If you are interested in blues, like I am, it is the female, on top for a change, that is the key. She has what they call lacing or edging i.e. all the blue feathers are edged in a darker shade of blue. He though is the actual show winner and is definitely a beautiful blue with his dark flowing mane and great tail feathers.
It is listed as critical and a lot of that is because of several factors: the long tail (requires special care), the aggressive or flighty personality and three, probably the worst of all, the lack of egg laying.
They really are an ornamental breed and are very distinctive and beautiful, with long flowing curves, abundant feathering, and a rich green sheen. Originally from the Isles of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo in Indonesia, the breed developed as a landrace and tend to reproduce very seasonally like a lot of the Jungle Fowl birds and tend not to lay eggs at all in the winter. In fact the Jungle Fowl line as a whole lays about 20 eggs a year! These are not birds for someone who wants a morning easy-over. Nor because they are small are they "meaty".
In the wild, Sumatra chickens were found in a few color varieties, including black breasted red, though black was predominant. It is the Black Sumatra that was embraced by the poultry fancy; with its long, flowing, low tail, beetle green sheen, gypsy-colored face (purple to black), black shanks with yellow soles, and its multiple spurs – often having three spurs on each leg, so the black melanotics are doing better than it's blue versions shown above.
The Sumatra was first imported into the United States in April 1847 by J.A.C. Butters of Roxybury, MA and there were subsequent importations by other in 1850-52. The breed arrived in Germany in 1882 and, there, was at first called Black Yokohama.
Nelson A. Wood of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., began with the breed in 1885 and is given much credit for refining the Sumatra chicken to enhance its flowing feathers and for increasing its productivity.
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