I've kinda wondered about this for a while: Does a matriarch hen drive away sibling jakes before they breedwith their sisters (like whitetails), or are they allowed to stay in the same general geographic area?

Or do the males just recognize their family members and seek out non-family hens in the same area?

If they DO inbreed, wouldn't prolonged, repetitive generational inbreeding be a bad thing?


My interpretation of this article says that they do, but I'm not exactly sure how to interpret this data. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8650106