Red Junglefowl

The red junglefowl is the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken. Males have a red comb and wattles, orange-red neck and back feathers, a dark underside and a long arching black-green tail; females are smaller and mottled brown, providing camouflage on the forest floor. Wild birds are slimmer and more wary than most domestic chickens. Adult males are roughly 65–78 cm long, while females are about 41–46 cm (Animal Diversity Web; Wikipedia, general species account).

It uses thick secondary forest and scrub but feeds in clearings and along broad tracks during the cooler morning and evening. Birds scratch leaf litter and soil for seeds, grain, shoots, fallen fruit, worms and other invertebrates, roosting above ground at night. Northern Vietnam holds the Tonkin form, G. g. jabouillei. Contact with free-ranging domestic chickens can blur identification and introduce domestic genes into wild populations, an important complication when assessing apparently wild birds (Animal Diversity Web; Wikipedia, general species account).