Sebright Chicken

Sebright Chicken is a British bantam breed developed by Sir John Saunders Sebright in the early nineteenth century purely as an ornamental exhibition bird, and it is counted among the oldest recorded British bantam breeds, with no larger counterpart of the same name. It is bred in two color varieties, gold and silver, each showing a base color evenly laced around the edge of every feather with black, giving a distinctive scalloped appearance. A defining and scientifically notable trait is that Sebright males are hen-feathered, lacking the long sickle-shaped tail feathers typical of a rooster, a result of a mutation that converts an unusually large share of the bird's male sex hormones into female sex hormones in its skin tissue. Sebright hens lay only 60 to 80 small white eggs a year and the breed is not kept for meat; it remains popular for competitive exhibition, ranked among the ten most popular bantam breeds by the American Bantam Association, despite being genuinely difficult to breed because of fertility problems and high chick mortality.