Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read online

  In early 1970, as the nation celebrated its first Earth Day and President Richard Nixon prepared to organize the new Environmental Protection Agency, Bump picked up the phone in his Washington office and called a young biologist in South Carolina with a keen interest in red jungle fowl. The foreign game program was about to be canceled, and the remaining birds kept for breeding at state game facilities in the South would soon be destroyed. “They are going to assassinate the jungle fowl,” he warned his junior colleague, I. Lehr Brisbin. “Save what you can.”

  Now in his midseventies, Brisbin lives with his third wife in a tony suburban neighborhood not far from the nuclear weapons laboratory where he has worked for half a century, just off a street lined with faux Colonial houses and well-tended lawns. His driveway begins like the others, and then abruptly turns into an unpaved track descending into thick woods. A box turtle wearing a radio collar lumbers past as I ring the bell and Brisbin calls for me to come in.

  He’s sitting barefoot on the parquet floor of the foyer with a green knapsack and maps strewn around him. On the hall table behind him, a stuffed fox in a radio collar stares directly at me. “It just dropped dead?” he is saying into the phone. “Did you freeze him?” Pause. “Well, if your bird died it isn’t going to bother me as long as you freeze him.” He hangs up, grabs a wooden cane leaning by the door, and hoists his small, wiry frame upright. Brisbin has agreed to take me to see the descendants of the wild chickens that he rescued from destruction, birds that may prove to be the last of the world’s truly wild red jungle fowl.

  His first job as an ecologist in the late 1960s was to determine if chickens could survive the trip to Mars. To do this, he put a squawking fowl into a metal box and lowered it into a deep lead-lined pit containing a low-level radiation source at the government’s Savannah River Site, where nuclear engineers made tritium and plutonium for weapons of mass destruction. Repeated exposure for a few minutes each day simulated the environment of outer space, beyond the protective blanket of the earth’s atmosphere. The ninety birds he studied proved remarkably hardy even after a month of significant exposure to gamma radiation. None died. Growth rates slowed, but the ­skeleton remained largely unaffected except for a slightly shorter middle toe.

  Poultry, he concluded, could survive the interplanetary trip. He published his findings in the same month that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface. A bird accompanied those astronauts on their July 1969 mission to the moon, albeit in the form of freeze-dried cream of chicken soup. NASA managers dreamed of sending live animals with astronauts to settle the Red Planet, envisioning roosters crowing during a pink Martian dawn as self-sufficient pioneers established humanity’s first extraterrestrial beachhead. Dogs and cats could wait, but chickens and their eggs were essential to the venture. The ecologist’s research for the space agency was part of that grand plan, which never took off.

  As a graduate student at the University of Georgia in Athens, Brisbin had studied the growth rate of chickens through their entire life cycle. The bird can live a decade or even two. Since those grown for meat or eggs are slaughtered at a young age, however, researchers knew little about the middle and elderly years. Brisbin realized that it would be useful to compare the chicken’s life cycle to that of its wild ancestor, and he dreamed of going to India to see the wild chicken in its native habitat. Just as NASA never made it to Mars, Brisbin never got to the subcontinent. But a year after publishing his paper on ­outer-space chickens, he got Bump’s anxious call.

  Alerted to the birds’ plight, Brisbin hopped into his Ford station wagon and drove two hundred miles to a Georgia game station, where he loaded up the car with a hundred red jungle fowl eggs. Two months later, he wrote Bump that he was raising thirty-five healthy young red jungle fowl in his chicken pens in the shadow of the nuclear facilities. He learned through trial and error that they were an unusually skittish lot, and he avoided touching the birds and limited their contact with people. A year later, despite his expertise and precautions, only eight birds were left. Two colleagues from the University of Georgia gave him sixty-nine additional red jungle fowl from the state game farm in Alabama, from the same stock that Bump had brought from India. That infusion helped stabilize the flock.

  In 1972, Brisbin was transferred to a desk job in Washington. He could not take the fowl to the capital, but he also couldn’t find anyone willing to take care of the temperamental birds. The Bumps had retired to their upstate New York farm, ecology colleagues at Savannah River scoffed at Brisbin’s hobby, and nuclear engineers were embarrassed by the presence of low-tech fowl on their high-tech campus. Then, “out of the blue, Isaac Richardson called,” says Brisbin. An eccentric loner and wealthy owner of a beef-and-pork slaughterhouse in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Richardson sold meat for profit but raised exotic birds for pleasure.

  Having heard of Brisbin’s plight, Richardson went to Savannah River that June, took a dozen birds home, and reported back that they were thriving. Encouraged, Brisbin put the rest of his birds in a shallow box padded with foam so they wouldn’t bash themselves to death and drove them to Alabama. It was August in the Deep South and he didn’t have air-conditioning, so “I left at dusk and drove all night,” he says. After dropping off the fowl at dawn, he turned his car north to Washington.

  Richardson proved a master in the difficult art of raising and breeding red jungle fowl. Three years later, he had expanded the flock to seventy-five. For the next three decades, he kept it healthy and isolated from other fowl to avoid diluting its genetic makeup. He gave birds to other amateur ornithologists, but most of those quickly succumbed to disease or stress. Even Beebe’s New York Zoological Park in the Bronx found them too difficult to manage. Richardson had some magic touch, and his extraordinary accomplishment achieved legendary status among the small circle of people aware of the skill and devotion required to maintain these difficult birds.

  Brisbin eventually returned to South Carolina and studied the rate at which chickens scratching in the radioactive Savannah River Site soil—and later, poultry exposed to Chernobyl’s radioactive brew—could shed that toxicity. (He found that they do, and quickly.) He also published articles on radiocesium contamination of snakes, wood ducks, and feral hogs, and spent years researching alligators that lived in the hot-water plumes of the Savannah River’s cooling plants, which earned him footage on Marlin Perkins’s popular television show Wild Kingdom. He didn’t raise red jungle fowl during those intervening decades, but Brisbin says he always remembered what Bump had told him during that 1970 phone call. “Someday,” the New York ornithologist had prophetically warned, “they might be the only ones left.”

  A quarter century later, Brisbin noticed that a special symposium on tropical Asian birds was planned for the 1995 American Ornithologists’ Union meeting in Cincinnati. “I thought, wow, here’s a chance to wave the red jungle fowl flag,” he says. His paper’s title—“Is the Red Junglefowl One of the Most Endangered Birds in Southeast Asia?”—was designed to provoke.

  The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies three of the world’s four jungle fowl as in potential danger. The exception is the red jungle fowl, which lives in much larger numbers than its sibling species across South Asia and is rare only in the crowded city-state of Singapore. Brisbin argued not that red jungle fowl were disappearing but that the wild stock was losing its genetic integrity. It was species death by introgression—the mixing of genes—rather than physical extinction.

  This is not a popular issue among conservationists, since physical extinction rather than genetic introgression is the overwhelming threat to celebrity wild animals like blue whales, Siberian tigers, and polar bears as well as tens of thousands of less beloved species. The wild Muscovy duck is threatened by crossbreeding with domestic mallards, while the limited populations of wild dogs around the world increasingly mix with feral and domesticated varieties. Plants also face challenges; wild rice strains
, for example, are dying out across Asia. Brisbin and several other ecologists point out that chicken, duck, and rice are critical parts of humanity’s food supply, and that ensuring the genetic survival of their wild ancestors therefore is an important and prudent endeavor.

  “I wanted to see if anyone would jump up and argue with me,” says Brisbin. His strategy worked when the biologist Town Peterson from the University of Kansas sprang up in the conference room to insist that introgression was unlikely to have a major impact on the wild bird. The two decided to collaborate to determine the truth. Since neither is a geneticist and sequencing was in its infancy, they needed a trait that provided a single clear physical difference between the wild fowl and the barnyard variety. They settled on eclipse plumage, since ornithologists knew that a full-blooded wild male sheds its red-and-yellow neck feathers and central tail plumage in late summer for a temporary ensemble of purple plumage, while chickens do not. As Beebe remarked, the presence of these purple feathers was a reliable sign that an individual bird was free of domesticated genes.

  The effort took four long years. Searching through dusty drawers and musty storage rooms in nineteen museums across the United States, Canada, and Europe, they came up with 745 red jungle fowl specimens collected over two centuries. By comparing the dates, seasons, and locations in which the specimens were collected, the scientists uncovered a distinct and disturbing trend. Eclipse feathers start disappearing from specimens dating back to the 1860s in Southeast Asia, and this seems to spread west over time. By the 1960s, as Bump was collecting his birds, eclipse plumage began to vanish almost entirely in the last western redoubts of northern India. This change, Brisbin and Peterson believe, was not simply a natural variation within the wild population. Specimen tags suggested that many of those lacking eclipse plumage were taken from areas where the domesticated chicken was plentiful. Northern and western India, where Bump had concentrated his efforts, could be the wild bird’s last stronghold.

  In a joint 1999 paper, the two researchers warned that the “genetically pure wild-type populations may be severely threatened,” and that red jungle fowl studies based on existing stocks in zoos or in the wild “are likely to be tainted with domestic genes.” That called into question decades of studies comparing the wild fowl with chickens in order to flesh out how, when, where, and why the chicken was domesticated. Alarmingly, the red jungle fowl, “so important economically and culturally to humans, is apparently in danger of genetic extinction.”

  Leggette Johnson’s farm on Gold Finch Road in Cobbtown sits amid the flat cotton fields of northeast Georgia, a two-hour drive south of Brisbin’s South Carolina home. On one side of the modest house is a spacious fenced-in area full of long pens taller than a man. Johnson meets us at the gate under an overcast autumn sky. With the wary look and the paunch, drawl, and overalls of the quintessential Southern good old boy, he is one of the few people in the United States successfully raising jungle fowl, and his flock includes descendants of the birds collected by Bump and cared for by Richardson.

  “You go in there and they’ll go crazy,” he says, pointing a stubby finger at a large wire pen. It is a statement, a warning, and a dare. Three birds are edging nervously to a far corner. One sports what looks like a little white turban above its small, dull brown body. Dental floss, Johnson explains. A hawk swooped down a month ago. Though the wire foiled the predator, the intended prey—a female red jungle fowl—shot against the cage in an instinctual attempt to flee. Her head split open, so Johnson retrieved some floss from the bathroom medicine cabinet, grabbed the dazed bird, and sewed up her wound while sitting on an upturned white plastic feed bucket.

  Escape is always on their minds. Johnson points at the largest of the three birds huddled together behind the wire a dozen feet away. Against the monotone tan of the two hens, the rooster is a showy mass of blue and red and yellow that glows in the overcast. He bolted one day when the cage door was not shut quickly enough and was on the loose for three months, remaining near his hens but long foiling attempts at capture. “I couldn’t come anywhere close,” Johnson says. “If I did, he would haul ass.” The fowl trusted no human, save for a neighbor’s two-year-old boy in diapers, who could walk right up to the liberated animal but obviously posed no threat to the rooster’s freedom.

  To get to the pen with the red jungle fowl, Johnson wades through an adjacent cage with other equally wild birds. Elegantly tailed pheasants and plump quail scatter as we walk through, more confused than distressed. “These I can feed out of my hand,” he says as they dart around our feet. “But not those,” he adds, pointing at the three huddled red jungle fowl. “People think you’re crazy when you tell them this, but if you get them really excited and catch one, it will quit fighting and limber up. Dies of heart failure, I guess.”

  On closer inspection, the brown of the two hens has a reddish hue with delicate black stipples on the neck. Their beaks are tiny, and they lack the spurs and combs and wattles of the foppish male. I decline Johnson’s offer to let me accompany him into their cage, since I don’t want to be responsible for giving such rare specimens a heart attack. There are only a hundred or so of this strain left on earth.

  Johnson shrugs, adjusts his cap, undoes the latch, and steps gingerly inside. An explosion of blurred wings alters the air pressure and I involuntarily jump. When the farmer exits the coop moments later, the birds are huddled even tighter against the far corner in a posture that seems to mix abject terror with haughty resentment. When I ask him how this bird became the domesticated chicken, he doesn’t answer but leads me to the other side of the yard.

  The Georgia farmer has one of the few collections of all four jungle fowl in the United States. The females all tend to be plain and brown and lack combs, the better to avoid detection when incubating their eggs on the forest floor. The roosters, splashed with vibrant colors, are more dazzling to bird eyes, which have four color cones to our three. Darwin explained such extravagance as an arms race among males in order to appear more appealing to their potential mates. Scientists now say that they are also trying to impress their competitors. Like the plumed helmets of ancient Greek warriors or the bright pantaloons and turbans of the nineteenth-century Zouave soldiers, livery can dazzle and psych out the enemy.

  Johnson leads us first to a cage containing the Sri Lankan jungle fowl native to that teardrop-shaped island off the southeast coast of India. The rooster and hen move cautiously to the back of the pen, but they don’t panic. The male is similar in size and shape to the red, but with a yellow-orange palette with a splash of yellow in the comb. The next is the gray jungle fowl of southern India, and the rooster races back and forth in its cage on black legs, rustling its black-and-ocher feathers set on a grayish background with a bit of yellow on the neck. This hen, like the others, is plain, but has yellowish legs.

  In the next pen is a green jungle fowl. Its natural home is on Java and Bali, islands of today’s Indonesia, more than two thousand miles east of Sri Lanka. This rooster stands strangely immobile, and stares at us with an unnerving intensity. He seems confident in his magnificent plumage, which is the most dramatic of all jungle fowl. His body shades from the color of long-exposed bronze to an emerald green. Feathers at his throat are a sky blue and bright violet, with splashes of ocher and electric yellow, and his comb shades from light blue to deep red.

  What’s odd, Johnson says as we stand in front of the motionless green jungle fowl, is that these three sister species are skittish, but not suicidally so. He’s never had to use dental floss on the birds on this side of his barnyard. Nor do the grouse, quail, partridge, and golden pheasant in the other pens approach the wild and untamed spirit of the red jungle fowl. He tries to avoid going into the pens with the reds more than once in three days to limit their trauma.

  The unusual nature of these red jungle fowl recently drew the attention of Leif Andersson, a biologist at Sweden’s Uppsala University who has pioneered DNA sequencing of
domesticated animals as a way to track their genetic past. He was part of the team that published the chicken genome in 2004. As Brisbin had decades earlier, Andersson realized that he needed a reliably wild chicken to compare with the domesticated variety in order to map the differences more accurately. In 2011, he visited Johnson’s farm to take a look at these unusual animals and sample their blood. The DNA of the Richardson birds, now being sequenced in Andersson’s Uppsala lab, could help unlock important clues to the chickens’ murky history, particularly if they prove to be among the last with an undiluted genome.

  On our way back to South Carolina, Brisbin muses on the mystery of chicken domestication. Biologists are still arguing over when, where, and why the bird left the jungle for the backyard. Thousands of years ago, somewhere in South Asia, it merged with human society. Our farming ancestors may have welcomed an animal that feasted on weeds and pests, hunters may have captured it in the forest and brought home live birds that eventually were tamed, and foragers could have found unhatched eggs and incubated them artificially. Brisbin believes, however, that only a genetic mutation that turned off the fowl’s natural skittishness could have paved the way for the more placid modern bird. “There’s a five percent chance that when you hold one it will die,” he says of Johnson’s jungle fowl. This shift from wild creature to barnyard chicken—possibly just a random turn of the genetic dials—was a dramatic transformation of the animal, with big implications for our own species.