Historic Presence of Jungle Fowl in the American Deep South

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My wife says the redtailed is making runs on the flock now. They’re all hiding. The red shouldered hawks are trying to run the redtailed off. We’ll see if he gets the wounded rooster or not.
 
Not only did the one-eyed stag survive, over the course of several days his eye withdrew back into his head, turned black, then slowly got its color back. It now seems that he can see out of it and it looks normal. It was dirty as heck too when it was hanging out. I can’t believe the healing ability.

On a different note, I found a blurb in an old Florida cookbook written by a famous author who references her Florida gamefowl.

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Marjorie Rawlings, The Cross Creek Cookery.

I didn’t take a pic of the rest of what she had to say because she uses some language and references we’d find distasteful today. But the gist is she had to slip around and hunt the birds with a .22 just as my grandmother hunted our family gamefowl in the woods of the farm.
 
Interestingly, I had a friend over at the farm this past weekend to pick blueberries, a retired judge from central Florida I used to work with and from an old Florida Cracker family like mine. When he saw the jungle fowl hybrids he volunteered that I had game bantams like the kind he grew up with on his family's farm.
Leads me to think that there may have been a cracker breed that was passed around Florida farmsteads. It's possible His childhood birds could have been related to your grandfather's stock . It wasn't uncommon for farmers of those days to pass around animals and goods throughout the community's. But I'm just hypothetically throwing ideas out there.
 
Leads me to think that there may have been a cracker breed that was passed around Florida farmsteads. It's possible His childhood birds could have been related to your grandfather's stock . It wasn't uncommon for farmers of those days to pass around animals and goods throughout the community's. But I'm just hypothetically throwing ideas out there.
That's along the lines of what I think. Here is where I currently stand (with a healthy dose of "I suspect but do not know" thrown in each point):

1. Red Junglefowl hybrids were common along the Gulf coast Spanish colonies from the 1500s into the 1900s.

2. These hybrids came from random crossings between red junglefowl or junglefowl hybrids the Spanish brought from trade with SE Asia and other gamefowl the Spanish had access to.

3. These hybrids were further refined through natural selection in the Deep South where they were kept free range around woods homesteads and in settlements.

4. They probably never became one set breed and could instead be most be said to be a large grouping of bankiva-type fowl with some tracking more like Spanish gamefowl and some tracking more like Junglefowl. As evidence of the large distribution of these junglefowl hybrids, I think the Frank Gary account of creating the American game bantam is some evidence that by the 1940s, people thought there were junglefowl all over the South as it was considered no special feat that Gary obtained his junglefowl off of a farm in South Carolina many years prior to the Federal efforts to stock RJF in the South and the preservation of the Richardson strain. I believe Frank Gary's "junglefowl" was one of these Spanish bankiva hybrids.

5. The Florida strains were probably the last of the southern bankivas to be around into the 1900s for the simple reason that Florida was still a frontier state until the mid 1900s and there wasn't an infusion of outside livestock until that time.

6. The Blueface strain of American gamefowl were likely created by crossing these Southern bankiva gamefowl/junglefowl hybrids with the American gamefowl. There's several accounts of Sweater McGinnis breeding an unknown exotic bantam into his Blueface line and one of his associates, E.D. Law, was out of Florida. There's lots of Blueface in Florida and what is passed as Blueface today has strong JF traits. I am aware of one Blueface broodcock on a north Florida gamefarm that has full eclipsed some years. I have seen photos of him in full eclipse.

7. The birds I knew as a child were probably Blueface, while the birds my grandparents knew were of the old Florida bankiva hybrid line(s).
 
A few more speculations on the Blueface and their relationship to any sort of junglefowl hybrid present in the South in the early-mid 1900s:

Any comparison between a Blueface and a junglefowl hybrid has to be made on what stock is often held out to be "Blueface" by the contemporary American gamefowl community. What is called a "Blueface" today may in fact bare little to no genetic relationship to the Blueface family McGinnis created.

McGinnis gave contradictory accounts as to the origin of the Blueface strain and associates of McGinnis themselves gave contradictory accounts as to their observations. Much of the confusion seems to come from the fact that McGinnis was a bit of a BS artist/trickster by personality, was still in his prime as a cocker when he unexpectedly died and not ready to give up his secrets, and that he had a method of raising gamefowl that lent itself to confusion to people trying to understand it from the outside.

McGinnis raised his gamefowl free range on rural farms over a large geographic area. He let his brood cocks flock breed groups of hens on the farms. He had issues with the farmers selling off his birds off to other cockers. Therefore he would often lie to the farmers as to what strains they did and did not have and he would call many flocks "Blueface" when they were not. The accounts agree on those points. Where the accounts begin to diverge is whether he had multiple flocks of "real" Blueface or just one flock of real Blueface at a secret location only he knew. Several accounts also indicate that he had bred either Sumatra "junglefowl" or another unusual bantam into the Blueface, but those accounts are contradictory as to whether he did this on purpose to improve the line, whether he did it as a joke in the "fake" Blueface lines, and again on whether the "joke" became serious when he found the bantam crossed birds were better fighters and thus those became the "real" Blueface.

The account I have a tendency to believe is this: McGinnis had one flock of his "real" Blueface that he kept on a secret walk no one knew about. He died never revealing the farm's location and the farmer himself probably never knew. Those "real" Blueface were probably crossed with Sumatras, and multiple spurs and small, dark hens seemed to be commonly associated with the "real" Blueface. McGinnis was known to cross Sumatras into his other lines. On several other farms he crossed his birds with our mysterious junglefowl hybrids to throw people off. Those birds are probably what we call Blueface today, with McGinnis' real Blueface line he won with probably lost to history.

We'll never really know. All I can observe is that birds called "Blueface" today have very strong hybrid junglefowl traits, down to low tail carriage, eclipsing, dark legs, often white earlobes, and small size relative to other American gamefowl.

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I have some Blueface in the brooder I'm going to grow out. If I like how they look, I'm going to let them cross into my Crackers and see if I can keep the Cracker traits while adding some size to them. Note that a couple of the birds in the brooder aren't Blueface, but are Crackers crossed to a pea-combed American.
 
That's along the lines of what I think. Here is where I currently stand (with a healthy dose of "I suspect but do not know" thrown in each point):

1. Red Junglefowl hybrids were common along the Gulf coast Spanish colonies from the 1500s into the 1900s.

2. These hybrids came from random crossings between red junglefowl or junglefowl hybrids the Spanish brought from trade with SE Asia and other gamefowl the Spanish had access to.

3. These hybrids were further refined through natural selection in the Deep South where they were kept free range around woods homesteads and in settlements.

4. They probably never became one set breed and could instead be most be said to be a large grouping of bankiva-type fowl with some tracking more like Spanish gamefowl and some tracking more like Junglefowl. As evidence of the large distribution of these junglefowl hybrids, I think the Frank Gary account of creating the American game bantam is some evidence that by the 1940s, people thought there were junglefowl all over the South as it was considered no special feat that Gary obtained his junglefowl off of a farm in South Carolina many years prior to the Federal efforts to stock RJF in the South and the preservation of the Richardson strain. I believe Frank Gary's "junglefowl" was one of these Spanish bankiva hybrids.

5. The Florida strains were probably the last of the southern bankivas to be around into the 1900s for the simple reason that Florida was still a frontier state until the mid 1900s and there wasn't an infusion of outside livestock until that time.

6. The Blueface strain of American gamefowl were likely created by crossing these Southern bankiva gamefowl/junglefowl hybrids with the American gamefowl. There's several accounts of Sweater McGinnis breeding an unknown exotic bantam into his Blueface line and one of his associates, E.D. Law, was out of Florida. There's lots of Blueface in Florida and what is passed as Blueface today has strong JF traits. I am aware of one Blueface broodcock on a north Florida gamefarm that has full eclipsed some years. I have seen photos of him in full eclipse.

7. The birds I knew as a child were probably Blueface, while the birds my grandparents knew were of the old Florida bankiva hybrid line(s).
Wow! That's a lot of awesome research you did there! ... I really enjoyed reading that, thanks. I'm not sure what else to add to this I haven't looked into it enough, but the more I learn the more interesting it is. Also I may order some blueface hatching of ebay, will see.
 
A few more speculations on the Blueface and their relationship to any sort of junglefowl hybrid present in the South in the early-mid 1900s:

Any comparison between a Blueface and a junglefowl hybrid has to be made on what stock is often held out to be "Blueface" by the contemporary American gamefowl community. What is called a "Blueface" today may in fact bare little to no genetic relationship to the Blueface family McGinnis created.

McGinnis gave contradictory accounts as to the origin of the Blueface strain and associates of McGinnis themselves gave contradictory accounts as to their observations. Much of the confusion seems to come from the fact that McGinnis was a bit of a BS artist/trickster by personality, was still in his prime as a cocker when he unexpectedly died and not ready to give up his secrets, and that he had a method of raising gamefowl that lent itself to confusion to people trying to understand it from the outside.

McGinnis raised his gamefowl free range on rural farms over a large geographic area. He let his brood cocks flock breed groups of hens on the farms. He had issues with the farmers selling off his birds off to other cockers. Therefore he would often lie to the farmers as to what strains they did and did not have and he would call many flocks "Blueface" when they were not. The accounts agree on those points. Where the accounts begin to diverge is whether he had multiple flocks of "real" Blueface or just one flock of real Blueface at a secret location only he knew. Several accounts also indicate that he had bred either Sumatra "junglefowl" or another unusual bantam into the Blueface, but those accounts are contradictory as to whether he did this on purpose to improve the line, whether he did it as a joke in the "fake" Blueface lines, and again on whether the "joke" became serious when he found the bantam crossed birds were better fighters and thus those became the "real" Blueface.

The account I have a tendency to believe is this: McGinnis had one flock of his "real" Blueface that he kept on a secret walk no one knew about. He died never revealing the farm's location and the farmer himself probably never knew. Those "real" Blueface were probably crossed with Sumatras, and multiple spurs and small, dark hens seemed to be commonly associated with the "real" Blueface. McGinnis was known to cross Sumatras into his other lines. On several other farms he crossed his birds with our mysterious junglefowl hybrids to throw people off. Those birds are probably what we call Blueface today, with McGinnis' real Blueface line he won with probably lost to history.

We'll never really know. All I can observe is that birds called "Blueface" today have very strong hybrid junglefowl traits, down to low tail carriage, eclipsing, dark legs, often white earlobes, and small size relative to other American gamefowl.

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I have some Blueface in the brooder I'm going to grow out. If I like how they look, I'm going to let them cross into my Crackers and see if I can keep the Cracker traits while adding some size to them. Note that a couple of the birds in the brooder aren't Blueface, but are Crackers crossed to a pea-combed American.


Amazing how much confusion one man can cause. It would make most sense to me that McGinnis kept his real Blueface at his home site?

I find it very interesting how old time cockers would free range their stock on farmers property. I would imagine that would spark interests with some of the farmers, it may have even contributed to the growth of the game fowl community. I wonder If my neighbors would be interested in having some of my birds on their property :lol: . I don't know what I would use for a shelter though.
 
Amazing how much confusion one man can cause. It would make most sense to me that McGinnis kept his real Blueface at his home site?

I find it very interesting how old time cockers would free range their stock on farmers property. I would imagine that would spark interests with some of the farmers, it may have even contributed to the growth of the game fowl community. I wonder If my neighbors would be interested in having some of my birds on their property :lol: . I don't know what I would use for a shelter though.
Historically those free range gamefowl keepers usually contemplated that the gamefowl simply roosting in the trees, presuming there were trees on hand and there probably was if the farm was successful at keeping free range gamefowl.
 
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Number 1 (free ranging) and my Aseel Jaeger (cooped) were constantly fighting through the wire of Jaeger’s coop until I added a layer of poultry net around it. It is all the more clear that once mature, a Cracker cock will not tolerate another mature rooster.

I have chicks out the wazoo this spring. Pure Crackers, Cracker/American crosses, aseel/Liege crosses, a few pure aseel, and loads of American game bantam.

As I’m observing the Cracker/American crosses amd what appears to be hybrid vigor, I’m becoming more sure that I want to integrate the American blood across my Cracker line. I’m more interested in having a functional woods chicken that than I am in maintaining purity for purity’s sake. I think the Crackers will benefit from being twice their current size. Larger chick size at hatching should be of help for free range chick retention.

I foresee over the next year working in 2 different American lines and then breeding back to pure Crackers again. I want to maintain straight combs, the bright cock plumage, dark legs, and low tail carriage. But a significantly larger body and egg size. After I do so, I’ll probably stop regarding them as junglefowl hybrids.

I am still noticing that subsequent generations of the pure Crackers show more and more junglefowl traits. Even the thin skin and pulsing walking style of a red junglefowl is starting to come out. But I’m also noticing less hardiness the more the JF traits come out. Cool rainy mornings early this spring killed lots of the chicks showing the heavy JF traits. That’s no good to me as a homestead chicken.
 

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