Bross63
Chirping
- Dec 18, 2016
- 58
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The birds they call Onagadori are not. Onagadori express multiple feather growth traits that all must be present and expressed in order for the bird to be considered a true Onagadori. One of those traits is multiple feathering, a mutation that causes the bird to produce many more tail and saddle (and hackle in most cases) feathers than a typical chicken. The birds they sell clearly do not express this trait. The Japanese standard for Onagadori also states the saddle must grow at least 1/3 the length of the tail. Again, their birds fail in this requirement.
First there is no such thing as proto-Onagadori. That is a term Marc King used to describe the birds that were part of the early development of the Onagadori, not a currently existing sub-set or a diluted version of true Onagadori.
There are actually Onagadori in the US. Other than Dr. Ogasawara, (who brought eggs back from Japan when he travelled there for research to support his National Geographic article in 1970) and whose flock at UC Davis was dispersed and lost to cross breeding and loss of the birds over time, there are two people in the US who have had true Onagadori, and their lines were developed alongside and in conjunction with one another. Those birds still exist in the US but are not shared publicly at the current time.
All the peddlers offering Onagadori, “Proto-Onagadori”, non-molting Phoenix, etc are scammers trying to exploit unknowing people who don’t know enough about these birds to understand they are being lied to and taken for their money.
Also, there are no birds anywhere in the world that are non-molting other than Onagadori and the very highest quality lines of genetic hackle birds that had Onagadori bred into them several decades ago. The only way to prove a single bird is non-molting is to put him up in a protected and confined space under specific conditions and with correct diet and care for a minimum of three molting phases. If he continues to grow his tail and saddle uninterrupted and without drying those feathers up and losing them during that period, only then can that bird be considered to express the non-molting gene. For a line to be considered to express nm, it requires multiple males from multiple hens and male sires to be proven and only proven hens and cocks then bred forward to secure the genetics. Hens can only be proven through the testing and proving of their sons, so a hen will be a minimum of 4-4.5 years old by the time her oldest son could confirm her to be nm. If you take all that into consideration it’s easy to see that no one can truly call their birds non-molting unless they have multiple males from their line from multiple different hens and cocks, and all their males would have to have gone 3.5-4 years minimum without molting their tails and saddles, and their tails would have all grown to the length of 10-12’ minimum with saddles of 3.5-4’ minimum.
The term non-molter or non-molting Phoenix has been incorrectly used by many, and unfortunately some still use it because they either heard it from someone else or were told by a peddler that their birds are nm. But again, if someone cannot produce multiple males from their line with 10+’ tails and 3.5+’ saddles they do not and cannot claim to have non-molting birds and certainly not Onagadori.
