Don't Count Your Chickens...
...unless they're on Kauaʻi or Key West. (Last in our chicken series)
(Listen to the radio version here.)
I was just down in South Florida for a week. We started out in Key West, oddly enough the only American place other than Hawaiʻi where birders are allowed to count Red Junglefowl on their life lists. The original human settlers of Hawaiʻi, the Polynesians, brought Red Junglefowl that were extremely close genetically to the genuinely wild junglefowl of Southeast and South Asia, and the Hawaiian environment suited the chickens just fine, so those that escaped domestication established wild populations. When the American Ornithologists’ Union first included Hawaiian birds on their Checklist in 1983, they included the Red Junglefowl as an introduced but naturalized species.
The original chickens in Hawaiʻi may have arrived via the Polynesians, but hundreds of years later, European and American settlers brought along their own chickens—the same species, but chickens that had been domesticated for hundreds of years, a great many of them domestic breeds that looked nothing like natural Red Junglefowl. Now it’s very hard to distinguish between the longstanding wild population of Hawaiian chickens and those whose immediate forebears escaped farms, so birders are only supposed to “count” on our life lists ones that look like wild junglefowl and live in wild areas on Kauaʻi.
Florida’s native humans survived for eons before Red Junglefowl arrived there with Spaniards starting in the 1500s. Like Hawaiʻi, the South Florida environment was close to what junglefowl were naturally adapted to, so feral individuals could do just fine there, too. But those chickens had been in domestication for hundreds of years, and the Spaniards apparently bred many of them specifically for cock fighting. The feral chickens on Key West, most of which look as much like wild Red Junglefowl as those on Kauaʻi, are very similar genetically to those in Cuba. When I wrote to Eben Gering, one of the authorities probing the genetics of wild and domestic chickens on both Kauaʻi and Key West, he noted:
I’m very confident the Key West population harbors legacies of strong selection for cockfighting. The males there’s are *way* more aggressive than in Bermuda (with Kauai intermediate, but still far far less aggressive vs Key West). The wildlife rehab center on Key West routinely receives roosters that have chunks of skull busted out of males by cranky territorial neighbors.
In both Florida and Hawaiʻi, feral chickens certainly competed against some native species, and their omnivorous eating habits may have contributed to losses of eggs and chicks of ground-nesting birds, but that was something virtually all native birds could have adapted to if not for European and American settlement triggering so very many other massive changes to the landscape in terms of agriculture, development, and water usage, substantially reducing the amount of natural habitat for many species.
In many ways, feral chickens in Hawaiʻi and Key West are like another feral species, one that originated in Southern Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia but today can be found throughout the world. Rock Pigeons were brought to all fifty states by humans, and feral pigeons were flying about and breeding in the wild long before the American Ornithologists Union existed. Like the Red Junglefowl, the Rock Pigeon has been domesticated for thousands of years, selective breeding producing many breeds that look virtually nothing like the wild parent species. An estimated 260 and 400 million Rock Pigeons can be found on the planet, most flying free.
People who raise chickens in Duluth must meet city standards for restricting them to their own yards. Unlike feral cats, the chickens who do escape captivity here don’t last long thanks to our severe winters and the fact that Duluth is along a major raptor migration route—I know several people who gave up on keeping chickens specifically because they couldn’t protect them from hawks.
Domestic chickens may not have established wild populations anywhere in the US except Hawaiʻi and Key West, but they outnumber pigeons here and around the world by at least two orders of magnitude—there are over 33 billion chickens in the world. They may not saunter about on Peabody Street as Rock Pigeons do, but they and their eggs can be found all over my neighborhood, at least in refrigerators and on dinner tables.
An old expression tells us we’re not supposed to count chickens before they hatch, but the American Birding Association doesn’t let us count them even then, except on Key West and in Kauaʻi. I can attest that in both places, the chickens don't give a hoot.
I was in K'auai and was woken up by those roosters every morning.(feral). We were told they were lose after a tsunami many yrs ago. The population is enormous.. We saw them everywhere. I used to listen to For the Birds daily in Wi for yrs. Love your work and passion.