Customer Reviews

Extraordinary Chickens

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I recently picked up a copy of Extraordinary Chickens & was delighted with both the photo layout & the treatment of the subject. The author (who some may remember from the photo article on chickens in Life magazine in the early 1980s)consulted with chicken experts & exhibitors around the world to produce this feast for the eye - a wonderful collection of the bizarre & the beautiful - most people will be astonished at the variety of colors, shapes, & sizes available in the world of the pure-bred exhibition chicken.

You have to know them to love them, and this book is a must for anyone who knows chickens! Or just likes looking at great animal photos! What a treat to spend time getting to know another animal personality. Get on to it!

The book teaches, it enlightens and it delights. The photographs are truly extraordinary and not just for the aficionado of rare poultry. The entire book is simply a feast for the eye and with very useful text. A perfect gift for the chicken lover in your life.

Polish chickens (as displayed on the cover and interior of this book) are a strikingly unusual breed. According to the author, they may actually be Italian chickens, originating near the River Po. They are the avian equivalent of Old English Sheepdogs. Ice can form in their topknots in cold weather, and their crest feathers restrict vision, which causes them to be easily frightened. However, they see very well downward, which after all is the food direction for chickens.

I'm not precisely a poultry romantic, having once helped a friend clean out a chicken coop. But Stephen Green-Armytage's book, and yearly visits to the Poultry exhibit at the Michigan State Fair have convinced me that I am going to raise chickens some day. Just the thought of a flock of Owlbeards, Polish Frizzles, or Buff Orpingtons bobbing through my garden and gobbling up the cutworms and grasshoppers is enough to make me smile. I can always hire someone else to clean out the coop.

"Extraordinary Chickens" is not a how-to poultry manual. It is a book of beautiful photographs that grew out of an assignment the author undertook for "LIFE Magazine." There is also some explanatory text on a small but striking selection of the more than five hundred poultry breeds that have been recorded by poultry photographers such as Josef Wolters and Rudiger Wandelt. It certainly stands testament to the breeders'desire to develop chickens with an amazing variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. There are photographs of chickens with combs like red sea coral (Hamburgs) and Moose antlers (Sicilian Buttercups); chickens with tails that are twenty feet long (the Phoenix or Onagadori); and chickens that look like pheasants (Sumatras) or Bulldogs (Cornish game birds---at least from the front).

The author suggests attending a poultry show, if you find yourself intrigued by the photographs in this book---"In 1995, a show in Nuremberg, Germany, boasted a total of more than seventy thousand birds, a record that will probably be beaten before this book appears." California seems to be the hotbed of ornamental poultry in this country, although I can testify to the fact that Michigan has at least one yearly show.

If you think you might actually want to raise your own poultry, first read Chapter Nine of the totally fascinating "Encyclopedia of Country Living" by Carla Emery. It's got everything from "Good Recipes for Old Hens" to a section on roosters divided into "Crowing," "Fighting," and "Making Capons."

If you have any interest in beautiful birds of any species, I suspect you will like this book. The photography is of the highest quality and Mr. Green-Armytage has a wonderful way of presenting the birds as special characters, not just standard poses. He has done a wonderful job of selecting a wide variety of lovely chickens from both British and American poultry shows. There is just enough text to whet one's interest in the breeds. Unfortunately, the index only has page numbers for the photos. Descriptions of the birds need to be hunted up on your own. But you bought it for the photos of lovely, strange and cute/funny birds.

This book is 112 pages of fantastic photos portraying poultry, exotic and domestic,in the most grandios fashion. You'll never look at a chicken the same way again! (excepy,maybe,if your'e having mashed potatos and gravy) Incredulous crests! Striking split combs! Magnificent beards,muffs,whiskers! Exciting and unusual feather patterns and colors are included in this wonderful collection. You will also enjoy the infusion of interesting information about the assorted breeds.

I brought this book for my Boyfriend a vet who loves chickens. He adores this book and carries it around with him to show people why he has such an unusual obsession. I am not a poultry fan, but the pictures are absolutely wonderful.

An entertaining, well-organized, informative book. A must read for the chicken-lover! Each breed featured is detailed in a short, but informative paragraph close to the photograph of the bird in discussion. Folks who read this book will never look at the "ordinary" chicken in the same light again. They are beautiful creatures who deserve the same recognition and respect as a show canine or show feline. And,the photography is excellent!!

Great book for people who love chickens! It's all photos, with very little to actually read, so don't buy it looking for information. But if you enjoy looking at amazing breeds of chickens, you'll love this (I'd love to see his pictures in a book about chickens as pets--few people appreciate the affectionate, endearing, and comical nature of these birds). If you DON'T like chickens you will probably find the pictures somewhat horrifying, as some breeds are really strange-looking (think the chicken equivalent of bulldogs or shar-peis, or other weird "purebred" mutations). This is a really fun book by an extremely talented photographer.

One of the signs of a talented artist can be his ability to take something mundane and render it new, interesting, even engrossing. There's not much that's more mundane than the common chicken, and Stephen Green-Armytage himself says in his introduction that it was hard for people to keep a straight face when he told them the project he was working on.

Well, this book more than justifies the ribbing he must have received. My lovely bride, who saw it first, was entranced by the quality of the photos (quite apart from the subject matter, which holds no special appeal for either of us). We're still not in any hurry to run out and join the 4-H, but the talent and time that went into these very impressive images will keep us browsing these pages for a good long time.