Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read Online Free Page A

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 thewing 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-hundred-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