I would like to say that I have just spent far more time this morning than is helpful trying to pinpoint the exact breed of Foghorn Leghorn, and have come to several conclusions.
1. He is definitely not a Rhode Island Red, as Wikipedia claimed. Our Lorge Rooster is a RIR and they are a dark red.
2. Nor is he a white leghorn, a solid white breed. Note lack of colored tail and hackle feathers.
So what IS he? Is there in fact a Leghorn breed that matches, with brown hackle feathers and tail?

Eh…not really, so far as I can find. If you squint very hard at some bad photos of Blue Leghorns, you could maybe convince yourself.
This is the closest I could find, and it’s listed as a Blue/Splash Leghorn. Most blues don’t look like this. Also the sickle feathers on the tail are dead wrong.
We must now expand our scope outside the titular Leghorn breed and look for others.

Oddly, there aren’t many. There are plenty of dark roosters with pale necks, and a few of the reverse, but I am coming up nearly empty on brown-on-white roosters.
But what, I ask you, if the dark red was for the sake of animation? What if those feathers should have been black, but solid black makes the character look like a cut out, so it was colorized and lightened?

Well, then we have more options, such as this magnificent Lakenvelder!
Also known as “Shadow-on-a-sheet.” Truly, any chicken would be proud!
Still, that’s a pretty stark contrast to handwave away. What about the Colombian Wyandotte?
The back of the head isn’t as sharp, but that does get us yellow legs and a mostly yellow beak. Definitely a contender.
Except…oh dear. That’s a rose comb, not a single, a common feature of Wyandotte chickens. I guess the Wyandottes are out of the running.
Foghorn is an immense chicken, as far as the cartoons show, which is an argument for the Light Brahma, but he doesn’t have feathered feet and the comb is still wrong.
In conclusion: I cannot find an exact match for Foghorn. Unless one of you clever souls can locate one, I think he’s probably a backyard mutt chicken, possibly with a white Leghorn ancestor.

Though I’m still secretly in favor of the Lakenvelder.
Possibly our strongest contender yet!

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More from @UrsulaV

24 Oct
I have been playing around with #Townscaper, a neat little building...toy? game? thingy?...which recently ported to mobile, and spent probably too much time thinking about these odd little towns on the water, which meant that eventually a little weird fan comic came out. 1/11
2/11
3/11
Read 12 tweets
24 Oct
I do in fact read everything on ebook, as my eyesight’s not what it was, but I do NOT want bookstores to get whalloped. Also, kid books are gonna be hit just as hard.
There are currently no good cheap e-readers that fill the niche of print for small children. I’ve been saying one’s probably a few years off since like 2010. I’ve been wrong every time.
And kids NEED books. For adults, it’s an annoyance, an emotional loss, a hit to our well-being. Kids, though, have windows of language acquisition, and they very much have windows where you can convince them that reading is not an instrument of torture.
Read 5 tweets
22 Oct
The fall air is absolutely glorious today, and I’m gonna get the last of these bareroot plants in the ground OR DIE TRYING
Today I’m planting bloodroot, Virginia spring beauty, rue anemone, and American lily-of-the-valley. (Yes, we have a native lily-of-the-valley! It is not as aggressive and a bit weirder looking.)
Of course, what it likes is “moist, well-drained soil.” I swear to god, if I was going to make a garden drinking game, the Liver Killer Edition would be “Take a shot every time a plant wants moist well-drained soil.”
Read 9 tweets
9 Sep
WHO WANTS TO HEAR THE SAGA OF ME ATTEMPTING TO ARRANGE A REAL ESTATE TRANSACTION DURING AN PANDEMIC?

Of course you do. Buckle up.
So my mom is getting up there in years and will eventually want to move to be closer to me. She was thinking that she’d like to move sometime after my kid brother finishes college.
Great, we can do that. I contact my local real estate agent and am like “we have a couple years, this is NOT urgent, this is what I’m looking for, if something happens to cross your desk, let me know.”

This was back in…oh, December of 2019? Ish?
Read 51 tweets
9 Sep
It’s gonna sound weird, but what really brought this home to me was hatching chicks from eggs. Chickens externalize everything, and lots of eggs just don’t hatch at all, or get far enough along that it looks like something’s happening, but it stops.
And a fair number of chicks get as far as hatching, then keel over because something is wrong internally. You really see the numbers game in action when there’s eighteen or twenty eggs from under the hen and you get maybe six that survive.
But since women obviously aren’t hens, every chance is emotionally fraught, and hardly anybody is thinking “an embryo developing is an enormously complicated system with all kinds of room for glitches,” because that’s just not how most of us think!

Anyway.
Read 5 tweets
9 Sep
The comic quite rightly does not mention size, which is absolutely variable by region and can be very hard to tell from a distance, (though my usual mnemonic is “if you ask if it’s a raven, it’s a crow, if you ask if it’s a small plane, it’s a raven.”)
Also, the size thing only works on the Common Raven! You go south and get a Chihuahuan Raven in the mix and it’s big, but not THAT big, and you end up going “fuck, crow or raven, can I get it to hold a banana for scale?”
And we had a huge problem—or rather, I had a huge problem, as the primary birder—in China because the Thick-Billed Crow has (surprise) a very thick bill and is only a smidge smaller than a Common Raven (23” vs 25”) and we were in an area of range overlap.
Read 4 tweets

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