The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Red Jungle Fowl: Ancestor of the domestic chicken

Red Jungle FowlAs we start thinking outside the box when it comes to chicken care, it helps to look at what chickens really are.  Most folks believe that chickens were domesticated from the Red Jungle Fowl which currently lives in southeast Asia. 

Red Jungle Fowl roosters look just like Rhode Island Reds to my untrained eye but the hen is far less conspicuous.  They act a lot like domesticated chickens too, dust-bathing, crowing, and so forth.  One point of interest is that these are not birds of open meadows --- Red Jungle Fowl seem to prefer bamboo forests for their territories.  That could explain why shade is such an essential ingredient in a chicken yard on a hot summer day.

This post is part of our Chicken Trivia lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries:




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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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