This is Shimako, our striped girl. She’s grown so big that she burst her collar the other day. She recently came through her spay surgery just fine, so her belly is bald. She hasn’t a care in the world, and she’s bad at cleaning her face, so she always has a bit of sleep in her eyes.
Where chickens come from
Today I’d like to get a little technical, with Rex helping me explain. The topic: the ancestors of Hawaii’s chickens.
Chickens come from a wild bird called the red junglefowl, which lived in the Philippines. Humans tamed it to some degree and kept it as livestock, and it became the chicken. Somehow those birds made it to the Polynesian islands, and when Polynesians came to Hawaii by canoe, they brought chickens with them. Those were Hawaii’s first chickens, so chickens didn’t originally live here — technically they’re an introduced species!
The red junglefowl’s features are the red-orange feathers around the neck and the fluffy white feathers at the base of the tail, plus a fairly slender body and long legs. (Rex, stop wriggling!) Its original crow isn’t a long cock-a-doodle-doo that trails off — it ends short and stops. Heart’s crow is a little close. Did everyone just shorten their crows at the same time?
Rex isn’t a pure junglefowl, but like those forest birds he flies very well — just not for me today.
The hens
Ilima shows the hen’s pattern. She has fighting-bird blood, so her shape is a fighting bird’s, but her light brown feathers and the paler brown-gold gradation on her neck are very close to the original junglefowl’s colors. (She’s been complaining this whole time.)
Our most junglefowl-like hen is Nuts, who is grumpily doing her best to look like anything else. She’s small and brown with a nicely rounded bottom. If this shape had Ilima’s colors, that would be it! But they’re all mixed, so it’s hard to say.
Is the real one still out there?
Many of the red junglefowl in Hawaii aren’t pure, but their genes remain, so researchers come from all over to study them. Why not just keep them? Because however similar they look, they are wild birds at heart. Kept in captivity, they can die from stress or can’t be properly studied — they’re one of the creatures humans never managed to tame.
Even in places like the Philippines, wild birds have mixed with backyard chickens, so some wonder whether a pure red junglefowl still exists. Some of our chickens warm up to people easily and some never do; I wonder if genes play a part. I hope genuine red junglefowl survive somewhere. I’d love to see one someday!