3. Good Organic Gardening - May-June 2016 AvxHome.in

Australian Langshan | FEATHERED FRIENDS
Full-size Australian Lanshan
and bantam. Owners adore
the friendly bantams
Words & photos Megg Miller
Which chook breed is best? If
you go looking among the
various types, you’ll be sure
to find one you like — but
will it put eggs on the table?
There is one purebred that can give the ISA
Browns of the world a nudge when it comes
to egg output. The Australian Langshan is the
top choice for sustained egg lay. It’s a very
docile bird that enjoys great success on the
show bench and its unusual utility properties
don’t seem all that affected by concentrated
selection for exhibition points.
Many breeders take pride in conserving
the utility side of their fowls, so the breed’s
numerous strains produce pullets that lay
outstandingly.
Well-kept secret
Aussie Langshans are only now becoming
backyard birds. They should be better
known but they simply haven’t received the
commercial support that pushed the Australorp
to the forefront and made it famous.
For many decades, too, the Aussie
Langshan wasn’t well known in the southern
states. If you were a Victorian or South
Australian, you’d have had to look very hard to
locate breeders.
Langies, as they are affectionately
called, were northern birds; there was an
unsubstantiated belief they did better in warmer
climes. Southern states were for big-bodied,
heavy-feathered breeds such as the Sussex.
Better communication and more travel
have enabled birds to be shared around and
now Australian Langshans are well distributed
Australia-wide.
Matter of identity
If you look for Langshans online, you will
discover there is a family of them. We’re
careful in this country to identify our
interpretation of the breed as Australian
Langshan. For many decades, it was called
Chinese Langshan because of its origins
but after 80 years on Australian soil, it was
renamed Australian Langshan.
Also in this country are Croad Langshan, a
distant relative of our Aussie Langshans and
a whopping big bird of impressive stature.
Overseas there are Modern Langshan, longlegged
specimens with a keen following.
The Croad and the Modern are interesting
fowls but we’re concentrating on the Aussie
Langshan because of its suitability to
backyard food producers.
Chequered history
Originally from the Nantong region of China,
Langshans were introduced to Australia
sometime around 1900. A Sydney-based
steward working on steamers trading with
Shanghai collected a few Chinese fowl, found
they were great layers and so sought them
out on each subsequent trip.
These small, black fowls were reminiscent
of Croad Langshan, a popular breed that had
been taken to England in the 1870s. Croads
had impressed their new owners with winter
laying and their large, purple-brown eggs.
The small, black hens, once introduced
here, were passed around and one
enterprising owner entered a flock in the
1906 laying competition at Hawkesbury
College. Entered as Chinese Langshan, the
birds astounded everyone, their output over
the two years of the trial establishing them as
outstanding layers.
This led to much surreptitious crossing
with Black Orpingtons, the leading layer of
the day. The end result was the development
of the Australorp.
An octogenarian who worked for the
Department of Agriculture remembers
sorting day-old commercial chicks back
in the 1940s and finding many of the
Australorps had feathered legs, a sign that
Langshan had been bred into parent lines,
probably to improve egg lay.
The Australorp went on to become a
A Sydney-based steward working on steamers
trading with Shanghai collected a few Chinese fowl,
found they were great layers and so sought them
out on each subsequent trip.
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