Dominique Chicken

Dominique Chicken is an American breed believed to descend from birds brought by English colonists, similar in origin to the modern Dorking or Sussex breeds, and it is considered the oldest American chicken breed, well known by about 1750 and widely distributed across the eastern United States by the mid-1800s. Its plumage shows a black and white barred pattern formally called cuckoo or hawk coloring, an alternating pattern of light and darker barring rather than pure black and white, and it is distinguished from the similarly patterned Plymouth Rock by its rose comb ending in a single backward-pointing spike, compared with the Plymouth Rock's single comb. The breed became endangered in the twentieth century, falling to fewer than 500 breeding birds by the early 2000s before a recovery effort begun in the 1980s succeeded, and the Livestock Conservancy listed it at watch status as of 2021, with international databases reporting it as not at risk.