Red junglefowl

Name and taxonomy

Carl Linnaeus described the bird in 1758 and called it Phasianus gallus. He gave the type locality as eastern India, and later authors narrowed it to Pulo Condor off Vietnam. Mathurin Jacques Brisson set up the genus Gallus in 1760, and the species sits there now. The Latin word gallus means a farmyard cockerel.

Older books call the bird the bankiva or bankiva fowl. German and Dutch names still use that word, as in Bankivahuhn. French speakers call it the coq bankiva and Spanish speakers the gallo bankiva. Five subspecies are recognised, from the Indian murghi in the west to bankiva on Java and Bali. The Burmese form spadiceus matters most, because the chicken appears to come from it.

Evolution and relatives

The genus Gallus holds four species, all of them Asian. The other three are the grey junglefowl, the Sri Lanka junglefowl and the green junglefowl. Crosses between the red bird and its relatives are usually infertile. Even so, genes have moved between the species over time. Farm chickens most likely got their yellow skin from the grey junglefowl, not from this bird.

A study of 863 chicken genomes traced every domestic bird to one event in Southeast Asia. It put that event at roughly 9500 years ago and named spadiceus as the source. The first chickens then spread east and west and bred with local junglefowl on the way. The domestic chicken shares 71 to 79 per cent of its DNA with this wild species. In Indonesia a cross with the green junglefowl is prized and is called the bekisar.

Appearance

The male is gold, red and dark maroon, with orange and a wash of metallic green. Long golden hackle feathers cover the neck and back. The tail holds 14 feathers that flash blue, purple and green in direct sun. The longest of them curve over and reach 28 centimetres. A white patch shaped like an ear sits on each side of the head, and the feet are greyish.

The female is drab brown, which hides her on the nest. She has no long ornamental feathers and only a small comb and wattle. A male's comb and wattle are much larger and advertise his condition. Each of his legs carries a sharp bony spur behind and above the foot. He uses the spurs against predators and against rival males.

A moult in about June puts the breeding male into a dull eclipse plumage. Black feathers cover the back, with small red and orange plumes across the mantle. The eclipse dress lasts until October. The female moults on the same timetable, but her plumage hardly changes. An eclipse plumage in a male is one sign of pure wild stock.

Habitat and range

The native range runs from Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh eastwards. It crosses southern China and takes in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. It reaches south into Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Timor-Leste. People have introduced the bird to Hawaii, Fiji, Samoa, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Australia. GBIF records the species in 208 countries and territories, which counts farm and feral birds too.

Junglefowl like broken country rather than deep forest. They use logged and regrowing woodland, bamboo stands and the edges of gardens and fields. Land burned to bring on bamboo attracts them, because bamboo seed is easy to find there. In Selangor in Malaysia they live in oil palm, which gives cover, fruit, insects and perches. Hens with chicks roost low, at about 4 metres, while other adults climb as high as 12 m.

The birds drink standing water when they can find it. They do not need it, and many live far from any pool. In north-central India they visit water holes often through the dry season. Where surface water is scarce, the population is likely to be thinner. Some plantations of rubber and timber hold no junglefowl at all.

Diet and feeding

Ripe fruit and seed draw junglefowl in, and they visit orchards, grain fields and bamboo stands. Most feeding happens on the ground, on fallen fruit and seed. Birds do sometimes perch on a branch and pull at hanging fruit. Crops examined by researchers have held the fruit and seed of many plant species. Grass, leaves, roots and tubers turn up in them as well.

Animal food matters too, and the birds catch many kinds of arthropod. Termites are taken in bulk, and about 1,000 of them were counted in one crop. Worms, other invertebrates and small lizards are all eaten. The birds even pick through the droppings of mammals. Adults eat more plant food than animal food, while chicks live mostly on insects and worms.

Behaviour and social life

A flock is usually one male or a few males with several females. Males are more often found alone than females are. Rank governs the group, and separate orders run among the males and among the females. A bird claims rank by raising its head and tail, and yields by crouching with the head turned aside. Chicks meet the pecking order in their first week, and the order settles in about seven weeks.

Dominant males hold small territories against other dominant males. Neighbouring roosts can stand only 100 metres apart. Hens feed under the guard of the top male. The strongest male has larger comb and wattle than the birds below him. When a top male dies, the next bird in line takes over at once.

Junglefowl bathe in dry dust to keep the oil in their feathers in balance. The dust soaks up the surplus and then drops away. Flight is short and heavy and serves only two purposes. The birds fly up to a safe perch at sunset, and they burst away from sudden danger. They are far more wary of people than farmyard chickens are.

Communication and senses

The male announces himself with the crow that everyone knows from a farmyard. A wild male crows more briefly than a farm rooster, and the note stops short. Crowing warns other males and draws hens at the same time. A body clock sets the timing, so the birds call at first light. The top male crows first, and the rest answer in order of rank.

The call system is complex for a ground bird. Separate alarm calls mark a hawk overhead and a hunter on the ground. Flock mates respond to each call in the right way. Males also perform a food display called tidbitting when a female is near. They cluck, bob the head and lift and drop a morsel until she takes it.

Taste is limited in these birds. They cannot detect sweetness at all. They can taste salt, and most of them dislike it. Sight and hearing probably do most of the work of finding food and spotting danger. The comb and wattle add a visual signal that other birds read as a health report.

Reproduction and life cycle

Most populations breed in the dry part of the year, in winter or spring. That pattern holds in India, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. Birds in Malaysian oil palm have been recorded breeding all year round. Dominant males try to keep the females to themselves. In one feral flock in San Diego, hens still chose subordinate males about 40 per cent of the time.

The hen probably scrapes her nest on the ground under thick cover. She lays one egg a day through the laying period. An egg takes 21 days to develop before it hatches. Breaking out of the shell can take a chick from ten to twenty hours. The hen alone cares for the eggs and the chicks.

Chicks fly at about four to five weeks old. At 12 weeks their mother drives them out of the group. They then start a flock of their own or join another one. Both sexes can breed at about five months, with females a little slower than males. In captivity the species has reached 30 years.

Predators and threats

Junglefowl roost in trees at night, which keeps them clear of hunters on the ground. Their alarm calls separate a threat from the air from a threat on foot. A cornered male strikes with the spurs on his legs. Chicks on the ground are probably the most vulnerable stage. A hen keeps her brood in thick cover and roosts low with them.

The larger threats now come from people. Deforestation and the growth of towns have cut numbers in some regions. Hunting for the pot and collecting for the pet trade press local flocks. Many countries give the bird no legal protection. The worst pressure is genetic, because village chickens breed with wild birds at the forest edge.

Population and conservation

The IUCN classes the red junglefowl as Least Concern. Singapore treats it as near threatened within its own borders. The species is widespread, so the count is not the worry. The worry is that pure wild birds are becoming hard to find. A survey of 745 museum specimens showed how far domestic genes have spread.

Male eclipse plumage is used as a marker of wild ancestry. It has been seen only in the western and central parts of the range. Studies in the 1960s found birds with eclipse plumage in north-eastern India. The species may already be gone from the far south-east of Asia and the Philippines. Dense human settlement keeps village chickens in constant contact with the wild flocks.

Relationship with humans

No wild bird appears to have changed human diets more than this one. People domesticated it about 8,000 years ago as Gallus gallus domesticus. Its descendants are now kept in their tens of billions for meat, eggs, feathers and company. Early Austronesian sailors carried junglefowl, pigs and dogs into the Pacific from about 5,000 years ago. Their birds reached Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia.

Archaeology sets other dates that are still argued over. Bones from the Chishan site in Hebei in China suggest about 7,400 years ago. People in the Ganges region used wild junglefowl as early as 7,000 years ago. No domestic chicken bone older than 4,000 years is confirmed from the Indus Valley. Wild birds are still hunted for meat and eggs inside the native range.

The wild form is used in cockfighting in parts of Asia. Zoos and botanical gardens keep junglefowl loose to control insects. They are often penned with peafowl or guineafowl for the same job. Feathers once filled pillows and mattresses. The wild bird is easy to keep and costs a smallholder almost nothing.

In culture and myth

Chinese tradition places the Rooster tenth in the cycle of twelve zodiac animals. It carries the earthly branch you, faces west and belongs to autumn. Its lunar month covers early September to early October, and brown, gold and yellow are lucky for it. Tibetan and Gurung calendars name a bird for that same position. Recent Rooster years include 2005, 2017 and 2029.

In French tradition the cockerel stands for the nation itself. A sculpture in Bordeaux made between 1894 and 1902 uses the bird that way. In Mediterranean and European tradition, a rooster could be used to read the will of the gods. The practice is called alectryomancy and often followed a ritual cockfight. Cockfighting was already practised in the Indus Valley civilisation, from about 2500 BC.