Historic Presence of Jungle Fowl in the American Deep South

[Az OEGB]

Thats what he is (OEGB x jungle fowl)except my jungle fowl are bigger than your crackers I made a mistake he is off off of a hen with light colored legs next time I will cross to blue legs I will get some more pictures tomorrow

 

[Az OEGB]

Got some more pictures for you

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

Yes he looks a lot more like a OEGB.

Here’s an example of a nice Cracker stag my brother recently produced that conforms well to the red junglefowl side of its ancestry:

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

In this separate thread I began 2 years ago I started with the idea that I would cross my Crackers to Liege, then when I got into
the project I decided instead to cross the Liege to aseel and cross the Crackers to American gamefowl:

https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...glefowl-x-liege.1424023/page-84#post-26582615

Since then I’ve made those crossings and decided to cross Crackers and American gamefowl into the Liege x aseel mixes. Separate from that line, I have bred in the American blood into my Cracker line and am now working on F2 Cracker to American crosses that are 3/4 Cracker 1/4 American. I will begin chronicling those results in this thread.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

So where I am now, I have two Cracker flocks on farm. One is down in the woods behind a half acre of electric net. There is one stag and 6 hens. The hens are pure Crackers, the stag is half-Cracker, half-American. The hens are mature and are all at least 1.5-2 years old. The stag will soon be a year old. The stag’s name is Erik the Red.

The habitat behind the net is a 1/4 acre of oak hammock and 1/4 of low-productive food plot. The habitat outside the net is several acres of oak hammock and bayhead swamp, as well as more food plot. I also have a deer feeder behind the net that throws laying pellets and scratch twice a day. The chickens are not cleaning up the feed so I will probably cut the portion down.

The net is only being semi-successful at keeping the chickens in. Morning and evenings they often fly over it and forage is the wider hammock, which I’m fine with in principle, but I like the net to discourage bobcat attacks and to give the hens a safe place to ground-nest. But I can foresee having to take the net down soon. They may be safer without it instead of a single hen being out and pacing it until a bobcat corners her. Although the cats do respect the fence. Currently the flock roosts both behind and outside the fence. I will have to run an electric line around the feeder to stop bear from tearing it up if I take the net down.

I have dispensation from the state wildlife agency to trap the bobcats. One in particular is quite large and has been a thorn in my side for about 5 years, being a major predator of my domestic turkeys.

The second Cracker flock is currently in a coop and is also headed by a half-American stag, and all of the pullets in that flock are 1/4 American.

 

[fluffycrow]

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

You're going to hate me for this Mr. Bullfrog. I apologize and accept your retribution.

In my opinion, the Cracker line cannot be improved upon. It is what it is through centuries effort by two master breeders, Mother Nature and Darwinian Selection. If their history is what you say it is, then it is a significant cultural treasure that should be protected from introgression, both intentional and accidental, at all costs.

So there it is. That's been bottled up inside me for two years.

Agreed, but here’s why I’m doing it:

I can’t confirm the origins of my current flock I got 4 years ago, which is something I’ve been upfront about in this thread. Back then I didn’t know how to talk about gamefowl with strangers and I accidentally scared off the old farm couple who had them. Early on I let them know my profession, and I think they became concerned that my questions about whether these birds where junglefowl or gamefowl sent them the wrong vibes. They would never tell me where they got them from or how long they had them after repeated contacts. The same is true of my great uncle, who was a cocker and would have known everything there was to know about the family birds. Because he was a cocker until the day he died last year, he wouldn’t talk to me. He was concerned if he said the wrong thing I would turn him in. Which has some precedence I suppose because his brother-in-law, my grandfather who raised me, busted him for poaching gopher tortoises where my grandfather was a game and fish law enforcement officer. When the great uncle died other family members more contemporaneous to his generation opened up some and told me a lot about how the birds were raised. As a child I was basically country walking the birds for my great uncle and didn’t know it. I was lead to believe the “game chickens” weren’t fighters, but in fact they were.

So I’m not sure if my current flock is of old Florida stock, hatchery junglefowl, a lost line of Frank Gary American game bantams, or highly inbred or mini line Blueface or McLean hatch American games that have RJF traits coming out through a genetic quirk. Nor do I know whether the old Florida birds were Spanish game mixes, junglefowl mixes, American game mixes, or all of the above. All I know is that RJF-looking gamefowl were common on Florida homesteads for a couple hundred years at least and they lived feral. Everything else is my speculation.

By recollection, my grandfather, and an elderly retired judge who has seen my flock, both agreed what I have is identical to what they grew up with and that the Cracker homestead gamefowl were only half the size of a traditional coop layer. Yet my own flock in childhood seemed larger in body to be more like small-sized American games, only slightly smaller than my layers. But I cannot account for how a child’s memory makes things seem larger that they were. Recently I saw some old family property and the shed and boat ramp on a lake that I remember to have been large clearly is not.

I don’t think a flock of red gamefowl on a Florida homestead 100 years ago could be improved on. But is that what I have? Or are my birds just an approximation? I don’t know.

Therefore, I’m ok with brining in American games that are also pretty close to the Cracker birds in look and identical in behavior and mixing them in to my flock. The Americans I am using grow up wild on a series of wood lots and are only brought in to tie cords and pens after adolescence. 4 years ago had I seen a flock of these Americans doing their thing in the woods, I would have said “yes l, that’s them!” Except for their size, which is quite large.

At the end of the day, a Cracker gamefowl should be a useful and practical bird. If it has lost some of its usefulness due to many years of inbreeding, it should have its blood refreshed. I feel the same about bulldogs. Bulldogs should be functional. If decades of pure breeding makes them something different than what they once were, then they should be outcrossed to restore functionality.

My little Crackers are just too small to be very useful as homestead fowl.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

Or to put it another way, whether my current flock are Crackers or not in origin, if they’re made into useful homestead birds that lay decent eggs, have hens that are big enough to whip hawks, and are yet still light and agile enough to live feral in the woods, while keeping the RJF look, then they are true Crackers indeed. A bird that has the look and lives the life is more of a true Cracker gamefowl than one that is confirmed of old Florida genetic stock but has evolved into something not practical.

Using the bulldog analogy again, if a pure bred bulldog from 1820 looks and acts different than a modern English bulldog that is a direct and pure descendant of the 1820 bulldog, and another bulldog is created by outcrossing a pure bulldog to a similar breed such as an American pit bull, the offspring of the crossing are truly more proper bulldogs if they look and act like the bulldog from 1820. That’s how I feel about the Crackers.

 

[Chicken Heel]

Nice to see civil discussion. It is growing more rare every day in the world we live in.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

So I suffered a setback yesterday on the woods flock.

One of the Cracker hens is marked with a red band and she absolutely hates being behind the fence. Yesterday about noontime she led off two other hens and struck out across the woods. This morning she made it to the house and tonight she’s roosting in the open coop on her favorite perch, but the other two hens that went with her are nowhere to be found. I have some hope they will turn up. Once I turned out some cull OEGB cockerels into the woods here and of the 5 or so I turned out, one wandered for 2 weeks and made it back up to the house. So maybe the other two will turn up.

That leaves three hens with the rooster down in the hammock. Yesterday evening and this morning they had a Cooper’s hawk stalking them, so they stayed in deep cover on both sides of the net. This evening the hawk wasn’t to be seen and they were relaxed and foraging outside the net. Here they are in front of and behind my hunting blind.

I believe they all roosted outside the net tonight. I opened up a gap in the net to let them go to and from the deer feeder easier. I ran electric strands across it to discourage varmints from entering.

I am considering putting this part of the project on hold and regrouping. I now see the electric net was a mistake. When some of the birds go over it, it divides the flock, making them more vulnerable to predators and encouraging the separated hens to go their own way and not stay with the rooster. I believe it would be better to run electric strands around a given thick area and the feeder. The chickens will go under the strands but mammalian predators generally will not if they run any risk of the bottom strand scraping their backs.

I also see that this life suits some hens more than others. Three seem to stick with the rooster no matter what, and the others want to do their own thing. The red band hen is one of the few Crackers of my old generation that likes to coop roost. The rest roost outside. She knew where she wanted to be and the woods wasn’t it. If I can get the stag and these three hens gathered up, I’ll mark the hens and keep them with this stag. The hens themselves are somewhat expendable but I would prefer to not lose the stag.

I probably need to try this again when the stag is mature and I have 20 hens to turn out instead of just a few.

I am pleased to see they they pick good trees and limbs to roost on and roost much higher in the hammock than they do in the trees around the house. I’m also pleased to see how vibrant they look. They must really be getting some good nutrients from what they’re foraging.