Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read Online Free
Author: Andrew Lawler
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 âan infusion of the blood of native village birdsâ into the wild genome.
Nearly a century passed before another biologist realized that the ancestor of the worldâs most prolific bird and humanityâs most important domesticated animal was slowly and inexorably vanishing, a victim of its own evolutionary success as Asiaâs expanding chicken flocks threatened to overwhelm the wild birdâs genetic integrity. Its passing could blot out the first steps of the chickenâs 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 Chinaâs 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. âAmerican wildlife management officials now are facing what is unquestionably the gravest crisis in the long and colorful history of wildlife conservation on this continent,â warned the president of the International Association ofGame, Fish and Conservation Commissioners in an
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 âan infusion of the blood of native village birdsâ into the wild genome.
Nearly a century passed before another biologist realized that the ancestor of the worldâs most prolific bird and humanityâs most important domesticated animal was slowly and inexorably vanishing, a victim of its own evolutionary success as Asiaâs expanding chicken flocks threatened to overwhelm the wild birdâs genetic integrity. Its passing could blot out the first steps of the chickenâs 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 Chinaâs 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. âAmerican wildlife management officials now are facing what is unquestionably the gravest crisis in the long and colorful history of wildlife conservation on this continent,â warned the president of the International Association ofGame, Fish and Conservation Commissioners in an
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