No Wings

When Peter Baumann was a student at Iowa State College, he got to thinking about chicken wings. Nobody really cares too much about eating them, he decided, and besides, they tempt chickens to fly the coop. So why not get rid of them?

When Baumann became a salesman of veterinarian supplies, he made it his hobby to collect freak chicks from hatcheries. A few of them were wingless; others had stubby wings. For twelve years he bred together the more promising freaks. Last week he showed about 400 wingless birds. To a non-practiced eye, the live birds do not look much different from ordinary chickens, but in place of wings they have a scarcely noticeable depressed area. Their drumsticks are somewhat larger than those of winged chickens and their necks are a little longer.

Baumann, now 32, is not a scientific geneticist, and he does not quite know how he developed his wingless breed. It was part luck and part persistence, he thinks. At first only a few of the chicks he hatched in his small incubator turned out wingless. Year by year, the proportion rose. Today, 95% of his chicks are wingless.

A major difficulty at first was infertile eggs. As every barnyard observer knows, mating roosters need their wings for balance. Baumann's early wingless roosters were so unstable that often only some 10% of the eggs would hatch at all. Baumann sometimes used artificial insemination. Eventually nature solved the fertility problem. Some of the wingless roosters gradually learned a new technique of wingless balancing.

Baumann, who lives in Des Moines, is optimistic about the commercial value of his wingless fowl. "Wings on a chicken," he declares, "are obsolete. The airplane characteristics of the usual chicken are a nuisance." His wingless chickens do not have to be confined by high wire fences, because their ceiling is about two feet. They are nice and quiet too, and the roosters don't fight much. They "dress -out" beautifully, says Baumann, "with white meat where the wings are on other birds. These chickens are the nearest thing to a schmoo of anything alive."

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