So, imagine there’s an old couple with a little farmhouse. They’ve got flowers, and a veggie plot, mebbe some fruit trees. Since they’re older and retired, they don’t have much livestock, just a cow and a few chickens.
A virus comes and kills pretty much everyone (a few random survivors). Don’t know if this couple would usually keep their chickens closed into a pen or something, but if that’s normal, say they knew they were sick and going to die, so they left the enclosure open and left the chickens to fend for themselves. There’s, say, a little creek nearby so water’s available, and I would imagine there’d be enough bugs n stuff for the chickens to eat. Here’s what I need to know:
After a couple of months, would the chickens nest somewhere besides their usually nesting places (presumably in a coop)? Would they wander off, or stick around? Would they become…different? Like, afraid of people (because they would forget people used to feed them)?
It’s for a short scene in a screenplay. I’m trying to get a couple of survivors some fresh protein.
Chickens are domesticated jungle fowl as I recall though I’m no ornithologist,so I think that they would start wandering around and revert to a wild lifestyle.
I don’t know how likely it is that domesticated chickens could immediately become feral chickens, but if they did, they might wander off and live life as foragers, scratching away to find food and making shelters either in elevated places or nests in sheltered places.
Nearly all domesticated animals (plants too) would perish. Whatever made them tame would have left them unable to cope without humans around. Dogs and cats can ge feral, but even in those cases, I would wonder whether they could survive outside of urban environments.
In the case of plants, we have mostly bred them in such a way that their seed does not scatter or cannot overwinter so that they depend on us to propogate the species.
There is book called, IIRC, The World without Us, that deals with all this (and more–what happens to all human structures)…
Domesticated animals have had a whole lot of the “smart” bred out of them - chickens at least as much as most. With predators in the picture, they would last about as long as a $5 bill lying on a sidewalk.
Thanks for the responses. I have found information on the long-term effect of the disappearance of humans. I think the Discovery channel did a pretty good series.
I am thinking more in terms of short term, like a couple of months. I haven’t found much information on such a short term scenario, so I was hoping there would be someone here who has had experience with chickens. Like, do people who own a few chickens keep them locked in a pen? Or do they get to wander around part or all of the time?
In my mythology for this virus, dogs and other herd/pack oriented animals get the virus and die. Cats, cougars, etc. don’t, so this works well with protecting the chickens for a couple months from at least some predators. I don’t know if cougars would eat carrion, but I know domestic cats will to survive if needed.
So, anyone gots chickens? If no one here does, maybe I can find some farmer with a blog I can email.
Some people who keep chickens do let them out to forage in the yard in the daytime. They generally don’t wander too far, so in the evening its not too hard to herd them back into the coop.
Roving packs of feral chickens would attack, kill and eat other animals, even animals substantially larger than themselves. Without mankind to control them, they’d throw off the shackles of Colonel Sanders and become the dominant predator species on the planet.
I raised chickens when I was young (a good while back). I’d let them range freely during the day - they can obtain a lot of good nutrition foraging for bugs, etc. and it seemed to keep them healthier than being cooped up. But it was important to get them into the barn at night - you could count on losing one or two otherwise.
Rounding them up in the evening was a challenge until I accidentally discovered a magic solution: a kite shaped something like a large hawk. The chickens had an instinctive fear of this when seen above them, and would scurry for cover. The 20-minute job of getting them all inside was reduced to 30 seconds.
Not sure if chickens would be able to survive. It’s possible I think, provided they can stay away from predators. They can probably find enough food in the wild.
Alternatively, grouse and pheasants are fairly common in rural areas of Eurasia and do already live wild.
That’s me. A couple months in most places is going to be doable, but it depends on a lot of factors, including the breed and what the local predators are like.
I’ve always let my chickens wander freely by day. That makes them happier and it also makes them much cheaper to feed. Free range chickens can lay on grain alone, being capable of obtaining all the protein and other nutrients they need by foraging. Free range chickens with no supplementary grain will stop laying, but they certainly won’t starve to death. So just don’t have your chickens producing eggs.
Some chicken breed are more amenable to independent existence than others. The bantams and most game breeds are very close to the wild ancestor and survive very well on their own. I personally favour bantam x leghorn crosses for my chickens. That gives them a lot of smarts with fair sized eggs. Where I’m form most farm chickens have some bantam in them for that reason. It’s also normal to keep a bantam rooster because they are very protective of the hens.
My chickens have been inclined to go feral all by themselves. They occasionally get a notion to roost in trees and have to be physically knocked down to get them back into the coop. Usually a few nights of that and they go back to sleeping in the coop, but without a person around they’d rapidly revert to the wild roosting habit. Similarly the broody hens will often abandon the roost and make nests in the long grass.
Predators are a real risk to chickens, but not so much that they would be exterminated in a few months. A fox will take a lot of cooped up chickens all at once, but if they are ranging free it will be lucky to catch one a week. Bantams aren’t that dumb. Other predators are also a threat, but once again not enough to eliminate the animals in a few months. Remember chickens evolved with these predators, in addition to pythons, tigers and leopards. It’s nothing they don’t have the instincts to deal with.
That’s not to say that chickens will survive indefinitely in most places. They are naturally a bird of closed tropical forests and will struggle in most other environments, but they won’t disappear overnight.
Would now be a bad time to point out that chickens are herd/pack oriented animals, and thus should be dead.
I’m actually not sure why you are focussing on chickens. Even if all the herd mammals are kaput (which makes little sense), then pigs, geese or pigeons are much more likely to survive without human assistance and are just as a good as a source of protein.
The presence worldwide of feral strains of nearly all domesticated animals and plants would suggest that you are completely wrong in this claim. Do you have any evidence to back it up?
Once again, how can you explain the worldwide presence of feral dogs and cats in wilderness areas if you believe they can’t live outside urban environments?
I’m struggling to think of any domestic plant besides bananas and maize that don’t have feral populations. Can you name some?
The traits vanish so rapidly outside domestication that it makes your head spin, often due to outcrossing with wild relatives. This is the reason why feral domestic plants exist worldwide. Anyone who has ever looked at the roadside in an agricultural region knows all too well that feral plants are ubiquitous and perfectly capable of self propagation.
If it makes claims that most domestic plants and animals are incapable of going feral then I wouldn’t put any trust in it whatsoever. The author clearly hasn’t done basic research.
I know of an unfenced, effectively wild flock of chickens that have been happily getting by with little to no human involvement for as long as I’ve been alive. So on that basis I’d be inclined to suggest that some would be able to survive.
There are feral chickens in wild habitats in numerous places around the world, and there are still plenty of ancestral jungle fowl in the wild. But strictly speaking there are no chickens in the wild because chickens are a domesticate.