The Polbar chicken is a breed of chicken native to Poland. It was developed by crossing Polish green-legged partridge hens with American Plymouth Rock roosters. The Polbar is an auto-sex breed, which means that we can differentiate from birth if the chicks are roosters or hens by a detectable characteristic in the color of their plumage.
Polbar Chicken Characteristics
The Polbar is a dual-purpose chicken breed prized for the excellent flavor of its meat and eggs. Its distinctive characteristics in backyard agriculture are its great independence in obtaining food, its high capacity for survival, and its resistance. In addition to the advantages mentioned, it is also important that they have unique genes, thanks to which they are a valuable gene pool, and are also material in poultry scientific research in Poland. They show general resistance to disease and good performance in various environmental conditions.
Color Varieties
Polbars come in only one color variety; Young chickens are creamy-white and adult chickens are grayish-brown. It has a single crest, red lobes, and grayish-yellow legs.
Polbar hens are also excellent producers of creamy eggs (160 eggs per year) but they do not tend to hatch their American Plymouth Rock eggs.
Polbar Chicken History
Polbar is a native Polish chicken breed created between 1946–1953 from the crossing of Greenleg Partridge hens and Plymouth Rock roosters.
The only population of Polbar chickens in the world is maintained as a conservative stock at Laura Kaufman’s Small Animals and Poultry Research Station belonging to the University of Life Sciences in Lublin, Poland. The purebred has been kept for more than 50 generations in the number of approximately 1000 birds.
Self-examination is the fastest method of identifying the sex of poultry and is characterized by high precision, provided that the maternal and paternal components correspond correctly. In the case of the Polbar breed, hens can be distinguished from roosters from the first day they hatch by the longest black stripe. Determining the sex of other breeds of day-old chicks is very difficult, or sometimes impossible.
Additional Data
The Polbar breed of chickens is conserved and investigated by the Polish genetic resources protection program, whose main objective is to preserve individual populations and protect them from extinction, as well as to consolidate and preserve their distinctive production, functional and phenotypic characteristics (such as, for example, the values of the flavor of eggs and dietary meats), resistance to diseases and traits of their behavior.
These birds are protected by the in situ method, which consists of the protection of live animals in several flocks in their natural environment, that is, in small rural farms. The objective of this program is that in each flock of protected hens, the genetic balance is maintained at an invariable level and the specific characteristics of birds of both sexes are preserved.
See Also:
- What is Peruvian Gamefowl
- Onagadori Chicken Breed Profile
- Narragansett Turkey Breed Profile
- Muscovy Duck Breed Profile
- Midget White Turkey Breed Profile