Poultry

Any domestic bird bred for the table, such as chicken, turkey, duck, goose, quail, pheasant, guinea hen or squab. The chickens consumed in the modern world are descended from Gallus gallus, an old jungle fowl from the pheasant family (Phasianinae), bred in the Indus Valley more than 4,000 years ago. Records show that Mesopotamian farmers bred ducks and that, by 1000 BC, geese were already popular in what is now Germany. Modern domestic ducks are believed to be descendants of the wild mallard, Anas platyrhyncha, except for the Muscovy duck, which originated in South America.

The modern goose owes its ancestry to the graylag, Anser feras, a large, gray European goose, so named because it is the last of its species to leave England for its annual migration.

Today's modern turkey is not the wild turkey the Pilgrims found in 1620, but rather the descendant of a turkey domesticated by the Aztecs in Mexico and later taken to Spain by the conquistadors. From Spain, the turkey traveled to England, and about 150 years ago, the domestic turkey finally reached the U.S. In the last 80 years, poultry production in the U.S. has grown from 30 million broilers to more than 350 million. See also chicken, duck, goose, temperature, turkey.

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