The Long Tail

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 metres. The bird was over eight years old at the time of measurement; its tail had been growing, almost continuously, for the bird’s entire adult life.

The Onagadori is, in every meaningful sense, a manufactured bird. Its tail length is the result of a single genetic mutation that delays the moult — the bird’s tail feathers do not, in a normal year, fall out and regrow. Instead, they grow continuously, season after season, for as long as the bird lives. The mutation has been known in the Tosa region for at least four centuries, and the bird has been the subject of careful breeding and protective regulation since the seventeenth century.

The Tosa Bird

The Onagadori takes its name from the old province of Tosa — the southern coast of the island of Shikoku. The bird is mentioned in the Kōyō-gunkan, a local history compiled in 1672, as a curiosity kept by the daimyō (feudal lords) of the Tosa domain. The lords were enthusiastic fanciers; the breeding of long-tails became an aristocratic art, and the birds were the subjects of formal exhibitions by the early eighteenth century.

The mutation that produces the non-moulting tail was understood, in a practical sense, centuries before the science of genetics. The breeders of Tosa knew that the character was heritable — that a cock with the long tail would produce offspring with the long tail — but they did not know that it was the result of a single dominant gene. (Modern genetic work places the gene in the autosomal region responsible for feather-moult regulation; the precise locus is still a matter of research.)

The Onagadori was designated a Natural Monument of Japan in 1952. The designation protected the bird from the crossbreeding that had, by the early twentieth century, begun to compromise the purity of the Tosa stock. Today the Onagadori is kept by approximately 150 breeders in Japan, with a breeding population of perhaps a thousand birds. It is one of the rarest of all domesticated breeds.

The European Phoenix

The Phoenix is the European cousin of the Onagadori — a long-tail fowl developed in the late nineteenth century by the German breeder Houdry from Onagadori stock imported from Japan. Houdry’s birds did not, however, retain the non-moulting mutation of the original Tosa bird; modern Phoenixes have tails of about 90–150 cm at maturity — extraordinary by European standards, but a fraction of the Onagadori’s 10 metres.

The Phoenix’s name is itself a piece of symbolism. The mythological Phoenix — the bird that rises from its own ashes — is the emblem of immortality and of resurrection. The European long-tail fowl was, its breeders claimed, a bird that never died — that renewed itself feather by feather, year after year, without the periodic shedding of the ordinary moult. The name stuck.

The Aesthetics of the Single Ornament

The Phoenix and the Onagadori are the only breeds of poultry kept for a single ornamental quality. The fighting breeds are kept for gameness — a complex of physical and temperamental traits. The egg breeds are kept for production. The meat breeds for growth. The long-tail fowl are kept for the tail — for the single visual effect of a feather of extraordinary length, growing year after year, carried by a bird that must be housed on a high perch and on clean bedding, that must be fed carefully to keep its plumage unsoiled, that exists purely for the visual eye.

It is the most extreme form of the fancy — the discipline that breeds for type rather than for use. The fancy has, since the early nineteenth century, been one of the principal engines of the preservation of poultry breeds. The Modern Game, the Phoenix, the Yokohama, the Onagadori, the Sumatra, the Sebright, the Polish — these are birds that exist because the fancy decided they should exist. Without the fancy, most of them would have gone the way of countless other breeds that disappeared when the agriculture that supported them collapsed.

The Long Crow

The Japanese fancy kept another class of bird alongside the long-tail fowl — the long-crower, a bird bred not for the tail but for the crow. The Tomaru holds its crow for over twenty seconds; the Koeyoshi for nearly thirty. The crowing of a long-crower is not the strident, repeated cry of the ordinary cock — it is a sustained, low, resonant note, often ending in a long, slow diminuendo. The birds were kept by the aristocrats of the Tokugawa court for the quality of their song, in much the same way that the Song Canaries of the Harz mountains or the Persian tumblers of the Persian court were kept for the quality of theirs.

The long-crower tradition survives in Japan today, kept by a small number of dedicated breeders. The birds are exhibited at the annual keawate — the long-crowing competition, in which the duration of the crow is measured to the second.

The Tail Without End

The Onagadori is the bird of a single, almost absurd, ornamental excess — a bird whose tail is longer than the room in which it is kept, a bird that must be kept on a high perch so that the tail may hang without damage, a bird whose plumage is the primary thing, and whose everything else is secondary.

It is also, perhaps, the purest example of the breeding impulse. The bird was not bred for food, or for work, or even for the pit. It was bred for one thing — a thing that is itself useless — and the breeding has been carried, across four centuries and many generations of breeders, with a fidelity that would be impossible to justify by any practical criterion. The Onagadori exists because some people decided that a tail was worth the trouble.