Featured on PDR in the collection Unnatural Selection: Emil Schachtzabel’s Pigeon Prachtwerk (1906)

Those who deign to class pigeons as “rats of the sky” have clearly never seen a Pigmy Pouter. Nor, for that matter, a silver Jacobin, named because its ornate headdress (composed of a “hood”, “mane”, and “chain”) resembles the cowl worn by a sect of Dominican monks. Another breed of pigeons are actual nuns, cousins in kind to horsemen, barbs, dragoons, finnikins, and runts. As fanciful as their titles, the diverse appearance of these birds makes one wonder how they can all be classed as pigeon. The bug-eyed Budapest tumbler barely resembles the peacock-like fantail, the cropper, which can balloon its breast to softball proportions, or, indeed, the bizarre frillback, which, at first glance, appears tangled in a mass of perm-treated hair. In the mid-nineteenth…