ROSE COMB RHODE ISLAND REDS.
By Peter Moate.
In 1969 I purchased my first poultry book, “The Standard of Perfection” otherwise known as the American poultry standards.
While I had been involved with Rhode Island Reds, it was from that book I discovered that there was a rose comb variety. I asked the late Trevor Young if he knew of them and he told me that that his mother had kept them, but that he had not seen or heard of them for about 40 years.
Not long after then, I picked up a gold laced Wyandotte cock bird at a show, from Don Breaden. This bird was more RIR type than Wyandotte. I mated him to a good type, dark red female RIR. Amongst the chicks was a very even red all over rose comb pullet, however she was completely black in under colour.
The next year she was mated to a good standard single combed male and some of the chickens from this breeding had rose combs and almost completely red under colour. From then on I bred rose comb to rose comb to strengthen the gene. Rose to rose was the main way of mating from then on. I bred about 50 a year and culled hard.
By 1980 I had sent Rose Comb Reds all over the mainland. In 1984 problems with a neighbour and the Glenorchy council meant that some birds had to go. I disposed of my Rose Comb Reds and Rhode Island Whites. The neighbour problem was settled (he sold up and left), and I continued to breed single combed RIRs until 1998 when I sold the lot.
In 2003 we moved to a few acres at Brighton, where I had lived 50 years previously. It was not my intention to get back into poultry, however, a few days after moving in, I took one of my dogs for a walk. About 200 yards down the road I looked through a fence and there standing before me was
a very large Rose Comb RIR cockerel. I quickly found the owner, and told him how I bred my Rose Combs 30 years earlier.
He said that his would not be related to mine as they were ‘pure bred.’ In August that year we bought 4 dozen eggs from him. 27 hatched with 18 cockerels and 9 pullets, one of which was laced all over (my Rose Combs had come home).
In 2004 I got some single comb eggs from Geoff and Amanda Vella, who had purchased my entire flock in 1998. Last year (2005) a Vella cockerel was mated to four Rose Comb females. The birds from this mating are those that I have been showing this year. I an currently working on a pea comb variety which has not been seen since the late 1800s. I have a photo in a book published in 1901.