Red junglefowl

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The red junglefowl, Gallus gallus, is a shy tropical bird of Southeast and South Asia, and its domesticated descendants are raised worldwide in their tens of billions. People keep them for meat, eggs, colourful plumage and companionship. Very few wild animals have been taken so completely into human life. The wild original still survives, though, and some zoos, parks and botanical gardens keep it for pest control, often beside Indian peafowl and helmeted guinea fowl. How did a wary forest bird become the most familiar farm animal on Earth? What does the original look like, how does it live, and when did the change begin? And what has all that human company done to the wild bird that stayed behind?

  91041

• 2. Rooster and Hen

  ›

  A male red junglefowl weighs around 1.5 kg, while a female weighs only about 1 kg. Both are much smaller than the domestic chicken, and the two sexes look strikingly different from each other.

  The rooster carries long, golden hackle feathers across his neck and back. His tail holds 14 iridescent feathers that shimmer blue, purple and green in direct light. Some of them are long and curved, growing up to 28 cm, and the whole bird can reach 70 cm in length. Colour shifts with the subspecies. Some males have golden yellow covert feathers from neck to lower back with greenish-black tails, while others are red with black tails.

  The hen is drab by comparison, and that dullness is useful camouflage. She has none of the long ornamental feathers that make the rooster so showy.

  On his head, the rooster wears a far larger comb and wattle than the hen. These fleshy ornaments tell rivals and potential mates that he is healthy. On the back of each of his legs, just above the foot, sits a sharp, bony spur. He uses it to defend himself against predators and to establish dominance in the flock.

  Around June, breeding adults moult into an eclipse pattern that lasts through October. The male's version brings black feathers on the back and small red-orange plumes scattered over the mantle. The hen's eclipse coat looks no different from her usual one, although her moult follows the rooster's calendar exactly.

  9262527

• 3. Naming the Bird

  ›

  In 1758, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus described this bird in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, calling it Phasianus gallus. He gave its home as "India orientali". Later scholars narrowed that vague address to Pulo Condor, also called Côn Đảo, an island off the coast of Vietnam.

  The genus came two years later. In 1760, Mathurin Jacques Brisson introduced Gallus, a name taken from the Latin word for a farmyard cockerel. The red junglefowl is one of four species in it. Older names linger in the literature, including bankiva and bankiva-fowl, and the bird is also called the Indian red junglefowl.

  Five subspecies are recognised today. The Indian red junglefowl, G. g. murghi, lives in north India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. The Burmese red junglefowl, G. g. spadiceus, ranges from northeast India to south China, the Malay Peninsula and north Sumatra. The Tonkin red junglefowl, G. g. jabouillei, occupies south China, north Vietnam and north Laos. The Javan red junglefowl, G. g. bankiva, is found on Java and Bali.

  The fifth is the Cochin-Chinese red junglefowl, G. g. gallus, the nominate subspecies. It lives from south Myanmar through Indochina. The Burmese form will matter again when scientists try to pin down where the first chickens came from.

  56789

• 4. Forest Edges

  ›

  From Pakistan in the west, the native range of the red junglefowl runs through India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. It continues east across southern China to Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Farther south it takes in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Timor-Leste. People have also released the species in Australia, the Dominican Republic, Fiji, Hawaii, Jamaica, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau and Puerto Rico.

  The bird does not seek out deep, untouched forest. It prefers disturbed ground and edges, whether natural or made by people, where food and thick cover are both close by. Nesting hens especially value that cover. Junglefowl use deforested land and regenerating forest alike, and they often turn up near villages or in regrowth after slash-and-burn farming. Areas burned to encourage bamboo attract them too, because edible bamboo seeds become easier to find.

  Plantations get a mixed verdict. In some places the birds are absent from rubber and other timber plantations, while elsewhere they live in tea and palm oil plantations. In Selangor, Malaysia, palm foliage gives cover, palm nuts give food, and insects and larvae live in and around the trees. The palms also offer roosts at many heights. Females with chicks favour low perches of about 4 m, while other adults climb as high as 12 m.

  Water matters less than one might expect. Red junglefowl drink from the surface when they can, but they do not need to. In north-central India they visit water holes often in the dry season, though not every bird on the subcontinent lives close enough to one. Where surface water is scarce, population densities may be lower.

  The menu is broad. Ripe fruit and seeds draw the birds to orchards, grain fields and bamboo stands. They mostly eat fallen items from the ground, but occasionally perch on a branch to feed on hanging fruit. Scores of plant species have been identified in their crops, along with grasses, leaves, roots and tubers.

  Animals are on the menu as well. Junglefowl catch arthropods, other invertebrates and small vertebrates such as lizards, and they may even eat mammal droppings. Termites are sometimes taken in bulk, and about 1,000 of them were found in the crop of one single bird. Adults eat more plant matter than animal prey, while chicks eat mostly insects, both adult and larval, and earthworms, with only occasional plants.

  910121518

• 5. Order at Dawn

  ›

  When one rooster announces daybreak, every other rooster within hearing answers at once. The crowing is governed by the bird's circadian clock. It attracts potential mates and warns other males that a breeding rival is nearby, and so a fight may be on the way.

  The order of the chorus is not random. Flocks keep a strict dominance hierarchy, and the top-ranking rooster always crows first. His subordinates follow in descending order of rank. Dominant males also tend to carry larger combs than the males below them.

  The wild bird's voice differs from the barnyard version. A male red junglefowl crows for a shorter time than a domestic rooster, and the call stops abruptly at the end. The call repertoire is complex. Junglefowl give separate alarm calls for predators in the air and predators on the ground, and other birds respond in the appropriate way.

  Beebe, an early observer, concluded that territories were rather small, especially next to those of some pheasants he knew. Collias and Collias supported this when they reported that neighbouring roost sites can lie as close as 100 m apart. Dominant males appear to defend territory against other dominant males.

  A typical flock holds one to a few males and several females. Males are more likely than females to be found alone. Compared with the domesticated chicken, the wild bird is wary of people.

  Grooming has a practical side. Red junglefowl bathe in dust to keep the oil in their plumage in balance, since the dust soaks up the excess and then falls away. Flying is rare for them. Most flights carry a bird up into trees or other safe high places at sunset, away from predators on the ground.

  212223335

• 6. Courtship and Chicks

  ›

  The display called tidbitting begins when a male finds food while a female is watching. He makes coaxing, cluck-like calls and bobs and twitches his head and neck. Again and again he picks up the morsel and drops it. The performance usually ends when the hen takes the food, either from the ground or straight from his beak, and sometimes the pair go on to mate.

  Dominant males try to keep exclusive access to the females, but the hens have their own opinions. In a free-ranging feral flock in San Diego, California, females chose to mate with subordinate males about 40% of the time.

  In many regions, breeding falls in the dry part of the year, usually winter or spring. That pattern holds in parts of India, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. Birds in palm oil plantations in Malaysia, however, have been recorded breeding all year round, and others elsewhere may do the same.

  The hen alone looks after the eggs and then the chicks. During the laying period she produces one egg every day. Each egg needs 21 days to develop. The chicks fledge after about 4 to 5 weeks, and at 12 weeks their mother chases them out of the group. Each youngster then starts a new group or joins an existing one.

  Sexual maturity arrives at 5 months, with females taking slightly longer than males.

  273334199

• 7. Becoming the Chicken

  ›

  Around 8,000 years ago, according to whole genome sequencing, people first domesticated the red junglefowl. The same work found that the event involved multiple maternal origins. The domestic form is classed as the subspecies G. g. domesticus, and its blood is not entirely red junglefowl.

  In 2012, a study examined mitochondrial DNA recovered from ancient bones in Europe, Thailand, the Pacific and Chile. It also used bones from Spanish colonial sites in Florida and the Dominican Republic. The authors concluded that the chicken came mainly from the red junglefowl, with later genetic input from the grey, Sri Lankan and green junglefowl. They dated domestication to about 8,000 years ago, in a founding flock within the bird's natural range. From there the chicken spread in waves to the east and west.

  A 2020 study fully sequenced 863 chickens from around the world and reached a sharper conclusion. All domestic chickens, it argued, trace back to a single domestication of the subspecies G. g. spadiceus in Southeast Asia, around 9500 years ago. The early chickens then spread across Southeast and South Asia. There they interbred with local junglefowl subspecies and formed genetically and geographically distinct groups.

  Other evidence complicates the picture. The Chishan site in China's Hebei province suggests domestication around 7,400 years before the present. Several studies now dispute a Chinese origin, pointing to unfavourable weather at that time. In the Ganges region of India, people were using wild red junglefowl as early as 7,000 years ago. In the Indus Valley, no domestic chicken remains older than 4,000 years have been identified, and the age of the chickens from Mohenjo-daro is still debated.

  The bird also went to sea. Beginning around 5,000 years before the present, early Austronesian peoples carried junglefowl from Maritime Southeast Asia to the islands of Oceania. Pigs and dogs travelled with them. Their modern descendants live throughout Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia.

  363935373

• 8. Borrowed Genes

  ›

  Research published in 2008 found that the gene behind the yellow skin of the domestic chicken most likely came from the grey junglefowl, not the red. That was surprising, because the other three Gallus species, the Sri Lanka, grey and green junglefowl, do not usually produce fertile hybrids with the red.

  A 2020 study analysed the whole genomes of the Sri Lanka, grey and green junglefowl. It found strong introgressive hybridisation in several populations of indigenous village chickens. The same study showed that 71-79% of red junglefowl DNA is shared with the domestic chicken. In Indonesia, a cross between the red and green junglefowl, known as the bekisar, holds cultural significance.

  Human closeness now threatens the wild bird. At forest edges, free-ranging domestic chickens are common, and interbreeding with them may dilute the wild-type genes. That could affect the species' distinct features and its adaptations to life in the wild. Deforestation and urbanisation have also driven declines in some regions. Hunting for food and the pet trade add pressure, especially where the bird has no legal protection.

  The wild form is still a real resource in its home range, supplying meat and eggs, and it is sometimes used in cock-fighting. Singapore lists the species as near threatened. The IUCN, looking at the whole range, classifies it as least concern.

  21364750