Pre-Plucked Chicks Draw Attention in Petaluma

Petaluma, once known as California’s chicken capital, has won more fowl fame--two pullets born without feathers.

A neighbor helped them survive the cold by making them tiny clothes with Velcro fasteners.

The naked chickens came out of a clutch of 14 eggs in the backyard hen house of Jane Gianini, a real estate saleswoman who has gotten offers from a Southern California county fair to show off her poultry oddities.

There are laboratory strains of “scaleless chickens,” but the Petaluma ones are unusual because they were born featherless under hen-house conditions.

“We’d be definitely interested in them for scientific purposes,” said Francis Bradley, a poultry researcher at the University of California, Davis. “They have a lot of uses in terms of experiments.”

But Gianini, whose grandparents were chicken ranchers in Petaluma, where the industry has declined in recent years, has no plans to ship them to a lab. She said she wants to see if the birds will produce featherless offspring.