18 : Sri Lankan Jungle Fowl

Sri Lankan Jungle Fowl - Gallas lafayetti

Yes it is a chicken. Along with 3 other distinct jungle fowl the grandaddy of all domestic chickens. They are part of the pheasant family and clearly this is the male bird given its striking plumage. The female bird will be brown and a little more drab in order to stand an even chance of sitting on a clutch of eggs on the ground for a couple of weeks.

This photo was taken in the Yala national park and if he looks a bit hurried you have to understand that he has Mongoose, wildcats, jackals and leopards all perfectly willing to despatch him. This bird is endemic to Sri Lanka. At some point either Sri Lanka was cut off or an ancestor wildfowl made it onto the island and they went their seperate course. It is not just plumage that makes a species - it will have a seperate foraging and breeding strategy possibly all developed in balance with its surroundings. When people worry about free range chickens and looking after them its those scratching and roosting behaviours that they look to. The depressed chickens in those sheds could only dream of the high octane life that this bird lives. Yes he can run from a leopard - hence the blurred photo.

So grandfather chicken - I am assuming that the journey to the depressing broiler house began tens of thousands of years' ago. Perhaps you'd have kept running and not taken the spilt grain if you'd have known what was in store for your ancestors. I don't know anything about the history of the domestication of fowl but this bird was definately wild ! The Bear Grills of chickens.

I leave you with the view from our tent flap that morning just to remind myself of what is out there.

Sri Lankan Jungle Fowl - Gallas lafayetti
Yala National Park, Sri lanka, 15-18 April 2011