How do you pick a winning chicken?

“It’s the condition. It’s the way it sits. It looks like a show bird,” longtime poultry judge Grahame Sharpe says of a particularly impressive Rhode Island Red in front of him. “That one’s not even in the same street. No real colour,” he says, pointing out another cockerel.

To the untrained eye, the birds being exhibited in the poultry competition at the Melbourne Royal Show – “our Grand Final” as one participant calls it – look pretty similar, at least at first glance. But if you look closely, you can see the subtle differences in the strength of their colouring, the shades of perfection in their feathers.

View image in fullscreen A curious Frizzle pokes its head out of the cage. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian

In poultry showing, every

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