Chicken

Leftover chicken broth with grains Mothership Sunday roast chicken Whether it’s chicken curry, the perfect roast or an easy midweek meal, our collection of gorgeous chicken recipes has something for everyone.

Reproduction and life-cycle

Strongly inbred Langshan chickens display obvious inbreeding depression in reproduction, particularly for traits such as age when the first egg is laid and egg number. Only hens that could no longer produce enough eggs were killed and sold for meat. Only in the early 20th century, however, did chicken meat and eggs become mass-production commodities. Although many taxonomists and ornithologists consider it as a domesticated form of the wild red jungle fowl, some classify it as a subspecies of the red jungle fowl (i.e., G. gallus domesticus), whereas others, including the U.S.

The pecking order is established within groups of female chicks by the 10th week of life. The time between ovulation and egg-laying is approximately 23–26 hours. In 2006, scientists researching the ancestry of birds switched on a chicken recessive gene, talpid2, and found that the embryo jaws initiated formation of teeth, like those found in ancient bird fossils. Large numbers of embryos can be provided commercially; fertilized eggs can easily be opened and used to observe the developing embryo.

• While the origin is Germanic, it is unclear exactly where the word came from, although it could ultimately have come from an imitation of the sound a chicken makes.
• The pecking order is established within groups of female chicks by the 10th week of life.
• Chickens are capable of mobbing and killing a weak or inexperienced predator, such as a young fox.
• Many people obtain chickens for their egg production but often name them and treat them as any other pet like cats or dogs.
• Skeletons of birds in the Gallus genus were used as grave goods at the site, confirming domestication.

Domestication and economic production

Add chicken to one of your lists below, or create a new one. To add chicken to a word list please sign up or log in. Mature males have long been used for sport (i.e., cockfighting, now outlawed in many jurisdictions) as well as for breeding. Farmers have developed numerous breeds and varieties to fulfill commercial requirements. Descendants of those domestications have spread throughout the world in several waves for at least the last 2,000 years.

Chicken, (Gallus gallus), any of more than 60 breeds of medium-sized poultry that are primarily descended from the wild red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus, family Phasianidae, order Galliformes) of India. In the UK and Europe, laying hens are then slaughtered and used in processed foods, or sold as ‘soup hens’. Hens of some breeds can produce over 300 eggs per year; the highest authenticated rate of egg-laying is 371 eggs in 364 days. During the Hellenistic period (4th–2nd centuries BC), in the southern Levant, chickens began to be widely domesticated for food. The red junglefowl is well adapted to take advantage of the vast quantities of seed produced during the end of the multi-decade bamboo seeding cycle, to boost its own reproduction. The domestic chicken has subsequently hybridised with grey junglefowl, Sri Lankan junglefowl and green junglefowl; a gene for yellow skin, for instance, was incorporated into domestic birds from the grey junglefowl (G. sonneratii).

Mating typically involves a sequence in which the male approaches the female and performs a waltzing display. The dance triggers a response in the hen and when she responds to his call, the rooster may mount chicken road bangladesh the hen and proceed with the mating. To initiate courting, some roosters may dance in a circle around or near a hen (a circle dance), often lowering the wing which is closest to the hen.