- Jul 31, 2012
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I totally have to disagree with you. Take a trip to Miami Florida for instance. They have a huge feral chicken problem and they are breeding and surviving just fine. My egg chickens? I don't have to feed them at all in the summer. They ignore the food in their dishes and are off foraging the whole day. They come back to the coop to lay. Their only threat is predators not a lack of food and they give me more eggs than me and three or four other families.It is not really a wonder. Our pioneers in early days would just let loose a bunch of bantam chickens into the adjacent forest near their homesteads. ( Bantams can survive free range only). Whenever they could, they would catch them and eat them. They would keep resupplying the forest, kind of similar to what we do with fish from hatcheries released into lakes and rivers. (restocking) . The chickens obviously were on the small size, but that was better than no chickens at all. Jungle fowl chickens are the original chickens from which all others were developed. I had one a while back, She was an excellent flyer, medium size, and not very meaty. Could survive in the wild with no problem. The later developed large fowl breeds are huge chickens that need to be fed by Keepers/Farmers. They would not survive in the wild on their own.