Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (3 page)

The red jungle fowl, in other words, is nature's Mr. Potato Head. Its daily rhythms, diet, adaptability, and sedentary and social nature were the perfect match for humans. In 2004, a huge international team of scientists called the International Chicken Polymorphism
Map Consortium decoded and published the chicken genome, the first genetic map of a farm animal and potent proof of the bird's economic importance. The researchers discovered that the vast majority of the 2.8 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms—selected pieces of the genome that each represent a difference in a single DNA building block—likely originated before domestication. The modern chicken, in other words, is still mostly red jungle fowl; although that conclusion was based on the assumption that the red jungle fowl genes that were studied were in fact those of 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 “an infusion of the blood of native village birds” into the wild genome.

Nearly a century passed before another biologist realized that the ancestor of the world's most prolific bird and humanity's most important domesticated animal was slowly and inexorably vanishing, a victim of its own evolutionary success as Asia's expanding chicken flocks threatened to overwhelm the wild bird's genetic integrity. Its passing could blot out the first steps of the chicken's 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 China's 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. “American wildlife management officials now are facing what is unquestionably the gravest crisis in the long and colorful history of wildlife conservation on this continent,” warned the president of the International Association of
Game, Fish and Conservation Commissioners in an 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 the
wing 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 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 Agricultural
Fair. 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. “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.