CAMBAR CHICKENS

The Cambar chicken was originally developed between 1914 and 1920 by genetics professor Reginald Crundall Punnett,back then It was very handy to have birds which you could sex by color at hatching. 

During World War I Punnett successfully applied his expertise to the problem of the early determination of sex in chickens. Since only females were used for egg-production, early identification of male chicks, which were destroyed or separated for fattening, meant that limited animal-feed and other resources could be used more efficiently. Punnett's work in this area was summarized in Heredity in Poultry (1923). With Michael Pease as his assistant, he created the first auto-sexing chicken breed, the Cambar, by transferring the barring gene of the Barred Rock to the Golden Campine

 

Punnett discovered the auto-sexing  ability of chickens while studying different types of barring patterns in chickens. He set up a series of crosses placing the autosomal barring of the Gold Campine on top of the sex-linked Cuckoo barring of the Plymouth Rock to form a new breed called the Cambar, The resulting breed had distinct male and female markings and colors, which would breed true every generation this was First discovered by Professor Reginald Crundall Punnett at Cambridge During World War I, when many foods were scarce, Punnett pointed out the value of employing sex-linked plumage-colour factors to distinguish male from female chickens; early identification of the less valuable males was thus made possible.

 

After World War II development of these breeds was mostly discontinued due to the hybrid birds we have today able to out preform the cambar,Hybrid hens we have today were all created using the same method discovered with the cambar (gold male on silver hen).

 

Sadly these beautiful chickens died out completely around 75 years ago but we have recreated them using the finest parent stock.