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Art by Barry Kent MacKay

(Artwork - 257)
Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus gallus var)

I’ve evoked skeptical stares among non-ornithological folks by saying that a species of pheasant is by far the most abundant bird species on earth, seen by more people – virtually everyone – than any other bird. But 99.9 percent of them do not resemble their progenitor, native to southeast Asia. And yet I have only ever painted a quick watercolor portrait of one, the second attachment…or only until now. The beautifully colored Red Jungle Fowl is, like all but one species of pheasant, native to Asia. The exception is the Congo peafowl (Afropavo congensis), endemic to the Congo basin region. But the Red Jungle Fowl has been domesticated for thousands of years. It is widely known as the chicken. There are between about 25 and 35 billion of them, world-wide, give or take a few billion!

Sadly, the demand for their meat and eggs coupled with greed-driven desire to maximize production of both has resulted in two things: One, the grace, color and elegance of form that contribute to what I see as the beauty of the wild progenitor has, through intensively selective breeding directed at maximum profiting, resulted in a scraggly, essentially or quite flightless all-white bird. And worse, almost all are kept under abysmal conditions that deny them the ability to exercise natural behavior or experience the infinitely textured richness of lives led a the tip of three billion years of past evolutionary history. It’s part of what motivates my own vegan diet.

I have painted domestic mammals before…a few dogs, cats, and horses…but not birds, ever. But…a few chicken breeds (breeds being identifiable forms of the same species – a great Dane and a chihuahua are two varieties, or breeds, of dogs, but both the same species) were bred with a view to their inherent attractiveness, and I mentioned to my partner, Sandi, that I had enjoyed sketching some at a local farmers’ market – show birds, not the kind necessarily meant for the plate. She asked, “So why don’t you paint one?” I huffily started to say I painted wild birds only and life was too short to deviate from that inexplicable passion. And yet, I had enjoyed the appearance and strutting behavior of the rooster in charge of a group of most contented hens living, at the moment, under the kind of idyllic conditions featured in children’s books about farm animals, and so I painted my first domestic bird, a rooster.

And attached, also, is that watercolor study of a wild Red Jungle Fowl, that I later gave to my friend, the late Karen Davis (1944 – 2023), founder of United Poultry Concerns.

Wild Red Jungle Fowl

I’ve attached one more: an oil I did of the Palawan Peacock-Pheasant (Polyplectron napoleonis), whose entire natural range is Palawan Island, in the Philippines, where they are in decline due to hunting for their meat, habitat loss, and the intenational demand for captive birds – all more profitable than leaving them and their environment alone.

Palawan Peacock-Pheasant (Polyplectron napoleonis)

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