Developing My Own Breed Of Large Gamefowl For Free Range Survival (Junglefowl x Liege)

[TexasBlues]

Best of luck with your break from making content. I have a channel where I just document the chickens, no talking and it takes up time to film, edit, upload etc. and then when you get fans, they have a million questions.

 

[TexasBlues]

I agree it has been lost. I might have spoke on it before, but my family raised quarter horses and game chickens when I was kid. And they didn’t have coops or nest boxes or feeders.
I was shocked as an adult getting back into chickens that most people keep their chickens penned up and protected from the elements.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

Best of luck with your break from making content. I have a channel where I just document the chickens, no talking and it takes up time to film, edit, upload etc. and then when you get fans, they have a million questions.

I really enjoy the fan interaction. I’ve given away so many chickens and hatching eggs to people local to Florida. My Crackers and my American game bantams are all over the deep SE. I’ve rarely let the terrorfowl out.

I’ll keep this thread going. I’m not quitting the terrorfowl project. And I will keep my book in print as long as my publisher is interested. It sells about the same number of copies per day with or without my channel. It seems like my channel was not a major factor in its promotion.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

I agree it has been lost. I might have spoke on it before, but my family raised quarter horses and game chickens when I was kid. And they didn’t have coops or nest boxes or feeders.
I was shocked as an adult getting back into chickens that most people keep their chickens penned up and protected from the elements.

That was my experience. I didn’t know much about the “pit” side of gamefowl. My family did that sort of thing back in the day when it was legal here, but they kept that from me. I just knew that gamefowl were wild chickens that took care of themselves and many local farms raised them free-range. And I had my own childhood flock of a red brood cock and several wheaten hens given to me by an uncle.

In the time between childhood and later adulthood, gamefowl disappeared from American poultry popular culture. I couldn’t find anyone locally outside of family who knew what a “game chicken” was like I grew up with, and family wasn’t talking much because they feared my job (they were still probably “gaming” their gamefowl and figured it wouldn’t be good to tell the young prosecutor of the family about them).

When the last cocker died of Covid, they opened up and told me about the family history with gamefowl. I allude to this in the book. The lack of knowledge out there that’s easily accessible to the average person was a big motivation for why I wrote “Free-Range Survival Chickens.”

 

[RobG7aChattTN]

What I’ve done that’s different than other chicken-keeping internet personalities is that I recognized the knowledge of free-ranging rugged breeds has been lost on the current generation, and I packaged the knowledge and used my platform to disseminate it. Its not that there aren’t others who also understand how good gamefowl and gamefowl mixed are at being self-sustaining parallel to myself. They just haven’t been disseminating the information.

I know two people who have been trying to perfect free-ranging semi-wild birds for many years. The one guy moved but a few years back he went by his old neighborhood and said that he still saw some of his birds running around. The other guy has gone complete survivalist and doesn’t go on the internet at all. He’s told his rural Florida neighbors that they can shoot and eat any of his birds that they want as he feels they are well established. Both of them have traded birds with me over the years and all have some Grey and Ceylon Jungle Fowl in them. None of them have much size and are more like your Cracker Game Fowl. I don’t know how long those guys have been at it but I met them both about 9 years ago when I started my project and we first traded some birds. I’m going in the opposite direction and trying to make wild birds more domestic instead of trying to make domestic birds more wild. When I had REALLY wild birds I turned them out and they flew away never to be seen again! I guess if the bobwhite quail can’t make it here the tiny wild chickens can’t either.