What is the Delaware state bird?

Why is Delaware's state bird a chicken?

Because of a nickname from the Revolution. A state historical marker near Felton, put up in 1932 and replaced in 1959, tells the story: “Tradition says Delaware soldiers received name ‘Blue Hen’s Chickens’” from the men of Captain Jonathan Caldwell, of Colonel Haslet's regiment, who had with them game chickens famous in Kent County for their fighting, “the brood of a certain blue hen” (Delaware Public Archives).

The marker calls it tradition, and the old histories hedge too. J. Thomas Scharf's History of Delaware (1888) dates the nickname to 1776 and says Caldwell's chickens were “said to be of the brood of a certain blue hen, renowned through the country-side” (Scharf, 1888).

When the regiment came home at the war's end, Scharf wrote, the “Blue Hen's Chickens,” a nickname “which the Delawareans had been honored with since the beginning of the war,” went back to their lives as citizens.

When did the blue hen become Delaware's state bird?

On April 14, 1939. That day an act of a single section was approved, “adopting the ‘Blue Hen Chicken’ as the official bird of the State of Delaware” (Laws of Delaware, vol. 42, chapter 128).

The chapter's printed heading has a slip of its own: it reads “BLUE HENS CHICKEN.”

Today the Delaware Code says it in one sentence: “The blue hen chicken is the official bird of the State” (Delaware Code, Title 29, chapter 3). The same chapter puts the bird on the Governor's flag, whose staff is topped by “a model of a blue hen’s fighting cock.”

Is the Blue Hen a real breed of chicken?

Not an officially recognized one. “While Blue Hens come from English gamecock stock,” the University of Delaware wrote in 2016, “it is not an officially recognized breed of chicken.”

Its blue doesn't breed true, either. A retired professor who worked with the university's flock for 40 years explained that two blue birds give chicks that are about 50 percent blue, 25 percent white splash and 25 percent black.

A true Blue Hen, the university's Messenger said in 2003, is “steel blue, not the electric blue of YoUDee,” the university's costumed mascot, with accents of red, brown, rust, black or white. Today's flock descends from a strain created by H. S. Hallock du Pont in the 1960s and is not related to the Revolutionary War birds.

Why does this page show an English game cock?

Because we found no old painting of Delaware's own birds. The Blue Hen isn't a standard breed, and we found no plate of it in the old poultry books. The nearest documented type is the English blue game cock, the stock the university says Blue Hens come from.

Harrison Weir's plate is captioned “First Prize Blue Game Cock” and “The Fisheries Exhibition, Aquarium, Westminster,” so it shows a prize winner at a London show. He signed it in 1901, and it was printed in The Poultry Book, edited in New York by Willis Grant Johnson and George O. Brown in 1903 (The Poultry Book, vol. 1). The cock and the two blue hens behind it are English show birds, not Delaware's.

Where can you see a Delaware Blue Hen chicken in Delaware?

At the University of Delaware. Its College of Agriculture and Natural Resources keeps a flock of 20 Blue Hen chickens on the University of Delaware South Campus, UDaily reports, and the easiest way to see some may be a home football game: three members of the flock attend home games in their custom-made moveable coop.

On the University of Delaware's farm, and on the sidelines. The university's name came first: it began using it in 1911, when its yearbook was called The Blue Hen, and Delaware named its state bird only in 1939 (UDaily, 2022). UD teams have been the Fightin' Blue Hens since 1911, the 2016 story adds.

The first live bird at a game came in 1931, the University Archives say: cheerleaders borrowed a rooster from a local farmer, dressed it in wing covers with a Delaware D and kept it on a leash. It was not actually a blue hen.

Today's sideline birds have names, chosen in a 2017 contest: Captain Cluckers, Private Poultry and Corporal Doodle-Doo (UDaily, 2017).

What does a Blue Hen chicken look like?

FeatherSite, a poultry breeds site, describes a rooster with orange and yellow feathers on the head, neck and saddle above a steel blue body, and says the shanks should be willow. Blue Hens come in blue, black and splash, with a single comb, BackYardChickens notes. A rooster weighs around 5 pounds and a hen 4.

Does Delaware have a second state bird?

Yes, since 2025. An act approved on July 16, 2025, made the red knot, a shorebird, “the official migratory bird of Delaware” (Laws of Delaware, vol. 85, chapter 86).

Its reasons are written into the act: the Delaware bays are “a critical stop” on the red knot's migration, “up to 90 percent of the Red Knot subspecies Rufa” can be found there in a single day in spring, and “horseshoe crab eggs are an important food source for Red Knots.”

The horseshoe crab has a title too: it has been Delaware's official marine animal since 2002 (Laws of Delaware, vol. 73, chapter 326).

Does any other state have the blue hen chicken?

No. Delaware is the only state with the Blue Hen Chicken. One other state chose a chicken: Rhode Island, whose state bird is the Rhode Island Red.

Delaware's neighbors chose wild birds: Maryland the Baltimore Oriole, Pennsylvania the Ruffed Grouse and New Jersey the American Goldfinch.

Questions about the Delaware state bird