American Gamefowl

[fat brown hen]

Unfortunately, my bulldog puppies have become the best selectors. The chickens that survived 2025 were the ones that could outfly the dogs. Those left are bullet proof. They even range deep into the swamp with no losses. I started the year with something like 75 free-range mixed games and “terrorfowl.” I’ve ended with about 22 adults on free range.

So 75 adult chickens went into the farmyard. 22 came out. The bulldogs took the rest, summer through fall, 2025.

Anyway…. we delivered the bomb.

Y'know, I've thought about doing something like that with my birds -- start with a lot and let Darwin sort them out -- but then I thought, why not simply hunt wild turkeys and grouse? Any "feral" chickens I breed will not come close to millions of years of natural selection.

And then I remembered that the reason I don't hunt, is because it's rather hard work with unpredictable results. I like having birds that I can rely on to be there the next day

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

Y'know, I've thought about doing something like that with my birds -- start with a lot and let Darwin sort them out -- but then I thought, why not simply hunt wild turkeys and grouse? Any "feral" chickens I breed will not come close to millions of years of natural selection.

And then I remembered that the reason I don't hunt, is because it's rather hard work with unpredictable results. I like having birds that I can rely on to be there the next day

Maybe it isn’t millions of years….

A lot of evidence is out there now that new vertebrate species arise naturally within a human lifetime. Speciation may be a fast process. We’ve only been paying close attention to the distinctions between similar species for a couple hundred years. My prediction is 200 years from now, we will see many subspecies varying substantially from the preserved museum specimens we have now.

Say jungle fowl are millions of years old. Did a blip of time of human selection really undo it? I would submit that whether junglefowl are millions of years old or 7k years old, all humans did was bury their wild genes. They aren’t excised from the genome. They’re just deactivated and subject to reactivation when appropriate.

My chickens have improved dramatically in terms of their survivability in the last 5-6 years. The more I take my hands off, the better they get in terms of toughness. The last 2 years have seen dramatic improvements first over disease and now top-tear predators. In previous years most couldn’t survive in my deep swamp after more than several weeks. Now it seems like the current flock can dive in deep. They’ve learned to use heavy cover to avoid the accipiters. They spend much of their time foraging under thick wild grape vine.

I don’t want to derail too much as that flock isn’t pure American game. Only a fraction of their genetics are American game. There’s Liege, aseel, red junglefowl hybrid, Old English game bantam, and Thai, all buried in there. They happen to look like American games. Now more than ever. I think that’s a testament to the body plan of bankivoid gamefowl being so close to the RJF phenotype. I think the flock even mixed together are going to end up looking like RJF as that type is starting to dominate.

 

[Wyorp Rock]

Her ego is writing checks her body can't cash, if you know what I mean.

Is she fence fighting or battling the hens? If you have a mature rooster that worth anything, he should intervene.

If she's fence fighting, block it off so she can't do that anymore, heal up her shredded feet and check for broken toes. Once healed, put her with the others and monitor.