Blue Eggs Matter, But So Do Tufts – Even More So

We are all currently receiving a healthy dose of discounted Christmas offers. Included in this are a slew of hatchery emails promoting their chick sales from breeds that they think will sell well next year. I received one yesterday from McMurray Hatchery wherein they listed their top 6 breeds based on sales (and they have hundreds of breeds/varieties). Three of their top six ‘breeds’ are blue egg layers. These are McMurray’s ‘Whiting’ blue, and McMurray’s version of the Ameraucana and the Creme Legbar. All of these blue egg laying lines that they sell are poor imitations of the original blue egg layer – the Araucana.

These days it seems everyone wants to jump on the blue egg bandwagon, but most don’t want to put the time and the effort into working with the original – the Araucana. A few steps down from the hatcheries are a large group of private individuals selling either chicks or hatching eggs that they say (when they are at their most honest) are ‘entry level’ Araucana. I am not sure what that means but it sounds like they are selling a headache to me.

The original Araucana, and the same bird that set the poultry world on fire over 100 years ago, was the blue egg laying chickens of Dr. Reuben Bustos’ Araucana flock. He created them through years of selective breeding. Most new breeds are created from either existing land races, or by mixing other breeds together. Dr. Bustos combined the land race birds in his area to create a rumpless, blue egg laying, double tufted bird. That is the original Araucana and will always be the original Araucana.

At the top of this entry is a photo of the page from the National Geographic Magazine published in April 1927. This issue introduced the world to the Araucana Chicken. Pictured are two white females and a white male with Mahogany leakage in his wing. The true Araucana have not changed much from the original in the NatGeo rendition. They are a medium sized, blue egg laying bird with evenly balanced tufts, medium feather, wing carriage above the lower thigh, with a nice full breast, not too heavy in the hackle, and a nice slope to the back. The artist did a pretty good job recreating Dr. Bustos’ ‘Collonca de Artes’.