Last July 22, the Museum of Science and Industry’s perennially popular egg incubator hatched something totally unexpected: two oddly colored chicks from a breed of chickens that had been extinct for the last 50 years.
The emergence of the White Java chicks, a male and a female, was so unexpected that they went unnoticed by the thousands of visitors who daily witness the coming of life in the glass-enclosed museum hatchery. For that matter, they weren’t even noticed by Tim Christakos, the hatchery exhibit manager.
The two chicks are an accident of recessive genes. Their eggs were the result of the mating of a hen and a rooster from another very rare, closely-related, almost-extinct breed–Black Java chickens. Early this year, when there were only 250 Black Java chickens left in the world, half of them lived in a flock at the Garfield Farm Museum five miles west of Geneva on Illinois Highway 38.
Reconstituting and preserving a breed of chickens that has no commercial value might not seem like much to crow about. It is a big deal, however, for some geneticists and agriculturalists who have fretted over the loss of many old breeds of farm animals in this century.
Losing those breeds has meant also losing their genetic traits, which in the future could be desperately needed if humanity is shaken by environmental changes such as global warming. The factory farm chickens consumers rely on for eggs and meat are genetic weaklings, highly inbred to lay lots of eggs or mature quickly for meat. Unlike hardy Javas, they could not long survive if forced to live outside their climate-controlled barns, especially in a warmer climate.
Last summer, Christakos read a Tribune article about Garfield Farm’s efforts to save the Black Java breed from extinction with a breeding program.
“I had been going out to Garfield Farm with my wife for years, and had admired the sheep, oxen and poultry out there,” said Christakos, who has run the Science and Industry hatchery since 1986, “but it never sank in that these were rare breeds in danger of extinction. When I saw that (Tribune) story, the light bulb went off in my head. I thought, `Well, my gosh, we can certainly help them out with that.’ “
Thus Christakos’ museum, one of the biggest in the world with 440 employees, and 7.7 acres of indoor exhibits, and Garfield Farm Museum, with just two full-time employees and 281 mostly outdoor acres of a restored pioneer 1840s farm, partnered up.
Last July 1, Christakos picked up 36 fertile eggs laid by Black Java hens at the farm museum and put them into his off-viewing incubating machines at the Chicago museum for their 21-day incubation period.
On the 20th day, Christakos put them in the hatching exhibit so museum visitors could watch them emerge from their shells.
Right on schedule, all the chicks hatched normally. Thirty-four of them had the dirty brown down of Black Java chicks. Two, however, had slate gray down.
“I had no idea this was abnormal,” Christakos said. “I figured it was just a normal variation of some sort.”
It was, he would later learn, quite abnormal. Both museums will use the serendipitous event to teach lessons in genetics and history.
Black and White Java chickens were hybrids developed by American poultry farmers early in the 19th Century from chickens that once roamed wild in tropical jungles of southeast Asia.
White Javas never became very popular and were seldom seen outside specialty-breed poultry shows late in the last century and early into this century. The last flock died out about 50 years ago.
Black Javas, however, were one of the most popular and commonly found farmyard chickens through much of the 1800s.
Pioneers liked them because they were big, hardy, meaty, 10-pound birds. They foraged well for their own food in farmyards, and their hens were “broody,” reliable about sitting on and hatching their eggs.
Late in the 1800s, however, new hybrid chickens proved to be more prodigious egg layers or better meat birds, and the Javas began to disappear.
“Through much of this century,” said Pete Malmberg, Garfield Farm’s operations director, “only a few people kept Black Javas, mostly as show birds for poultry shows.”
By 1990, he said, the population of Black Javas had dwindled to about 100, and he decided to try to use Garfield Farm to build their numbers to a safer level.
Malmberg bought a few Black Java eggs, hatched them and started a breeding flock, unaware that a male and a female in the group carried White Java genes.
Last December he founded the North American Java Club to entice poultry fanciers and farmers into helping him preserve the species, sending out fertile eggs they could hatch and raise.
Last April, one of the farm’s hens hatched a slate-gray female chick.
“I was pretty much dumbfounded,” Malmberg said, “but I knew what it was. It was a White Java. In May, we hosted the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy annual national meeting at the farm, and we had a lot of people here who knew genetics. They told me that I’d probably see more of them hatch out, as long as I had a hen and a rooster with those recessive genes actively breeding.”
More Top Picks Best Air Purifiers For Dorm Rooms
Indeed, early in July a weekend farmer in Wisconsin who had joined the Java club and had received fertile eggs from Malmberg hatched a second White Java chick, a rooster.
But with 120 birds at Garfield Farm, Malmberg was having a hard time keeping up with hatching new eggs, either at the farm or among club members. When Christakos offered to hatch some of the eggs at the Museum of Science and Industry, he jumped at the chance.
About three weeks after Christakos’ first Black Java batch hatched, he took them to the farm to exchange them for a new batch of fertile eggs. When Malmberg whooped with amazement over the two gray chicks in the first batch, Christakos realized he’d hatched something truly special.
Counting the first batch, the Science and Industry incubators so far have hatched about 200 Javas, with more scheduled to emerge this month. With the hatches at the farm and other Java club members, the world Black Java population so far this year has grown to about 500. So far, however, no White Javas have appeared other than the four already hatched.
Malmberg said he plans on using those four to try to breed a viable flock of White Javas too.
The Museum of Science and Industry, which is gearing up to build a major permanent exhibit on genetics that will open in 2001, plans to use its experience with the White Javas as a central part of that exhibit. For the new exhibit, it will build a new hatchery, replacing the one that has been in use since 1954.
Now the museums are talking about working together to build up other disappearing poultry breeds, including turkeys, ducks and geese.
“We have the land and the facilities to do the outdoor things,” said Jerome Johnson, Garfield Farm’s director, “and they have the state-of-the-art facilities and staff to do the technical hatching things we can’t match.”
The mathematical odds of accidentally re-creating the White Java breed from recessive genes in a small Black Java flock has not been calculated, Johnson said. He guesses it to be a 1 percent chance or less.
“To have the gene float around for all those years in such a small surviving population of Black Javas is surprising,” said Robert Hawes, a University of Maine emeritus professor of poultry science.
But beyond his surprise at the reappearance of the White Java, he is most impressed with Malmberg’s effort to effectively build up the Black Java population. Hawes has been a leading proponent of maintaining small populations of rare breeds of farm animals as banks of genetic diversity.
“There is always the danger that, if we rely on just one variety of any animal in a given market, it may have genetic predisposition to a disease that could wipe out most of the population in one sudden spasm,” Hawes said.