Chicken
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An illustration based on the real animal.
A little discovery to share.
Chickens outnumber every other bird species on Earth.
THE REAL WORLD
The real Chicken
- Scientific name
- Gallus gallus domesticus
- Japanese name
- ニワトリ
- Group
- Birds
- Class
- Aves
- Order
- Galliformes
- Family
- Phasianidae
- Genus
- Gallus
The chicken is a domesticated bird (poultry). It is treated as a subspecies of the red junglefowl, a wild bird native to southern Asia.
Chickens are active by day and live in flocks made up of a rooster and several hens.
Many chickens have a comb on top of the head and folds of skin called wattles under the chin; these are showier on roosters.
Chickens scratch the ground with their claws to find food, and roosters make a shrill crowing call to tell other males about their territory.
How the Chicken lives
Hens may cluck to communicate with chicks or after laying an egg.
Smithsonian's National ZooBasic data
- Active
- By day (diurnal)
Watch wild animals from a distance. Do not touch or feed them, and take care of the places where they live.
Names around the world
- 日本語
- ニワトリ
Names come from Wikidata and iNaturalist records. Where a language has no recorded name, we use the scientific name.
Sources and how we check
- Smithsonian's National Zoo — ChickenChecked: 2026-11-03
We check each fact against its source. The illustrations simplify how the real animal looks.
The classification (class, order, family, genus) follows Wikidata records, checked against GBIF. Classifications can change as research goes on.
The basic data are the values given in each source. They vary with how the animal is measured, whether it is male or female, and whether it lives in the wild or in captivity.
This page was translated from the original Japanese with the help of AI.
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