Danny Feathers Talks Leghorns-Part 1

In this special episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, host Rip Stalvey presents a historic conversation with the late Danny Feathers, an expert on White Leghorns. Danny shares his deep passion for the breed, recounts his childhood attraction to White Leghorns, and offers detailed advice on breeding techniques, including selecting and pairing birds. 

 Danny recalls revitalizing the characteristics and quality of Leghorns and discusses his methodology for breeding, focusing on various bird attributes from earlobes to feather quality. This episode is a tribute to Danny's enduring legacy and knowledge preserved against the odds.

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Transcript

0:00

Hi! Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast. I'm Rip Stalvey, and together with Mandelyn Royal and John Gunterman, we're your co hosts for this show, and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy, and productive flock.

Rip Stalvey: 0:23

In this special installment of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, we unearth a treasured conversation with Danny Feathers. Our conversation traverses the art of nurturing and showcasing the elegant white leghorns, a breed that captured Danny's heart and expertise. This interview, has become a part of Danny's enduring legacy. The audio captured by a telephone conversation may not boast high fidelity yet it carries the weight of wisdom and passion originally preserved for the American Poultry Association's educational archive. It faced oblivion when the site underwent a digital renovation. Against all odds this interview resurfaced from the depths of a forgotten computer alongside another gem. These recordings, once all lost, will now grace our upcoming podcast episodes, allowing these voices to resonate once more. We invite you to join us in this poignant journey as we relive Danny's dedication to his beloved white leghorns.

1:21

Today we're talking with Danny Feathers about White Leghorns. Danny, welcome aboard and glad to have you with us. Thanks for calling me, Rip. See if we can't get some things straightened out. I hope so. Danny, if you would, tell us what attracted you to white leghorns and why you bred them for so many years. When I was a kid, you'd go to the feed store and you'd get them little old colored dyed Easter chicks, and I'd say 99 percent of them were males and 100 percent of them were mean when they finally grew up, and but white has always been my favorite color of chicken. I don't know what even though those were layer type leghorns they still appealed to me. They were beautiful, about the age of four. I had a grown one, and he was, like I said, he was mean, and that sucker hit me in the face, just to the right side of my right eye, and just missed my eye about a quarter of an inch. And man, I was hooked then. And then I started seeing, as I got older, I started seeing exhibition leghorns, and the curves on them. And I just think a leghorn, period. Whether it's white or what color is a beautiful bird, I love the lines on them, and so that's what's attractive me to them. Very good. Danny, if somebody came to you and said, Mr. Feathers, I want to start raising leghorns what could you advise me to do? What would you tell somebody to do that wanted to start with leghorns? And I don't tell anybody to look in the, Yearbook of who wins the most or any of that. Cause that's all someone else's perspective. A lot of times I don't agree with what one and, but it's not my, it wasn't my opinion paid for that day. I congratulate'em and go on, but I tell somebody to, go and find somebody that raises a bird that you like, a style that you like, I, I used to tell people to get a standard and study it and but I find so many people have a hard time interpreting the standard. You're gonna have, most of them, people are gonna have to find someone to to help them interpret it, I'd say just find a bird that you think meets, meets that description of a bird that you like in that breed and talk with them people and get those birds, if you can get some from them. Makes perfect sense. We all, the standards are just like the Bible, we're all going to interpret it a little different way, I used to argue with people. They said the standard is that written description. Yes, it is. But there was a panel of judges that said on that, the development of that standard each year, even when they redo them. There's a panel of judges that look at the artist's renditions. And they agree, hey, that's what the standard tail of that bird would look like. I still believe that shillings work is still the best to go by. And you take a look at his leghorns, and that's what I try to make my bandens look like and my largefowl. In seeing pictures of them, I think you've done a really good job with that, because when I see your birds, that's exactly what I see, is a shilling leghorn. And I agree with you, his illustrations are the very best out there. Yes, sir. How would you, how do you breed your leghorns? What do you look for and what do you strive for? And how do you try to put those breeding pens together to reach those goals? I think it wouldn't be fair to the birds that I have today to tell you, unless I tell you how I developed them. The the leghorn, when I was a kid, you didn't find leghorns, bantams, That that had front ends on them, you know. They were they didn't have a whole lot of plumage. They had long, long sickle feathers main sickles, but they didn't have long lesser sickles. I set out to change that, and I put I put the largefowl, Otto Niehaus, largefowl in them, which he got his directly from Dan Young, who we all consider the father of the modern day leghorn. Before him, they were all, looked like cage layers, and so one pin was set like that, the other pin I happened to find a white rock bantam male that had decent front end on him. He was too narrow to be a good rock, in my opinion, but I used him on the other side. And then, seven years in a row, I picked the best offspring, male and female, from each side, and bred brother and sister seven years in a row, before I ever started breeding them together. So that's how it started. So what I look for is, whenever I put a mating together, I look at everything. I sit down and look at all the males that I'm thinking of breeding. And I take a piece of paper and I write down all the positives on that male, and then on the other side I write down all the negatives on him. I do that with each and every one of them. There's been times I've bred 15 males, and then I do the same with every female. And I'm not talking about just the type of the bird, I'm talking about the earlobe shape. The earlobe thickness. How the beak sits on the head. The type of beak, I look at the feather quality of these birds, I do that with all the females, and then I start matching them birds up on that paper. Where he's strong, she may be weak, or where she's strong, he may be weak. So I call it a plus minus. But if you get two birds bred in there with the same weakness, you're going to set that as a trait. Like I said, I looked at all kinds of leghorns. To the very first master breeder, this will probably aggravate some and offend them, but I never was impressed with the Ritz birds. I never was. They, I think, I'm out here in the chicken yard as you can tell, but I think that every bantam that has a counterpart, we as a breeder, should strive to make those birds look like those large fowl. I'm not saying all largefowl look like those folks do either. When I was younger, I've seen birds in bantams that weren't near as good as birds in largefowl and then vice versa, I agree. But I think when you look at that bantam, It says it's a miniature, right? Exactly. What's it a miniature of? It's a miniature of that large fowl, I know some guys some guys will argue with me that, the coach and banden aren't going to have the head of that. Largefowl coaching. Why not? The only reason they're not is because you're not trying, why are some leghorn bantams a lot fluffier than what our largefowl are? Why are some largefowl too soft feathered? Because they're not paying attention. Because they don't know any better. They've got them from somebody. He was winning with them. He was the only guy in that area. He was a hell of a conditioner. Therefore, he won on conditioning. That's a real, real sore subject for me, but we won't go into that today. It's ten points for conditioning. That's not talking about the feather, that's talking about the body, when I fill in birds, I won't breed a soft bodied bird, period. I don't want a soft bodied bird. You can take my leghorns wings will snap back better than most old English, in the early days showing under judges and you might not have had the prettiest head or prettiest comb on a bird. It may have been four points, or it may have been, maybe the points were needle points. Back then, hell, they'd just eliminate the bird altogether, and you go up and ask the judge about it, they didn't like his head. How much is that head worth? And we're just talking about a small section of it. So you eliminated an otherwise good bird over a small fraction of points. Exactly. I got to where, alright, I'll fix that. So I started putting a lot of emphasis on heads with not losing type, and started producing real pretty headed birds. And then they had to find something else that they were going to knock it for. I've had, I had a buddy call me a headhunter one time, he said, man, you are a headhunting fool. I said, yeah, but is the rest of the bird oh yeah, so I don't, I look at everything, eye color, shape of the eye, I'll look at the scales on the legs, there's not a part of that bird that I don't look at, I've judged some birds county fair wise and even some of the open that had coarse scales, look at your standard. What's your standard say about that, it's a no. You shouldn't be breeding that bird. There's not one If you'll fix And look at every part of that bird, and when you start fixing everything, and you can't do it all at once, you have to do little pieces at a time. But once you get it all where you think it should be, man, you ought to have a heck of a specimen right there when you're done. It's, go ahead. Some things that a lot of people don't understand is the wing is directly connected to the tail as far as length. If you want a great big long tail, you're going to have a great big long wing. And and a big long wing is a heavy wing. And they droop. They droop, they sure do. And A lot of times, I've had people say look at this bird here, he said his wings cross, or her wings cross back behind their rear end. That bird's wings are too long. Is that bird's wings too long, or is that body too short? Reach in there and feel that kill bone. That kill bone's gonna tell you a lot, I sent you those three pictures last night on out of standard, and those three pictures, in my opinion, are three of the most important pictures that any poultry person should have. If, and I, just my opinion, but if folks would sit down and study, really study what those pictures explain to them and show them, we'd have a lot better birds today than we do. Oh, I guarantee you would. It goes back to Don Schreider talking about the body under the feather, and those are the pitchers he's talking about, and I learned that before I even knew there was a standard rip coming out of the game foul and understanding the body. And understanding the room that needs to be inside that body for all the organs to fit in there properly, so that bird can be its most productive. Exactly. People get The thing I see with most people, and we'll talk about leghorns all day long they get frustrated if they make a mating and nothing good comes out of it. Hey, I'll tell you what, if people are actually honest, you're gonna fail more times than you're successful. Absolutely. But every time you do, you should have learned a valuable lesson. And if you're like me and you have a Terrible memory, you write that down somewhere, so I got a big old book wrote down And I got a big book because I didn't want to lose a small one. I lose I forget where I put it So I've got a big ledger in there, I have had people ask me How do you know, or how have you learned as much about chickens as you have? And I said it's simple. I bred a lot of really bad chickens over the years. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I started out with some Jim Daniels, I guarantee you, the white leghorns I started out with was bantams. Come from a swap meet. In those days you could, there were swap meets all over up here where I live and in southern Kansas there. And I'm not too far from Wichita, Kansas, and Wichita had a bantam club up there. And you could there were some good bantam people in there. There was a guy by the name of Joe Burkle. Probably nobody remembers him now as far as the old English people, but this guy was a multi millionaire. His wife was just absolutely wealthy, he didn't work, he spent all day with chickens and not just one breed of chickens, he had multiple breeds of chickens, and he could, he worked on everything, he made some of the finest blue Andalusian bantams I'd ever seen in my life. He was not an easy guy to get to know but, he didn't hardly talk to a kid at all, and I'm just a kid, but I'd watch, sit back and watch what he did, at the shows and stuff. And so I learned a lot from that. Back then, a lot like I told one guy that I grew up showing his leghorns I showed against some old men over at the Enid Club, which is 60 miles southwest of me. And there's five old men over there that were old leghorn bantam guys, and I'm telling you what, them old bastards were brutal. They didn't have a good thing to say to you. They wanted to demoralize you. They wanted to run you out of chickens. And they they weren't dealing with an average person here. I grew up in Gamecocks and you get that all the time. They just made me try harder is all they did. And and it took me five years before I ever beat them. But, buddy, when I did you don't think I didn't saddle them up and ride them. I rode them hard, and they never beat me again. But I was I was my own worst enemy because I don't sell a lot of birds. I I don't like to let somebody have a bird because I go through, And they asked me, I want a trio. I said, all and I go through and I pick out birds and I put them together with like I'd breed them. And and then, I find out a year later they didn't hold, they don't got them no more. They got rid of them shortly after I, they got them from me, and I don't like that. And I, when I do sell birds, they're birds that are good enough to stay here. And so I eat all my culls. Or I've got, now I've got a guy who's an ag teacher out at the, our high school, I've got a school farm out there and he takes a lot of culls from me just to have run loose out there on the farm, and he donates eggs to the teachers up there to eat and what have you. But he likes leghorns and he likes little Rhode Island red bantams, and but he takes anything I let him have I just, generally when I sell something to someone, we've talked for quite a while, and I, they don't just get the birds, they get my help, cause I want them to be successful with them, but it gets here and here with time. We're living in a time where everybody, nobody wants to work for it no more. They just want instant gratification and move on to the next thing. I've been in leghorns since 1970 show, show type leghorns, and before that. The buff leghorns. Large fowl, that was, quite an undertaking. That started out as a, the original ones I got are a cross of a bantam buff leghorn male and a large file white leghorn female. And but it didn't have a good golden buff, it was just kind of a lemon color. They were even, but I, the standard is to ask for a good golden buff, that's what I want to try to do, I I don't like, I don't like whether they're good enough to win, why worry about it. I know you posted a picture of one, I think it was last year, maybe? That bird was, he was not only a good buff leghorn, he was a good leghorn, period. He was just a magnificent bird. He was something. He I sat down him and three others up there at the APA semi annual up there in Hutchinson, Kansas. And I'd showed some before. I'd showed a, I'd showed a cock bird and a pullet six or seven years earlier. And got The cockbird was by far the best bird. The pullet was a great pullet, but she was a little small. But she had some tremendous type. But like I said, again, she was just a tad small. And But the cock bird was just outstanding and full of beating, I'm thinking to myself, how in the world can that happen? There's just no way that should happen, and since then I've gotten to where I don't even talk to judges about it anymore. That's something that I'll tell new people. It's alright to go talk to them, but if they don't answer you, you need to know that standard. You need to know where the, what the point cuts are and everything. And if you're an acknowledgeable exhibitor, and you go up to a judge and he can't answer those questions knowledgeably, then you've got a problem. And I don't let judges put my brood thing together. I don't. I'm as happy with them when I put them in the cage, I'll be happy with them when they come out here regardless of how they place, but that, yeah, that male was an outstanding male. I was really pleased with him. He had a brother that was almost as good every bit as good as type, but he came out a lighter, but he was still even. Showed him up there, and he was third, and then a half brother was second. This was reserve variety. I actually thought that I should have won that leghorn class, but the judge didn't think so that day, and they paid him for his opinion, and I was fine with it, you don't see many of them, and no, and I, hopefully we can change that, but I do them the same way, it's still my plus minus, Marcus Davidson Dan Honnard got some of them and I got some birds from Dan to put it, to breed and Dan's birds were a lot more robust leghorn, which I really like little short in the thigh. But great culler, great, outstanding bodies. When you get a hold of one, you can look at them in a pen, you'll say they're a little bit small. When you get a hold of one, you go they're a little bit big, just like a good Rhode Island Red is big. Yes, sir. Rhode Island Red is the same way. If that Rhode Island Red has got the proper feather, she's gonna, she or he's gonna look small in that pen. Until you get a hold of them, and then you can say that bird may be just a little too big. But we live in a time where they don't appear to worry about that anymore, but I've since crossed the two, and I still keep three lines of them going. The cross is a line, instead of the family noun, And my family being the, down on our family, but but still, it's a leghorn, right? One thing that used to really irritate me was I'd, when we look at a leghorn, it's defined, really, most people define it by that sweep and through the tail. There's not a break there, right? And then you'll see There's some out there that, that wind, that got, damn they got a break right at the base of the tail, and then the tail kicks up too high, so they got a break right there at the top of the cushion end of the tail, so they've got two breaks and yet, they don't seem to understand a smooth sweep without a break.

Rip Stalvey: 19:44

Thank you for joining us this week. And before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released, and they're released every Tuesday. And if you're enjoying this podcast, we'd like to ask you to drop us an email at poultrykeeperspodcast at gmail. com and share your thoughts about the show. Thank you again for joining us for this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. We'll see you next week.