Preserve an Endangered Species with Heritage Chickens

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If you buy Jungle Fowl, pen and treat them as you would other skitterish game birds such as pheasants. Fighting cocks are easier to handle, but don't let mature cocks so much as lay eyes on another male chicken. The birds will literally fight to the death.

I suggest that you select the large-bodied meat/egg breed that most appeals to you. For up to 50 hens, keep 3 roosters. (3 will fight less than 2, and if you only keep 1, you are out of luck if it dies or loses vigor.) Roosters will dig their claws into a hen's back and bite her comb in mating, but that's how it's done. Dab gentian violet horse medicine on any sore spots.

Keep your eves peeled for a lien that is going broody. A penned hen will stay on the nest, peck if you it try to remove eggs, fluff up her feathers, and fuss a lot. Her "cut-cut-cut" contented sound will change to a load "Blaaawk"

Most egg raisers try to discourage broodiness, but we want to encourage it. Give her a separate cage and a 2-foot-square brood nest kept full of fresh hay if need be to keep her setting. Lot her hatch all her own eggs to retain the setting tendency.

A hen with access to free range will he sneaky about brooding and will make a nest off in the bushes. She'll lay (fertile eggs if the roosters are doing the job you feed the otherwise worthless little martinets for) for several weeks till she accumulates a clutch of 12 to 18 eggs, which will hang fire till heated to hen temperature—when they'll begin to develop so they all hatch together. Fine hen will sit on them, turning, heating, and humidifying them nearly full-time till they hatch in 3 weeks. Unless you recognize all the birds or conduct a hen count every evening, you won't miss her when she begins brooding. She'll urine in briefly for feed and water only once in a while and will stay out nights.

Then one morning you'll be working in the yard, and around the barn or through a hedge will come Biddy with her little brood of yellow or red or black or brown, one-colo, striped, or spotted chicks darting in and out from under her wings. All the other hens will sit up a ruckus and mill around in welcome. Momma hen will strut around acting proud enough to pop—as well she ought to be.

In time, choose the biggest and the most feisty roosters arid plumpest hens from the brood to keep and you are on your way to helping restore self-reliance to our chickens. But in future, you must introduce outside strains to prevent atavism—where recessive genes predominate and the birds quickly revert to the ancestral Jungle Fowl.

For more information on ordering chicks and feed, and or a resource listing on raising chickens, tom to page 88.

Necessary Unpleasantness

Killing, plucking, and dressing fowl is the least appetizing part of the process. I've always felt that if you eat an animal you have an ethical responsibility to see it through the passing in a humane and respectful manner. But maybe that's too Native American for modern times. There's a book out now on chicken mobile-housing and raising by a fellow who recommends you avoid the nasty details by taking birds to a commercial slaughterhouse (for another dollar or three per). Lotsaluck fading one.

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