Domestic and/or feral birds

General
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Is there yet a definite answer to whether a bird is a red junglefowl or a domestic chicken? I found these two older threads– https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/grouping-domestic-animals-with-their-non-domestic-counterparts/30099 (2022) and https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/gallus-gallus-outside-its-native-range/66592/14 (2019)–but it looks like the issue persists.

I am just now learning about these so please correct me if I’m wrong. It seems to me that the red junglefowl does still exist in south and southeast Asia, and that, with some few special populations here and there, most other chickens around the world are domestic chickens. So, does it make sense in the USA, to change any observations of red junglefowl to domestic chicken?

Similar questions for various ducks and pigeons. Is there anywhere that true mallard, Muscovy ducks, or pigeons exist? At least in the USA, should most or all of these be IDed as domestic mallard, domestic Muscovy, and feral pigeon, or is it not as simple as that? Is there a way to tell where these original species exist?

Thanks

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I think wild type mallards exist, since aren’t domestic ones usually not green-headed brown ones?

And aren’t all or most feral pigeons IDed that way?

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Please do, unless they are, for instance, zoo collections of the wild-type.

I think this may recently have changed, but for a long time, entering a subspecies ID would only take the observation to the species level. I was preemptively marking domestic chickens as “can still be improved” if they showed as red junglefowl.

There are lots of true wild mallards in the US and in Eurasia. They tend to be noticeably smaller than the domestic forms, and can fly. Most of the domestic breeds are too heavy to fly.

A bigger concern is graylag and swan geese. True wild individuals of these are rare vagrants in the US; in Eurasia, it is more complicated because there are native populations.

Regarding the muscovy, I am not sure the extent of its native range in South America, but outside South America they would be the domestic type (again, with the exeption of zoo collections of the wild type). I leave it to others to reply regarding pigeons.

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Wild rock pigeons persist in parts of Eurasia and North Africa. Pigeons elsewhere can safely be labelled as feral pigeons (and almost always eventually are in my experience)

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Wild Muscovy Ducks are widespread in Latin America (not just South America) and can occur all the way up to the US-Mexico border in southern Texas. Truly wild Muscovies are very rare and localized on the US side of the border, though they have been documented. Any Muscovy Duck away from this region in the US can be confidently labeled as a domestic.

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For the first two species in the US, the answer is straightforward. The majority of Muscovy Ducks in the US are of the domestic type. They’re bulky, often with patchy white plumage, red faces, and yellow legs. The only place in the US where you can find true wild Muscovies is along the Rio Grande river in Southern Texas.

All Rock Pigeons in the US are considered Feral/Domestic Pigeons. They are quite variable in shape and plumage but can also resemble their wild counterparts.

Mallards are the most difficult species to separate. While many domestic breeds are strikingly different from their wild counterparts (bulkier body, odd proportions, different plumage, etc), the problem comes from game-farm Mallards which are nearly identical to wild Mallards. They’ve been widely released throughout the continent and are believed to intergrade with natural wild populations. A large portion of the Mallards in the eastern seaboard are either game-farm Mallards or hybrids with them. The only way to diagnose such ducks is through genetics, so I tend to just identify them as Mallards.

Hybridization between wild and domestic populations is also an issue with the latter two species in other parts of the world as well.

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It depends on the domestic breed. Some like the Silver Appleyard or Rouen Duck can have plumage very close to their wild counterparts. They differ greatly in size and proportion however which allows them to safely told apart.

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Wild-type Red Junglefowl are introduced in Georgia, so not all US observations of junglefowl are Domestic Chickens.

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There are some wild-type Muscovy Ducks in south Texas, where they are a native species.

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Their range is extremely limited within Georgia – the city of Fitzgerald. The ones outside the area of the city didn’t survive and they’ve never really expanded beyond it. They have interbred with domestic chickens over the many decades they’ve been running loose. There are some pure flocks in private hands which have been kept isolated and penned (or at least there were more than a decade ago).

Within their native range, it is useful when identifying domestic chicken versus wild red junglefowl to get a recording of the crow, if possible. In many parts of their native range they have interbred quite a lot with domestic chickens.

Within the US they’re domestic chickens unless you’re in the area of Fitzgerald, Georgia, and then it’s a judgement call how much intergradation makes a difference. (Much like @That_Bug_Guy mentioned with mallards, it’s a tricky one.)

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Mallards don’t seem that tricky in North America and Eurasia where they are abundant wild birds. Therefore, label them as Anas platyrhynchos, which is true for both wild and domestic ones anyway, unless there is some evidence that the individuals in question are feral domestic ones. If there is, label them as domestic (Anas platyrhynchos domesticus in iNaturalist taxonomy). Of course, that will bring up the perennial question about whether the individual domestic Mallard you see should be labeled wild or captive. Don’t fret about what percentage domestic ancestry an apparently wild-type bird might have. (That question seems to fall into the category that nuns at Catholic schools would call a Divine Mystery, which meant an unanswerable one.) Note that if a game farm is raising wild type Mallards and they escape, they are now feral wild types, not feral domestic Mallards.

There is a bigger mess in Australia and New Zealand where native Anas superciliosa (which used to be called Gray Duck, now maybe Pacific Black Duck?) have formed a hybrid swarm with introduced wild-type Mallards as well as feral domestic Mallards. I’m not going to step into that one!

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There are Pacific Black on the beach and other coastal areas. Hybrids are fresh water only ducks.

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Thanks, Everyone! That’s all very helpful. I spend a lot of time scrolling through bird observations–originally simply adding feather obs to the Found Feathers project, but now also adding annotations wherever it makes sense–and the longer I’m here, the more I’m learning. So as I pick up new insights, I can also improve my contributions.

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Yes, regardless of whether they are wild or domestic, Anas platyrhynchos is accurate, and should be used when in doubt.

The game farms are raising a domestic mallard that usually looks very close to wild type (in both overall shape and coloration) but they are genetically domestics, so released game farm mallards would be domestics. However, it’s going to be very difficult for most people to distinguish them unless they show some pigmentation oddness.

DuckDNA is a project from University of Texas at El Paso and Ducks Unlimited partnering with hunters to test mallards that are taken to identify their genetics; some of the birds with significant domestic genetic introgression that they share look indistinguishable from wild to me.

The domestic game farm birds are different than wild mallards, physically and behaviorally, even though it’s hard to tell without really knowing mallards and might require the bird in hand, if possible at all for non-pros.

These domestic game farm mallards are causing problems hybridizing with the wild ones, and both the game farm birds and wild/domestic intergrades have lower fitness for surviving in the wild. They don’t show the same foraging behaviors, have lower incubation incidence, move significantly less, don’t show the same migratory behaviors, are more inclined to use human-modified habitat and shun wetlands, have shorter bills with fewer lamellae (teeth), etc. Here’s a podcast discussing the study and some other issues contributing to mallard decline in the Great Lakes region.

It is important for these things to be studied and tracked – hence DuckDNA and studies like this one – but it’s outside the scope of most iNatters, unless they are hunters and can get DNA testing done.

We have fewer game farm domestics mingling with the mallard flocks out here on the west coast than the eastern part of North America, or Europe. North America has fewer releases these days, I believe, so a lot of it is introgression from past releases, while some parts of Europe still have extremely large releases annually.