The Codex
Volume I · No. 3 essays
The Encyclopedia
A folio of long-form essays on the gamecock and the cultures that bred him — drawn from primary sources, illustrated with hand-drawn plates, and grounded in six centuries of recorded history.
A Library of Voices
An ongoing editorial selection. Each essay is drawn from primary sources and illustrated with hand-drawn plates.
- Essay 0101
Anatomy of the Cock
Comb, hackle, saddle, sickle, spur — the vocabulary of a bird
The fighting cock has a vocabulary of its own — a precise, almost technical language in which the bird’s parts are named, counted, and judged. The vocabulary is centuries old, and it is the common property of every …
- Essay 0202
The Long Tail
Onagadori, Phoenix, and the breeding of a single ornament
The longest tail ever reliably recorded in a living bird belongs to a chicken. The bird was an Onagadori — a long-tail fowl of the Tosa province of Shikoku, Japan — and its tail measured, in 1972, an extraordinary 10.3 …
- Essay 0303
The Shape of Courage
How a single bird became the emblem of three continents
There is a bird on the standard of the Palmetto Regiment of the American Revolution. There is a bird on the coat of arms of Paraguay, on the flag of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, on the coinage of the Roman emperor …