19 : Sri Lankan Jungle Fowl

 

Sri Lankan Jungle Fowl - Gallas lafayetti

A historic post from the origin days of the Daily Bird. The task of migrating these posts would be a lot quicker if I didn't stop to read every one but then I am reliving moments and its filling with the juice I need to "get back out there". I am at least ironing out the spellos of a man in his very early forties who was in a distinct hurry to get a post up every day. 

Yes thi is a chicken. Along with 3 other distinct jungle fowl the grandaddy, no ancient "all-father" of all domestic chickens. They are part of the pheasant family and clearly this is the male bird given its striking plumage. The female bird will be brown and a little more drab in order to stand an even chance of sitting on a clutch of eggs on the ground for a couple of weeks.

This photo was taken in the Yala national park and if he looks a bit hurried you have to understand that he has mongoose, wildcats, jackals and leopards all perfectly willing to despatch him. This bird is endemic to Sri Lanka. At some point either Sri Lanka was cut off or an ancestor wildfowl made it onto the island and they went their separate course. It is not just plumage that makes a species - it will have a separate foraging and breeding strategy possibly all developed in balance with its surroundings. When people worry about free range chickens and looking after them its those scratching and roosting behaviours that they look to. The depressed chickens in those babies battery sheds could only dream of the high octane life that this bird lives. Yes he can run from a leopard - hence the blurred photo. 

So "all-father" chicken - I am assuming that the journey to the depressing broiler house began thousands of years' ago. Perhaps you should have kept running and not taken the spilt grain. If only you had have known what was in store for your ancestors. A contrarian argument is this the most evolutionary successful bird in the world. There are 30 billion domesticated chickens making up 12-14 % of the total number of birds on the planet. In terms of biomass (the mass or weight of the birds themselves in aggregate) they could constitute anything between 50 and 75 % of the total. So on the evolutionary scales of life in terms of passing on his genes, and in pound for pound terms the first chicken that hung around humans took the crown. 

I don't know anything about the history of the domestication of fowl but this bird was definately wild ! The Bear Grills of chickens. Keep running "all-father" chicken. I'd rather you fed a beautiful leopard than an obese middle aged man on his lunch break. 

I will leave you with the view from our tent flap that morning just to remind myself of what is out there. 

Sri Lankan Jungle Fowl - Gallus lafayetti

Yala National Park, Sri Lanka 15-18 April 2011