Red Junglefowl! When out with the gang driving around the countryside looking for birds it won’t take long for someone to spot a flock of chickens and call out “Red Junglefowl.” It’s an old and somewhat tedious joke but it reflects an underlying truth – every chicken you see, every piece of KFC you bite into, every over-easy fried egg is a product of this wonderous jungle bird.
The Red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus) originated in Southeast Asia. Unlike a lot of its pheasant brethren the species proved amenable to domestication, and somewhere around 8000 years ago neolithic people started keeping them for food and eggs.
The practice was obviously successful. The Austronesian peoples adopted the bird with enthusiasm and spread it to Taiwan and the Philippines, and then on to the Pacific island groups of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.
Meanwhile the bird spread eastward along the land routes. Chicken bones have been found in deposits Syria dating from at least 2000 BC, and the Phoenicians subsequently spread this new “technology” throughout Mediterranean as far as the Iberian peninsula. The first evidence of chickens in England dates from Pre-Roman times (carbon dating puts them between 770-390 BC) but the Romans arrived in AD 43, bringing poultry farming with them.
Red Junglefowl or Chicken?
The domestic chicken of today comes in a variety of shapes and forms, many of which look a lot different from its progenitor. But at the species level they are the same. Red junglefowl is Gallus gallus, and all domestic chickens belong to the subspecies Gallus gallus domesticus.
There is some evidence that a small percentage of genes of some other species got added to the domestic chicken mix along the way, particularly from the three closely-related species: Grey Junglefowl, Sri Lankan Junglefowl and Green Junglefowl. These four junglefowls branched off from a common Red Junglefowl ancestor, the first to leave the fold being the Green Junglefowl, about 5.7 million years ago.
Wild Red Junglefowl are slightly smaller than the domestic version, and the roosters have a distinctive call best described as “hoarse and choked off towards the end” compared to the domestic bird.
Distribution and Habitat
Wild populations of Red Junglefowl persist in Asia in Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, and in the Southeast Asian countries: Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The species prefers areas where dense foliage is available is to hide nesting sites. Forest edges and disturbed forest (e.g. forest regenerating after logging or slash-and-burn agriculture) are favoured, but Red Junglefowl can also be found in tea and palm oil plantations.
Threats
The main threats to this species include the usual culprits: habitat loss and hunting for food. But hybridization with feral and domestic chickens also poses a threat as it dilutes the distinctiveness of the species and could undermine some of the specific adaptations that have allowed it to survive in the wild for millions of years.
Photos
The photos accompanying this article were taken at Cát Tiên National Park, Đồng Nai Province, Vietnam, in March 2025. The subspecies is likely Gallus gallus gallus – i.e. the nominate subspecies.
Nikon Z9, Nikkor Z 180-600 f/5.6-6.3 VR
Thanks to Mr Phuc Le and Viet Bird Tours for setting me up to see this and many other great birds, and to Võ Trọng Tài for guiding me around.
