Roosters. You can’t live with them or without them. Just ask a hen, or George Elliot, who wrote in “Adam Bede” referring to one of the minor characters, “He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.”
Tell me about it. I’ve been having one fowl week. It happened during the semi-annual cleaning of the chicken coop, which is my department on this farm. Perhaps it was the coming rain that was the catalyst for all the activity but nonetheless, the activities coalesced into a major reshuffling of the flock.
As I was helping a wheelbarrow deposit the detritus on the coop floor out to the planting fields, my grandson Wilson called.
“Gramma, do you want a couple of roosters?”
Now, already the challenged owner of three roosters, two bedraggled and one the bedraggler, I answered unhesitatingly, “No.”
“Just come and see them,” he wisely suggested.
In the back of his truck, standing regally and confidently were two young, beautiful, impeccably feathered Barred Rock roosters.
“They’re brothers,” Wilson said.
Raised at Healdsburg High as part of the agriculture curriculum, they were now dawn noisemakers and needed to vacate suburbia.
Wilson was on his way to Western Farm Supply, where he would hope the two birds would remain together when sold.
I was struck dumb by the perfection of the two roosters, which outshone my poor aged cocks by a margin of 10-to-1. But, how to assimilate them into our flock without destroying the old fellows?
It took a great deal of thought and planning. You can’t just toss new roosters into a chicken yard and expect everybody to play nice. I have tried that and nobody listens. You end up kicking birds to separate them from their vicious, worst instincts.
The phrase “pecking order,” is a natural law for many animals, certainly barnyard fowl. If you recall my other stories, you read about saving Henny Penny from destruction wrought by her sister hens, bent on pecking her to death.
She is blind in one eye from their attack but otherwise is a lovely hen living with my two sheep in the backyard. Still drawn to her tormentors, she enjoys peering through the wire fencing at her fellow chickens enclosed in their area.
But, I digress. Back to those new roosters. Wilson and I decided that the two old roosters would be safe enough, since they were cowed long ago by King Red.
Bearing this in mind, we caged King Red temporarily for two days, hoping the two Barred Rock guys, let’s call them 2-Rock for short, would all get along.
They didn’t. They kept the oldest bird on his perch and chased the middle white bird to exhaustion and certain death. He was terrified. I was flummoxed. I had to save him. The quickest solution was to bring him into the sheep yard with Henny Penny and just vacate the chicken yard totally.
Night came. Henny was secure in her own little cage, but white rooster acted alarmed and abandoned. He found an old cage built into a corner of the sheep house and hopped up there. In the morning he was the first one up.
The next day, it was time to introduce King Red to the yard birds. I left him in his cage but placed the cage on the ground. Immediately, 2-Rock came over, their neck feathers (hackles) standing straight up and cruising for a bruising. It was not going to be pretty.
Now there are two roosters in the sheep yard, two cocks that were never buddies but now are friends in defeat. Last night, rain softly falling, they ran around looking forlornly at their old yard, the door closed keeping them out.
The white rooster sped along another fence to the closed door of the sheep house. He had thought of spending the night in the safe, dry enclosure with the sheep. What a good idea.
Today I realize it is more than a good idea; it is the way it will work. If I have to delay closing the sheep door until the roosters are safe inside, so be it.
Renee Kiff weeds and writes at her family farm in Alexander Valley.
