Old Cotswold Legbar
The 'Old Cotswold Legbar' lays her eggs in a variety of beautiful pastel colours including, turquoise, blue, olive, pink, peach and eau-de-nil. The colours are perfectly natural and are akin to the eggs laid by many wild birds.
Eggs of this nature were first seen by missionaries in South America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it is not widely known that the history of blue eggs in the Cotswolds stretches back as far as the 1920's, when botanist and explorer, Mr. Clarence Elliott, who toured the world collecting rare plants, brought three hens and a cockerel back from Patagonia to Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire in 1927.
Old Cotsworld Legbar hens enjoying foraging in some shrubs
Unfortunately the cockerel did not survive the voyage by boat to England but the three hens were used at Cambridge University in 1930 by Professor R.C. Punnett, in his genetic studies of poultry. It was Punnett who carried out a series of crossing White Leghorns, Gold Legbars and Elliott's three Araucana hens over four generations to produce the Cream Legbar. The cream colour in the plumage of this bird is due to a gene which dilutes gold to make the colour almost indistinguishable to the eye from silver.
Some of the direct descendants of those Cambridge Legbars are kept on our farm in the Cotswolds and have being instrumental in the development of Clarence Court's own bird, the Old Cotswold Legbar, which is now a houshold name. They are attractive and proud birds, many of which have the distinctive muffs, crests and hawk-like eyes of their earlier Chilean relatives.