Colours Standards Report August 2026

The ANBC is taking on a new approach to Colours and Standards consultation. The C & S group comprising the ANBC C & S coordinator and the State and Zone coordinators will meet quarterly to discuss all things colours and standards.

The first meeting was mid-July where the new pictorial and melanistic spangles were discussed. Good progress was made on the pictorial where previous pictorials from Australia and the WBO were reviewed. Guiding our thinking were considerations of what we have achieved in this country to date, welfare concerns especially relating to directional feather and ensuring that our new pictorial will be aspirational but achievable in a reasonable timeframe. We will continue to refine the requirements for the pictorial over the next few months with the view to producing a document that will guide both judges and exhibitors for the years to come.

There was a good discussion around melanistic spangles that will also continue over the coming months as we gather more documents and, more importantly, breeding results. I would encourage anybody breeding melanistic spangles to document their breeding results and share them with their state C & S coordinators. Understanding the nature of the mutation will help us to understand how we approach the compilation of a standard or standards for the variety.

Peter Thurn
Colours & Standards Coordinator