The strange fowl is a hybrid between a domestic chicken and a common or ring-necked pheasant.
Such hybrids are unusual. Whenever these two species are crossed only a very small percentage of eggs survive to hatching. The hybrids are also sterile.
One of the best ways to understand the ring-necked or common pheasant is to think of it as a very nervous wild chicken.
Of course, one could also think of the chicken as a very tame species of pheasant.
The wild ancestor of the chicken is primarily the red jungle fowl, although some gray jungle fowl blood has probably been added at some juncture.
These birds are essentially wild tropical pheasants.
Bock pheasant cocks and roosters crow. Both are very possessive of their hens.
And both species roost in trees.
It is a bit inverted to think of a wild game bird as a close relative to a banal barnyard fowl.
However, when you see the hybrids, you can see a relationship there.
The behavior is very similar.
Of course, common pheasants can live in much harsher conditions than any chicken. As strange as it might sound, common pheasants are not native to North America or to Western Europe. Their original European range included only the Caucasus.
It is mostly a bird of the cold steppes of Asia, and it comes in many different subspecies The males in the subspecies introduced to North America have the rings around their necks, which is why we call them ring-necked pheasants.
Not all subspecies have this ring.
This hybrid is a male, but you can plainly see that he has no ring around his neck. He also lacks the comb of the chicken and the “ear tufts” of the cock pheasant.
It is very interesting to see how these very characteristics are inherited with hybrid birds.
Because these birds are virtually all sterile males and because they have the traits associated with the pheasant’s wild nature, these birds could never be commercially successful in the way that the mule duck has.
It is just a strange bird.
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Oh.
Couldn’t decide if it was a brown hen or a pheasant and so I was right…
That explains the odd shape. It looked pheasant-like to me, but yet it looked, well, chicken-like!
He almost looks like an old English game rooster to me, he has the mean looking face and upright stance. I had someone tell me that game chickens taste a lot like pheasant.
Game chickens supposedly are more similar to the Red Jungle fowl than other breeds.
I don’t doubt it.
I’ve never eaten a game chicken.
Oh, I’m sure they are. I had a Sumatra hen once that acted just like a wild anima. She would beat up the dogs and steal their food, break into the house and bite you if you tried to pick her up. Aside from her coloring, she was indistinguishable from a game hen. When I was a 4-her I was given some game hens and they were actually pretty docile, but much more intelligent than the other chicken breeds I’ve had.
I need your expertise, we have a chicken like wild bird running around towards the front of our property and a big fox lurking around the back of our property. I am trying to download the video from the phone to enlarge to get a better look… not sure exactly what kind of bird that it is but if it lives to see the morning sun then it is doing pretty good to get past that fox.
It looks like a grouse but the tail looks more plumed.
Hmmm. There aren’t that many species of gamebird in your area. My guess is it is a hen pheasant.
Oh, yes… it could be. Funny I haven’t ever seen pheasants around here before. We used to have guinea hens until one of the neighbors decided that he didn’t like to be woken up at 4:00 am.. We used to have pheasants up in Massachusetts but never saw them here… we have bald eagles though now. Quite a few of them.
Lots of pheasants here and they breed very successfully on my property, foxes or not.
My old neighbour Peter, now gone, used to shoot a lot, but said he would never shoot pheasants “as he would be ashamed to shoot anything that stupid.” Having watched the birds quite a lot, I understand perfectly.
Elizabeth
I looked at the video more closely and it is not a pheasant hen… it really looks like a chicken but has a wild look about it. The bird has those feathery things on it’s legs and it has a tail like a chicken and walks like a chicken. Its smaller than the average chicken. My daughter has video of it on her phone and I am hoping to download it and enlarge it with my video software. I could not find the bird this morning.