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 AgriculturalFair. 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.
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. âThey are going to assassinate the jungle fowl,â he warned his junior colleague, I. Lehr Brisbin. âSave what you can.â
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 fauxColonial 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.
Heâs 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. âIt just dropped dead?â he is saying into the phone. âDid you freeze him?â Pause. âWell, if your bird died it isnât going to bother me as long as you freeze him.â 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 worldâs 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 governmentâs Savannah River Site, where nuclear engineers made tritium and plutonium for