Someone mentioned the Sumatras as being seasonal layers and this is only true to a point. Some strains lay year round but the Sumatra breed never was supposed to lay like many of the selected Mediterranean production strains. There is a lot of confusion as to what chickens in general are supposed to do and not supposed to do and this leads to a lot of misinformation and confusion being spread around. Take each breed as you find it and assess it on it's own breed merits and not those found in some antiquated book of late 19th century agriculture.
Never view the entire domestic Gallus species as a whole, as many have done and tried to down grade the usefulness of many old breeds while teaching production traits of a very few commonly kept breeds, because it is like trying to compare a watermelon with a grape.
There is such an immense gene pool that contains many strange and useful characteristics that do not necessarily equate out to be for high egg production. Some breeds are moderate layers and it was the intent of the area farmers that these hens should lay over a period of many years and to gather most of their food from the wild and from the few food scraps they were given.
The Sumatra was a semi-feral type of chicken when it was first seen by Europeans. They believed then and many still believe that the Sumatra was some off shoot of the Wild Jungle fowl or a separate wild gallus species. Those of us who have raised them will tell you that there is something besides your common every day chicken residing in the makeup of these birds. Many of the first birds imported to England and America were live trapped by the natives of Sumatra from the feral flocks that roamed free around the island.
I have seen my own Sumatra hens dig a tunnel under the roots of a tree
or under the hay bales in a barn and try to hide a nest in there. They still have a lot of wild instincts and many odd characteristics that seem to be instinctual to that breed alone.
The Asiatic classes are not known for being extremely prolific when it comes to laying a lot of eggs. The Sumatra is one of the few cases where individual hens have been known to lay as many as 200 eggs per year in the warmer states. You are lucky to get 100 eggs per year per hen and that is not average but close to the top end of their production scale. The APA standard does not list egg laying under useful characteristics for this breed other than to say they lay white or tinted shelled eggs.
In the U.S. the Sumatra has been outcrossed by a lot of well meaning people who view their efforts as "improvments" to the breed but in truth they have destroyed or lost many of the traits that make this one of the most unique breeds in all of poultry creation. NOTHING in any of the standards can even come close to the fine feather quality or the brilliant green sheen of a true purebred Sumatra. They were brought here because of their unique characteristics of super black plumage, multiple spurs, long tails that drug the ground, as many as 5 spurs per leg on the males, black eyes that study you as much as you do them, and their graceful carriage never before seen in any other type of chicken.
When they were brought to England they were embraced as fighting fowl and were bred to English game stock to boost their fighting spirit as well as increase their size and body weight. The first birds were so wild that they were kept in covered aviary pens to prevent them from going back to nature. Almost at the same time the Malay and Asil came into the picture and when cock fighting was outlawed in England it was the exhibition fanciers who gathered and saved these Oriental breeds.
The Asiatic game family embraces many strange types that are grouped under the Malay family tree. At one time the Malay was a fighting fowl but has since had many of it's agressive traits subdued through extreme selective breeding. In the past it was used as an outcross to produce
heavy weight laying hens and it's blood is to be found in the Rhode Island Red and several of the other dual purpose American breeds. Today the Malay is one of the rarest and most endangered breeds on the planet. It is to be found almost exclusively in the hands of fanciers and a few game fowl breeders. It has been estimated that there are fewer than 300 large fowl Malay in all of North America and the bantam version is even rarer and fewer in number than the large fowl.
The average Malayoid type fowl such as Ga Noi, Madagascar [Malgache],
Malay, Asil, Saipan, all pretty much lay sporatically and only about 60 eggs per year. However these breeds have an average life span of roughly 10 years which makes improvements in type and color of their offspring much more possible than with shorter lived breeds.
Two of the rarest types of Malayoid Asiatics are the Yamato Gunkei. This breed is lucky to lay 40 eggs per year with only half being fertile.
http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/Games/Yamato/BRKYamato.html
http://www.kampfhuehner.de/e/yamato.html
The second breed is something I learned about only recently myself.
They are called Ga Ho or Ga Dong and were once used as ceremonial fighting cocks but as anyone can see they are more of a meat type chicken for obvious reasons. They are considered a national treasure in Vietnam. I have read where these hens only lay 185 or fewer eggs in their entire life time.
http://www.kampfhuehner.de/e/vietnam.html
http://www.ganoi.com/gaho.html
http://www.thanhniennews.com/2010/pages/20110911140804.aspx
I posted the above to show the wide variation within the Malay family tree. It runs from the tall Malay types, to the extremely heavy types, to the branch known as the "pheasant Malays" which is the branch occupied by the Sumatra. Also to show that these are fowl that originate from a type of fowl of ancient origin that were not bred for egg production and may have been mostly ceremonial in nature.
Some of the champion Sumatras shown in the later half of the 20th century were bred to be bigger and lay more and bigger eggs than any previous strain of Sumatra before them. That is easy to do when you cross a champion line of black Sumatras to Black Minorcas. You can tell these fakes by their Mediterranean shaped tails. A true Sumatra male has it's tail on level with it's back and the hens have a downward angle tail that is like a half open fan shape, and the bottom angle similar to an angled broom when viewed from the side.
The pure Sumatra stock is a lot lighter weight and smaller in size than these new age fakes. The weight of a true Sumatra as set by the APA standard as cock #5 Hen #4 Cockerel #4 and Pullet #3 1/2.
I am sure most of us who call ourselves fanciers and preservationists
don't keep chickens because we need the eggs. If this was the case I wouldn't have but a few laying hens and spend the rest of my time in the useless pursuit of personal perfection and idle chatter.
As things stand I apologize to no one for my hobbyies of raising, showing, preserving, odd ball breeds of fowl or for saving nonGMO garden seed. This was our heritage and came from a long line of diverse human ancestors who once considered the things useful or entertaining.
If all you had were the stars to stare at then a few frizzled, creeper, naked neck, tailess, crested, or other odd ball frivilous play toys were not too much to ask for to brighten up your monotonous life. If you had a few singing cage birds you had music and none of this needed to be justified to any of the cynics that promote that everything must be useful or have a purpose.
To compare the laying ability of a Sumatra hen that might lay for 10 years to that of some hatchery leghorn that is scheduled to die within 2 years is no comparison at all. There are European breeds such as the Lakenvelder and the Campines that lay even smaller eggs than the Sumatra. So few people raise them that it is hard to get a conversation started anywhere on the internet about their good qualities or the fact that they lay buckets full of tiny white shelled eggs.
I used to have Campines of the finest quality and after a while, regardless of their useful traits, their good looks win out and they soon grow on you. Dean
CHICKENS-101@yahoogroups.com
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