Animal · Thailand, China, India
Chicken
Gallus gallus domesticus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The chicken is the most numerous bird on Earth: more than twenty-six billion of them live with people, in coops, gardens and on farms. Every single one descends from the red junglefowl of the forests of Southeast Asia.
Picture credit: Grendelkhan (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Alvesgaspar (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Fernando Losada Rodríguez (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the chicken live?
Home: farmyards, gardens and coops all over the world.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Thailand, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, the United States, Mexico, Germany.
The short profile
Fully grown: 40–50 cm tall. It weighs about 2.5 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
Chickens were first kept by people in Southeast Asia thousands of years ago, at first for their eggs, their feathers and for show, not mainly for meat. A flock has a pecking order: every bird knows who may eat first, and disagreements are usually settled with a look rather than a scuffle. Hens scratch the ground all day and eat almost anything they find: seeds, worms, snails and green leaves. They talk a lot, with more than twenty different calls, among them a special warning for a hawk in the sky and another for danger on the ground. A laying hen can produce over three hundred eggs a year, while her wild ancestor managed only a few clutches each spring. Because chickens live with people everywhere, they are not on any red list; their wild relative, the red junglefowl, still lives in forests from India to Indonesia.
Find it on the globe
Chicken is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why does a chicken have a red comb on its head?
The comb and the two flaps under the beak are bare skin full of blood vessels, and they let heat escape, because a chicken cannot sweat. A big, glossy red comb also shows other birds that this one is healthy and strong.
Where do chickens live?
With people, on every continent except Antarctica, from a city balcony coop to a village yard and a huge farm. Their wild ancestor still lives on its own in the warm forests and bamboo thickets between India and Indonesia.
Is the chicken really the most common bird in the world?
Yes. The farming statistics of the FAO count more than twenty-six billion chickens alive at any one moment, which is about three for every person. The most numerous wild bird, the red-billed quelea of Africa, reaches roughly one and a half billion, so chickens outnumber it many times over.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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