Rare chickens strut at UM farm museum

ORONO – Just across the street from the Maine Center for the Arts, a few doors down from dormitories undergoing summer renovations, and within crowing distance of the University of Maine football field, three rare Chinese chickens are blissfully unaware they are summering on a college campus.

Scratching around for earwigs and other insects and fighting over someone’s breakfast toast in a portable coop, the small, ornamental Nankin chickens are part of the summer exhibits at UM’s Page Farm and Home Museum.

Once thought extinct, the chickens were raised and lent to the museum by Robert Hawes of Hampden, a UM professor emeritus and authority on backyard poultry raising.

Hawes is one of only a handful of U.S. poultry breeders who raise Nankins.

At first blush, it may appear that roosters crowing and hens laying eggs may not mesh with the university’s mission. But behind the wooden-slat silo and inside the three-story barn museum, the rich history of Maine’s poultry industry and the school’s part in it are proudly displayed.

Maine was once a major force in the egg-laying industry, and the university began researching poultry as the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station in 1880.

At one time, the campus contained a series of poultry barns, and today several faculty members are conducting poultry research in the department of animal and veterinary sciences.

“Chickens tie in with the central theme of the Page Museum, which keeps artifacts and information about rural Maine from the late 1800s,” Patty Henner, museum director, said Thursday. “The chickens are a learning tool for visitors and allows them to see one of the original breeds of chickens, developed in China and commonly available more than a hundred years ago.”

The bodies of the tiny birds are the size of a softball. The hens are a soft buff color, while the rooster sports a chestnut red breast and green tail feathers along with the buff feathers.

As soon as visitors approach the coop, the chickens begin to strut.

“They are show birds,” Henner explained. “They love people. When no one is out here, they are chicken to come out.”

The rooster “is very vocal, all morning long,” the museum official said. “He’s pretty loud for such a little guy.”

Henner said a kindergarten class came to visit earlier this week and “fell in love with them. The kids tried to get the male to crow by saying ‘cock-a-doodle-do’ to the rooster, and when he answered, they all ran away screaming.”

Right now, because of the heat, the chickens are molting – a phase where they shed feathers – and are not laying eggs. When they begin laying again, the eggs will be sold to breeders, Henner said.

Nankins are one of the most ancient breeds of bantam chickens. According to information provided by Hawes, the breed is believed to have come from the Dutch East Indies, carried by trading ships to the Netherlands as early as the 17th century. Once popular in Britain as a backyard pet, they were considered extinct by the early 1900s.

A British breeder, however, found a few remaining flocks and conserved the breed. A Connecticut breeder brought the first Nankin stock to the U.S. in the mid-1960s.

Nankins are considered a Heritage Breed by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.

The exhibit is open to the public from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily until the beginning of the fall semester. Museum exhibits are free.