Starting at the beginning.....

Everyone knows what a chicken is, right? That most useful of domestic productions and, without a doubt, the single most important bird in the world as far as mankind is concerned.

This is an article in Discover magazine from June 1988, by Richard Conniff. They were well integrated into industrialized agriculture by then to "become our cheapest and most abundant source of animal protein."
More recently I read where more than ten billion chickens, mostly for meat, are produced in the United States alone in one year. So yes, I would say the chicken is right up there in importance. That's a lot of chicken McNuggets.

The chicken has been with us for a very long time, remains have been found in China going back 8,000 years. They have been carried by man everywhere outside the high Arctic, even traveling with the Polynesians to cross the pacific, actually reaching south America at least one hundred years before Columbus.

But maybe I'm putting the cart before the horse here, should give you a little personal background first.

I've been at this awhile, studying the fowl. When I was five back in 1952, we had just moved to the country from Buffalo, NY, and my father, wishing to expose us to a wide range of experiences, brought home a sitting hen from a neighbor. I can still remember seeing those baby chicks the day they hatched, so fascinating. I marveled at the colors, some black, some dark red, and a couple the expected yellow. That was it for me. I became fixated on the chicken.

I have to laugh when I think about this focus thing because it runs in my family, from my maternal grandfather, a civil engineer, to my mother to my brother and me. Then to at least two of my sons and daughter and two grandsons that I know of for sure. I am probably the worst of the lot, have never had a good working memory, very likely aggravated by the fact that I read way too early, got in the habit of always referring back to a word or name instead of trusting my memory.
As the twig is bent....

So, where were we? Origins. That's my interest, and not only the chicken, but the cow as well and a passing reflection on the other domestics. I suppose I could have become some kind of naturalist, always checking out the local fauna and things; fish, frogs, newts, clams. Loved watching things grow; animals, plants, kids. Maybe that's why I ended up with such a large family for this day and age, totally impractical for sure, but I wouldn't change it for the world. Seriously.


Anyway, I would imagine my chickens and the neighbor's cows as wild creatures. What were they like before man tamed them?

We had a local phenomena back then before dairy farm regulations got so strict known as barnyard bantams. They probably started out as pets somebody had dropped off. The farm was like it's own little contained ecosystem and it was a survival of the fittest. There was food enough and warmth generated by the cows in winter, and cats. I really doubt if the cats really did all that much to control vermin to any great degree, but I'm quite sure they drove the evolution of the feral bantams. They were great little mothers. All the wild instincts were there. And they could fly very well. Of course I would bring some home, picking them off their high perch over the cows at night.


I bred one of these hens to a 'game' rooster one year. She had just come off her nest in the small barn behind our house and was keeping her chicks very close. Our cat sought to investigate, the picture is burned into my memory to this day, the hen became a blur of wing and feathers, flew behind the cat right on it's tail clear around the barn and out of sight. Next thing I knew she was flying back, flying, not running, back to her babies.

The colors of the barnyard bantam were varied, but tended towards the so-called black breasted red of the ancestral Red Jungle Fowl. It is a sexually dichromatic pattern, only the cock is BBR, the hen being cryptically colored and the chicks with pretty chipmunk markings of their own.

I bred from the above game x bantam cross for several years, ended up with some outstanding birds not too different from the half-junglefowl pictured above with my granddaughter Mary.


To be continued....