The breed book
60 birds worth hatching: ten each of chickens, ducks, quail, turkeys, peafowl and pigeons. Every entry gives the egg colour, how long the eggs take, what the birds are like to live with, and the sources we checked it against.
Start with the egg
This book starts where a breeder does, with the egg: its colour, how many you can expect in a year, and how many days it needs before something taps its way out. Then it gets to the part that decides whether a breed suits you, which is what the birds are like to live with once the hatch is over.
Each chapter holds ten breeds and does not rank them. They are our pick of the well-loved ones, set out in an order that makes sense to read, from the easy-going to the specialist. Where a breed has a drawback, the entry says so.
How long is the wait?
Quail are the quickest: Coturnix eggs hatch in about 17 days. Pigeon eggs take 17 to 19 under their parents, chicken eggs 21, duck and turkey eggs 28, and peafowl eggs 27 to 30. Muscovy ducks are the long haul at about 35.
The whole book, egg by egg
All 60 entries, with the colour of egg each one lays. Pick a name to go straight to it.
A dotted outline means the sources do not settle on one colour for that bird.
How the breed book is put together
Every figure and claim in the book was checked against a page we could open and read: breed standards and clubs first (The Poultry Club of Great Britain, the British Waterfowl Association, Turkey Club UK, the National Pigeon Association), then conservation bodies such as the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, then universities and natural-history references. Each entry lists the sources it was checked against. Where sources disagree we give the range.
The plates are illustrations, not photographs. We made them with an AI image generator and checked each one against the breed's description, but a drawing is no substitute for seeing the birds, so ask a seller for photos of their own flock.