Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read online

  His visit to Burma on the eve of World War I had nothing to do with chicken history, however. It was part of an urgent mission by conservationists to study and record pheasants that faced extermination thanks to women’s hats and rubber tires. Hundreds of thousands of acres of prime pheasant habitat were then being cleared across South Asia to make way for vast rubber plantations to supply the burgeoning bicycle and auto industries. Meanwhile, the feathers of exotic birds were a popular fashion statement for hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans, and egrets, warblers, terns, and herons across the United States were decimated as a result. A small protest movement that began in Boston when two socialites met for tea and founded the National Audubon Society grew into a potent political force that led Congress to ban sales of native bird plumes.

  The large millinery industry promptly turned to the jungles of South Asia, home to all but two of the world’s forty-nine pheasant species, including the red jungle fowl. This family of birds has elaborate and brilliant plumage unmatched by other avian species. Bird lovers feared that entire pheasant species would vanish before they could even be cataloged. “Members of this most beautiful and remarkable group are rapidly becoming extinct,” warned Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the New York Zoological Society. “The record of their habits and surroundings, which is important to the understanding of their structure and evolution, will soon be lost for ever.” Osborn and other worried New Yorkers turned to Beebe, the wunderkind of ornithology.

  Beebe had dropped out of Columbia University to work at the recently opened New York Zoological Park in the Bronx, and he was only twenty-two years old when he designed its innovative flying cage. While other American zoos kept birds in small pens, this one was a breathtaking, open chamber, 150 feet long and 75 feet wide, soaring 50 feet into the air above a stream, plants, and trees. The flying cage became a central New York attraction after its 1900 inauguration. Rail-thin and with a dashing mustache, Beebe was adept at combining science with adventure, high society, and entertainment. He befriended Theodore Roosevelt, liked costume parties, flew World War I air missions, starred in documentaries, and descended three thousand feet into the ocean in a bathysphere. “Boredom is immoral,” he once told a friend. “All a man has to do is see.”

  In 1902, Beebe married a wealthy and talented Virginia bird-watcher and novelist named Mary Blair Rice. With Osborn’s encouragement and with financial backing from a New Jersey industrialist, they set out in 1909 from New York Harbor aboard the Lusitania, the ill-fated liner sunk six years later by U-boats that helped push the United States into the war against Germany. For seventeen months, the couple worked their way across the southern girdle of Asia, avoiding bubonic plague, fleeing a riot in China, and contending with bouts of Beebe’s periodic depression. Their marriage did not survive the difficult trip. Upon their return home, Rice left for Reno and filed for divorce, accusing her husband of extreme cruelty. He went on to publish the four-volume A Monograph of the Pheasants.

  The couple discovered that mass slaughter indeed threatened numerous species, given rubber plantations, the market for feathers, and Chinese adoption of a diet heavy in meat. “Everywhere they are trapped, snared, pierced with poisoned arrows from blowpipe or crossbow, or shot with repeating shotguns,” Beebe wrote dispiritedly. He saw huge bales of silver pheasant feathers stacked in the customs house in Burma’s capital of Rangoon and complained that Nepal and China exported large quantities to the West, despite new laws forbidding their import. The fast-expanding rubber plantations, he added, severely reduced habitats for the remaining birds.

  Beebe was particularly taken with the red jungle fowl, “the most important wild bird living on the earth,” given that it is the living source of all the world’s chickens. He watched with astonishment as one fowl rocketed out of the brush to anchor safely on the high branch of a tree, while another soared across a half-mile-wide valley. “There is no hint of the weak muscles of the barnyard degenerate,” Beebe states with a biologist’s condescension toward domestic animals. Most of the red jungle fowl’s days, however, are spent on the ground, feeding in the early morning and late evening and resting in the shade during the heat of the day. That rhythm was in synch with many early farming societies in the tropics.

  Little was known of the bird’s diet, so Beebe spent a good deal of time probing the digestive pouch near its throat—the crop—and picking through the guts. He found mostly remnants of plants and insects. Although an omnivore, the bird prefers grasses like bamboo shoots and live bugs to grain, herbs, or carrion. This would have made it, unlike crows or sparrows, a friend to early farmers.

  Beebe also was struck by the sedentary and social nature of red jungle fowl, qualities that also likely appealed to ancient peoples. The birds rarely stray from their home turf, and mothers care for their chicks for nearly three months before they leave to form their own social groups. “It is seldom that I have seen or have heard of a solitary cock or hen,” Beebe writes. Unlike other pheasants, jungle fowl prefer to roost together at night. The favored place to sleep is usually a bamboo stalk bent low. That might seem a poor choice, since it is closer to the ground than a tree branch and liable to sway in the wind, but few predators can climb the smooth stalks. An isolated tree is another favorite perch, less vulnerable to nighttime attack. While most birds chafe at being locked up at night, the red jungle fowl’s sleeping habits and vulnerability lend themselves to a chicken coop.

  The bird’s predators are, after all, legion. Minks and jackals like the taste of wild chicken, as do hawks and eagles, while lizards and snakes enjoy the eggs. The fowl is not, however, a prolific egg producer like its domesticated sibling. Each hen lays an average of a half-dozen each year in carefully concealed ground nests, fewer eggs than many other pheasant species. Nor is the bird larger and fleshier than many of its cousins. The copious meat and eggs that mark the chicken today are solely a result of human intervention over millennia and not a characteristic of its ancestor. But the male red jungle fowl’s ability to sense danger and crow a warning might have served as a handy alarm system for early human settlements.

  There are three other species of jungle fowl—the gray, the green, and the Sri Lankan—and Beebe closely observed these as well. All share similar traits, but they live in a much more restricted geographical area than the red, which thrives from five-thousand-foot mountainsides in the chilly Himalayan foothills of Kashmir to the steamy tropical marshes of Sumatra. From Pakistan to Burma to the Pacific coast of Vietnam, the red jungle fowl is at home in a remarkable variety of habitats, and has evolved into several distinct varieties specific to those climates. This capacity to adapt to a wide variety of climates and food gave the red jungle fowl the right stuff for a journey that would take it to almost every conceivable environment on earth.

  Beebe concludes that the red jungle fowl is made of a mysterious and unique kind of “organic potter’s clay” that sets it apart from other birds, what he called “latent physical and mental possibilities.” He was writing at the dawn of genetics, and the same year that he watched the wild cock strut across the Burma clearing, Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University—Beebe’s would-be alma mater—published a series of seminal papers in Science based on fruit fly studies that demonstrated the existence of chromosomes that carry specific genetic traits. The research helped launch the modern genetics revolution that Darwin had laid the foundation for a generation before.

  The fowl’s unusual plasticity, Beebe theorized, let humans mold it into the “beautiful, bizarre, or monstrous races” of the domesticated chicken. Plumage could be lengthened or shortened, colors and their patterns quickly altered, and the size of limbs extended or reduced. While the wild bird has a tail less than twelve inches in length, that of one Japanese breed stretches twenty feet. A domesticated rooster’s comb alone can take more than two dozen distinct forms. Males could be altered to become fierce fighters with fewer feathers for an opponent to grasp. Wit
h tinkering, the two-pound red jungle fowl morphed into the twenty-ounce bantam and the brawny ten-pound Brahma, while a White Leghorn hen can churn out an egg a day.

  The red jungle fowl, in other words, is nature’s Mr. Potato Head. Its daily rhythms, diet, adaptability, and sedentary and social nature were the perfect match for humans. In 2004, a huge international team of scientists called the International Chicken Polymorphism Map Consortium decoded and published the chicken genome, the first genetic map of a farm animal and potent proof of the bird’s economic importance. The researchers discovered that the vast majority of the 2.8 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms—selected pieces of the genome that each represent a difference in a single DNA building block—likely originated before domestication. The modern chicken, in other words, is still mostly red jungle fowl; although that conclusion was based on the assumption that the red jungle fowl genes that were studied were in fact those of purely wild birds.

  The results offered practical ways for breeding companies to create even larger and meatier birds through crossbreeding for particular genetic traits, but they provided frustratingly little insight into the changes that transformed the wild creature into a barnyard staple. Later research hinted that a mutation prompting fast growth might have put the red jungle fowl on its domestication track thousands of years ago, but there is little evidence that humans bred the bird, at least initially, primarily for food. What scientists need is a reliably pure red jungle fowl to tease out the minute differences that make one bird wild and one domesticated.

  This is not as easy as it sounds. By World War I, exotic bird feathers on hats were out of fashion and the rubber boom had crashed. This gave the pheasants of South Asia, including jungle fowl, time to recover. During his expedition, however, Beebe noticed in passing that some male red jungle fowl lacked eclipse plumage, a set of purplish feathers that appear when a male sheds its red-and-yellow neck feathers and central tail plumage in late summer. In fall, the bird molts completely and grows a new set of feathers. Chickens skip the eclipse plumage phase, so Beebe saw this as a sign of “an infusion of the blood of native village birds” into the wild genome.

  Nearly a century passed before another biologist realized that the ancestor of the world’s most prolific bird and humanity’s most important domesticated animal was slowly and inexorably vanishing, a victim of its own evolutionary success as Asia’s expanding chicken flocks threatened to overwhelm the wild bird’s genetic integrity. Its passing could blot out the first steps of the chicken’s journey forever. But thanks to an obscure U.S. government program designed to quiet the clamor of Southern hunters, the red jungle fowl may yet reveal its story.

  Importing wild animals from distant and exotic lands is a practice as old as civilization. Early monarchs in the ancient Near East boasted of their menageries of lions and peacocks, a Baghdad caliph sent Charlemagne an elephant, and a fifteenth-century Chinese emperor showed off his giraffes to astonished diplomats. Since the vast majority of species are not as adaptable as chickens or humans to a new climate, diet, or geography, most transplanted animals quickly perish.

  One of the few successful imports of a wild bird to the United States is China’s common pheasant, also known as the ring-necked pheasant, which was brought from the Far East and proliferated in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains in the 1880s, though it steadfastly refuses to live south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Many other alien species that proliferated proved disastrous, such as European starlings and English sparrows, which eat crops, harass indigenous birds, and can bring down a jetliner. In the early 1900s, at the same time that Congress moved to protect native species from hat fashion, lawmakers banned import of potentially harmful species.

  By the Great Depression, native wildlife of all sorts, from deer to ducks, was rapidly disappearing, and alarm spread among conservationists, hunters, and the gun and ammunition industry. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt signed bipartisan legislation providing the first regular funding for wildlife research designed to understand and address the problem. World War II put a halt to this work, and the emergency only deepened a decade later when millions of returning veterans took to the woods with high-powered rifles. Hunting seasons around the country were sharply curtailed and the entire Mississippi River flyway was set off-limits. “American wildlife management officials now are facing what is unquestionably the gravest crisis in the long and colorful history of wildlife conservation on this continent,” warned the president of the International Association of Game, Fish and Conservation Commissioners in an Atlantic City ballroom in 1948.

  The chief of New York’s game conservation department, a self-­assured and newly minted PhD named Gardiner Bump, proposed a radical solution. A hulking man over six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds, Bump argued that importing wild game birds from Europe and Asia to North America, if done scientifically, would replace the depleted stocks of native species. The director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was wary of introducing a potential pest, since he led an organization created largely as a result of the outcry against alien species. Desperate for ideas in the face of impending catastrophe, he reluctantly agreed.

  Bump and his wife, Janet, set out on a two-decade-long search for the best candidates, traveling from Scandinavia to the Middle East. None of the dozens of game bird species they shipped to the United States adapted and proliferated on their own. Meanwhile, Bump’s colleagues and superiors in Washington were under increasing pressure from Dixie lawmakers to find a bird to satisfy their disgruntled hunting constituency. Southerners had mainly duck and quail to hunt, and they were eager to bag more challenging game fowl like pheasant. In 1959, the Bumps rented a house in a well-to-do suburb of New Delhi with a backyard large enough to accommodate bird pens, betting that on the subcontinent they could locate a suitable Southern candidate.

  Old British hands consulted by Bump urged him to focus on the red jungle fowl, which was secretive, smart, and fast and liked a warm, humid climate in a wooded environment. Bump assured Washington that he was on the trail of a promising species, but Indian civil servants denied his request to send an official expedition into the Himalayan foothills that were prime red jungle fowl habitat. In those days, India was friendly with the Soviet Union and wary of Americans close to its sensitive borders with Pakistan and China. Undeterred, Bump went on a private hunting holiday. Exploring the wooded hills and forests of northern India, where the Ganges River gushes out of the Himalayas, he was impressed by the challenge posed by the fowl. It was, he wrote, “almost as difficult to hit on the wing as the ruffed grouse.” He decided to send out locals to net the birds and collect their eggs.

  Bump had one overriding concern. He needed truly wild birds that would survive predators in the American South. If his imports were tainted with domesticated chicken genes, they might lack the shy and sly qualities of the fowl observed by Beebe, and therefore not last long enough to procreate. To avoid this problem, he directed that all the eggs and chicks of red jungle fowl had to be collected at least three miles from the nearest village. Later he maintained that most of the specimens were taken ten to fifteen miles from the closest human habitation, though verifying this claim a half century later is difficult.

  The biologist died decades ago, but Glen Christensen, who worked with him in India as a young ornithologist, is still alive and pushing ninety. “Hold on, I have to get my oxygen,” he says when I call him at his home in the Nevada desert. After a pause, he returns to confirm that Bump was well aware of the crossbreeding problem. Christensen laughs at my idea of a hardy and enterprising outdoorsman roaming the wild hills of the Hindu Kush with rifle and knapsack. “He wasn’t too involved with the trapping. In fact, he wasn’t much of a field man,” he adds, taking another pause to inhale. “He sat in his compound in Delhi like an old country squire.”

  More difficult than trapping the birds was finding a way to get them from New Delhi to New York, a seventy-three-hund
red-mile journey. Flights from India to the United States required a series of plane changes and took a total of four days, a logistical nightmare for anyone shipping wild birds. In 1959, Pan Am inaugurated Boeing’s new 707 jet to reduce this time to one and a half days on the same aircraft. The Bumps held a lavish dinner party for Delhi airline agents, serving cocktails in the backyard among the sturdy pens while explaining their effort. Impressed, or possibly just drunk, the Pan Am agents agreed to help.

  By May 1960, the Bumps were collecting red jungle fowl and their eggs brought by trappers. They hatched the eggs under domestic hens, placed them in backyard pens, and fed them a poultry mash commandeered from the American exhibit at the World Agricultural Fair. Thanks to Pan Am, seventy were sent to four Southern states via New York. Later, in 1961, forty-five more were shipped to the United States. Meanwhile, state game managers bred the birds in special hatcheries, raising ten thousand red jungle fowl for release across the South, starting in the fall of 1963. The couple was hopeful that at last they had finally found a solution to the game fowl crisis.

  The released birds, however, appeared to vanish in the Southern wild, victims of predators, weather, disease, or some deadly combination. Back in the States, Bump traveled peripatetically among state hatcheries for the rest of the decade, antagonizing game managers with his increasingly desperate demands. His critics, always legion in the conservation field, carped loudly that the effort to introduce foreign species was a waste of time and money. Wildlife populations had rebounded in the 1950s through a careful combination of hunting limits and habitat protection. The more insidious new threat, particularly to wild birds, was pollution. A former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee named Rachel Carson, who was mentored by William Beebe, published Silent Spring in 1962. The bestseller propelled the environmental movement toward understanding and preventing the chemical pollution and habitat destruction that were taking a toll on native species.