What species would make good flying livestock?

Question

Domesticated magpies will carefully watch over these flying livestock like smarter, louder, sheepdogs, driving away would be predators (along with the help of a much smaller number of domesticated eagles, falcons, etc). Without any human contact for up to months at a time these magpies will herd the livestock birds between regions, filling an analogous role to cowboys.

Though early cities and their surrounding farmland are far more dense/efficient than normal for the tech level (for reasons beyond the scope of this question). So you will also have livestock birds which nest in a set location, and feed off the surrounding wilderness, or use a nesting wagon/sled pulled by animals often with little human involvement.

This is a technologically primitive civilization which figured out mendelian genetics way earlier, but takes hundreds of thousands of years to start building cities. So there's a lot of time for selective breeding to do its work. The timeline of this setting also means you can consider as potential domestication targets species from up to the last half million years.

The proposed species need to be at minimum fast growing, flocking, and tasty. They should be able to be herded between feeding spots like free range grazing cattle. Ideally this means you can exploit good grazing/browsing spots that are in rough terrain and/or very far away from the nearest settlement. Being too helpless is also a downside, because while the magpies can be very loud and frightening, they can't keep a constant eye on every bird at once.

I've considered birds like peking ducks, and passenger pigeons as good candidates, but there's probably other good candidates I'm not thinking of, as well as factors I'm not considering. Still if I'm not mistaken, passenger pigeons seem like a particularly good candidate, because they would turn borderline inedible acorns into bird meat and/or eggs.

I also don't know how dramatically it changes things when you have domesticated birds that are herded around like this. Since the birds in question need to maintain their flight, until they're brought back to a settlement and being fattened up for slaughter (like grazing cattle).

Wild birds are still herded into nets and eaten, but I imagine the livestock birds probably taste better and aren't as seasonal. Also over time I'd expect that like with RL grazing livestock these domestic birds may to some extent displace wild birds in the same niche.

Answer 1

Christmas is coming and the Goose is getting fat....

^{Please put a penny in the old man's hat.}

^{If you haven't got a penny, then a ha'penny will do.}

^{If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you!}

They form small groups for individual households to look after. Half a dozen or fewer geese, lead by a single Gander. (Usually)

Larger flocks may be held by villages, but again, only one gander, or there'll be trouble.

If raised from hatching, the birds will bond to anything that moves . This has been clearly demonstrated in the famous video (excerpt) by Christian Moullec. (The BBC made a documentary some years ago, but I can't find it offhand.) What he does is (apart from giving flights to journalists) periodically migrate the birds to fresh pastureland for them to graze.

At 6 months, a chick is ready for the oven, but they can be kept longer if necessary; the meat is tougher, more sinewy.

They are capable of migration intercontinentally, so satisfy the long-distance flight requirement.

Diet should be varied: grasses, clover, alfalfa, seed heads, wheat, maize, barley, and beans with some berries thrown in when in season. Given wild grassland, they will fend for much of their diet, just add a seasonal supplement of grains for bulk. Bring them into a pen at night with water for bathing etc.. They will endure icy winters if housed with straw and shelter.

Egg production is not as fast as highly-bred chickens, but the eggs themselves are much larger and quite delicious (personal experience, we had a small flock in my early days).

Perhaps surprisingly, they make great guard-animals, creating a huge barrage of honking and hissing at the sight of an intruder. Persistent intruders will get a nasty peck from serrated beaks, enough to draw blood.

Get them inured to family dogs from an early age - these will protect them from predation.

Answer 2

Lots of good answers here. One thing to add: the question of "which existing bird is a good fit for this scenario" may be almost irrelevant given the sheer time scale you've had to breed and domesticate them. Artificial selection can happen way faster than natural selection. You've already used that to your advantage with the Magpies. It's impossible to say for certain whether or not breeding Magpies to have dog-like intelligence and personalities is doable, but if so, then it's almost certainly possible to optimize just about whatever bird you want to be livestock.
Take chickens for example, which diverged from their wild ancestor (junglefowl) about 8,000 years ago. There's still a visual resemblance between the two, but we've conveniently made chickens much meatier, tamer, and less inclined to fly away than their ancestors. Better still, they lay more eggs and reach full size much faster. We accomplished that in 8,000 years. You've got half a million years to play with!
What birds did the people in your world choose to use as their livestocK? Probably whatever was plentiful and huntable at the time. Geese, ducks, pigeons, junglefowl, or any number of others will probably do. The specific attributes of the bird in question aren't a huge deal; your people will just change them.

Answer 3

Since you insist on magpies being able to "shepherd" the livestock birds effectively, this limits our options. Most birds that would make good livestock are not going to be cowed into submission by a magpie, no matter how smart it was.

Shepherd dogs works well herding sheep, because sheep are very docile, easily scared, and the dog can "motivate" sheep with nonthreatening but painful bites.

A Magpie, crow, or another corvid, has no way of forcing geese, ducks, or even any other fat kind of poultry to do anything. It can alert the human shepherd, but so can geese themselves.

Rather than have actual, semi domesticated "livestock"birds, I would focus on teaching birds of prey to "herd" wild murmurations of flocking birds, like waders.

Waders form gargantuan flocks, that a well trained hawk can keep penned in one general area. Waders feed on abundant marshland critters, so they are very effective at turning biomatter into human food. The same hawk that keeps them from leaving the area, can be used to hunt them.

The only reason why this does not happen in nature, is that bird murmurations confuse hawks and falcons, which cannot deal with the overwhelming sensory input when flying into the murmuration head-on. But a good falconer should be able to train their bird of prey to skim the edges of the murmuration to effectively keep it confined and kill just enough waders to feed the humans without endangering their flock.

Answer 4

Chickens can fly and have been domesticated already. Being ground nesting and ground feeding birds means they dislike flying, but they can still take to the air.

Answer 5

Swans have been relatively successful over the centuries, not that we eat them any more. You don't need to herd them as they come back to the same place each year to breed.

All you need is a system of marking who owns each one and a ritual rounding up of all the new cygnets and marking them according to who owns the parents, known as swan upping . This is done when the adults moult as they can't fly for a few weeks.

You have probably heard that the king owns all the swans, that's not actually true. The king only owns the swans that aren't owned by somebody else.

Answer 6

I see you mentioned passenger pigeons, but from what I know pigeons just in general would work. Many of the pigeons in populated cities actually are domesticated, just descended from abandoned ancestors. And while I've never personally eaten a pigeon, Dodoes were a member of the group and we all know how that went. Thus, I would advise pigeons, good work on your part. Hope this helped!