As a result of the efforts by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust over more than 30 years, traditional breeds of farm livestock have been preserved for the future, with conservation measures introduced whenever their numbers have been giving cause for concern. Several have safe homes in Oxfordshire, writes Elizabeth Edwards.

The trust has on its ‘watch-list’ about 70 native breeds. These include cattle, sheep, pigs, two breeds of goats and poultry.

In 2008 and 2009 there have been a number of breeds added to the list of poultry on which it is necessary to keep a watching brief. “This is not because their numbers are particularly low, but because the trust is aware of the threat of possible outbreaks of diseases such as avian flu,” said the trust’s head of conservation, Dawn Teverson.

For breeds affected by foot-and-mouth disease, such a situation can result in their numbers being geographically rather numerically compromised, if for instance all the flocks of a cattle, sheep or pig breed are in the same area of the country, Dr Teverson explains. “Therefore we encourage a more widespread keeping of rare native breeds,” she says.

Of the poultry breeds added to the watch-list, several are or have been kept by members of the Cotswold Pheasant and Poultry Club, an organisation which has a number of members in Oxfordshire.

The club has a membership of approaching 200. It holds monthly meetings, with speakers on poultry matters and related topics . It holds its own annual show and its members show their birds and their eggs at other events.

The club has been in existence for more than 30 years, specialising in the breeding, exhibiting and preservation of breeds of poultry, ducks, geese, turkeys and pheasants.

Among its exhibitions this year will be one, for the first time, at Cogges Manor Farm Museum, Witney, on May 30 and 31.

At this time of the year most members are either setting eggs under broody hens, or hatching out chicks in incubators, often breeding new stock from the bloodlines of flocks which they have kept for a number of years.

Retired farmer, Colin Ponting, who lives in the Vale of White Horse, has kept Light Sussex poultry for 20 years and this year’s chicks will be from the same family lines. He also specialises in Wyandottes and, at the club’s annual show in February, won the trophy for Best in Show with a Silver-laced Wyandotte hen.

New broods are raised in the spring of the year, with the aim that by the time the main show season begins in the early autumn the birds will have reached the age when their plumage is at its very best.

At the Cotswold Club’s own show, the runner-up to Mr Ponting, with Reserve Best in Show, was Simon Harvey, pictured below, who lives near Coleshill. The bird which brought him success was a Black D’anvers cockerel. This is one of several closely-related Belgian breeds which he keeps, the others being D’uccle and the D’watermael. He also specialises in the Houdans, from France.

He is one of the younger members of the club. Now aged 18, he has been interested in poultry-keeping since his father gave him his first group of hens for his sixth birthday.

Recently he has been asked to take on the registration for the Houdans breed for the Rare Poultry Society.

He also organises the exhibition which the Cotswold Club runs at the village open day held in Coleshill each September. Among the new breeds added to the Rare Breeds Survival Trust’s ‘critical’ list is the Croad Langshans, one which a Cotswold Club member in west Oxfordshire, John Marflett, has kept in the past.

Mr Marflett looks back on some 40 years of poultry-keeping. He remembers a time when many kept a few hens in gardens to provide families with a regular supply of eggs and he now sees signs of a return to this. The club can be contacted on (01666) 510248 or at www.cotswoldpoultryclub.co.uk