Roeder's breeding lines. Published in the recent book of world breeds of poultry by Wolters Press, this bird shows the white colour form of the Yokohama like I have never seen before. The whites were usually years behind the red shouldered colour. This bird has all the main points of a fine show bird: the tall standing with yellow legs, long saddles, small walnuts comb, full and long tail feathers that arch in the second half of their length, slender tail feathers (the Germans standard says specifically that the feathers of the Yokohama are to be slender and not wide as in the Phoenix) and a good clear cream white colour.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequently the Iron Curtain in entirety, the meeting of East and West took place also on the Ornamental Fowl level. Western Germans in our Yokohama Club have long appreciated the work of the East Germans with the Bantam Red Shouldered Yokohama and as soon as the wall came down, breeders were exchanging birds freely. This particular rooster illustrated below was at one of our club shows and represents, to me, one of the finest examples of pure East German breeding.

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