When ornithologist Avril Tontos first heard about groups of wild junglefowl thriving along the Orinoco river in Venezuela, she was intrigued. When she decided to travel there and see them for herself, however, she stumbled onto something much more fascinating. These chickens weren’t only different from any other bird she’d come across before; they were producing eggs that had the potential to change the culinary world forever.
‘It took three days of hiking before I found the first signs of chickens living in the jungle,’ she says. ‘It’s an incredibly hard part of the country to get to and the journey was fraught with danger – the jungle is an incredibly punishing environment to be in and I was just about ready to give up and go home after several days of camping. But then I saw a tree with a few feathers and some scratch marks on the trunk, and I knew I was getting close.’
Avril didn’t have much to go on – her research was a dubious mix of myth, hearsay and a few verbal accounts from locals. But over the past few years these rumours had become more and more frequent, and as someone who had specialised in chickens for her PhD, Avril embarked on an expedition to either prove them false or make the biggest bird-based discovery of the twenty-first century.
