Hello, Quercus

Chickens have a tendency to multiply.  As I've commented before, it's awfully easy to end up with a rooster, especially if you are soft-hearted (in extreme cases like mine, perhaps that would be soft-headed).  But there's something funny about a flock of chickens that makes it behave like a very particular black hole.  It exerts a mysterious pull that sucks in new chickens from the doggondest places.

There's a little town near my old workplace that has chosen a rather unusual distinguishing characteristic:  its feral chicken population.  (As with feral cats, the term is strangely apt.  Officially, "feral chickens" refers to birds foraging and living successfully within the town, without human intervention.  It does not mean bands of poultry hoodlums roving the streets and terrorizing the populace . . . but that depends on who you talk to.)  The town points to its proud farming history, and traces its current feral flock of about 200 back three decades to a founding stock of one rooster and three hens that were allowed to roam.  Since then the “bloodline” has been augmented by wandering birds and some outright escapees from backyard flocks, bringing in some startling and intriguing colors and shapes.  (Crele gene on a White Leghorn base with red and black patches and some Japanese Bantam thrown in?)  The birds wander all around the center of town, stopping traffic and even soliciting scraps from restaurant-goers sitting at outdoor tables.  Everybody loves those chickens, or if they don’t, they keep very quiet about it.

So back in early December of 2009, during a vicious cold snap that brought snow to much of the area, I was practicing in a small-animal/exotics hospital that also takes in wildlife.  Late in the morning, the phone rang.  The receptionist covered the mouthpiece with her hand and waved at me. 

"Can you take another chicken?"

“Sure.”  (Never mind that at that point we had over sixty birds.)  “Injured?”

“No, the hospital down the street says somebody has an orphaned chick.”

I glanced at the black sky outside, treetops whipping in the icy wind.  “Weird.  Okay, send it over.”

Over the next fifteen minutes or so I steadily upped the age of the bird in my mind’s eye, and messed with its species.  No hen in its right mind would brood at this time of year, and the feed stores don't carry chicks during winter, so what could this thing be?  Chickens are pretty unmistakable, but perhaps somebody had found a young duck?  Maybe a gosling?  Or no, this would be somebody’s end-of-summer feed-barn-clearance-sale chick, some poor leftover Rhode Island rooster on gangly legs and with no down left even on top of its head, only peeping because its voice hadn’t settled yet.  Probably they lived in an area not zoned for chickens, and someone had complained.  Yup.  Undoubtedly.

I happened to be up front when the lady carrying the very small box arrived.  "I found a chick,"  she said hesitantly.
 
Good grief, did she have a sparrow in there?

“Well, you’ve come to the right place!”  the receptionist said encouragingly.  I leaned over the box as the lady raised the lid.

Poing.  The tiny ball of brown fluff popped its head up, squinting in the light.  “Peep,”  it said miserably.  The egg tooth on the end of its beak sparkled briefly.

“I work in the Old Town,”  the woman explained,  “and I was walking out to my car when I heard peeping, and there he was standing in the driveway crying his eyes out.  I looked everywhere for the mother but I couldn’t find her.  I can’t raise him, he’ll never make it . . . .”

She needn’t have worried.  I already had the bird in my hands.  The chick was uninjured but quite cold; I would have taken him in even if he’d been missing a leg.  The fact that he was alive at all was something of a between-holidays miracle.  At two days old, as witnessed by that egg tooth, no chick could be expected to survive longer than half an hour in the frigid, rainy weather outside.  For that matter, his siblings would be in some trouble even with their mother’s care, but there was nothing I could do about them.

Fortunately, I still had some stale chick feed sitting on the shelf over my desk.  We set the little squirt up in a tank with a heating pad, a rice bag, a heat lamp, and the requisite feather duster.  Within half an hour the bird had recovered enough to start shouting his abandonment to the entire building.  But to our surprise, once he got a good look at the people moving around the room, he settled down and began to eat.  Humans, apparently, were his new flock.

Throughout the next few months, the chick grew and thrived at our house, living in a homemade brooder on top of the washing machine.  I was annoyed but unsurprised when he broke with a rather snippish strain of coccidia at his third week.  It was resistant to the coccidiostat in his feed and the lab never did get it properly typed, but the chick bulled his way through it without so much as a dip in appetite.  One of the more unusual things about him was the fact that after that first day, he never cried.  Generally a solitary chick is an extremely unhappy bird, and will peep and call incessantly.  This kid chirruped and talked to himself, but not once did we hear the "peep-peep-peep-PEEP-PEEP!" of a lonely chick.  In the evenings he watched as we brought in Uncle Hoppy and Auntie Sonar, who also sleep in the laundry room, and in the mornings he would watch unperturbed as they were carried outside.  He was a remarkably self-possessed little fellow.  We named him Quercus, Quirk for short.

Quercus sitting on his feather duster

Since then, Quercus has grown into a remarkably handsome rooster, smallish and compact with a single comb and bright orange eyes.  He has orange and yellow hackles and saddle feathers, red shoulders, orange chest and belly, green legs, a black tail, and a little black striping and spangling.  He crows the first three bars of "Pennsylvania 6-5000," for some reason.  Having been hand-raised his entire life, he is extremely tame towards my husband and myself; matter of fact, I had had some anxiety about that, because he is so used to humans that he isn't afraid.  He did indeed go through the typical young-rooster-being-a-jerk phase, but it didn't last:  after a little trial and error, he learned what  "Stop that!"  means and, rather amazingly, he listens.  He spends his days in a chicken tractor on the lawn, yelling back and forth at Uncle Hoppy and the pair of Icelandics in the side yard, and every evening comes out of his hut to be taken indoors and put to bed in the laundry room.

So, another rooster has found his way into our home, and this one a real character.  I think we were both lucky.

Grumpily defending his pen from the camera

March and that lion

Spring, yes, spring is here.  You know the old saying about how March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb?  In this part of the country, March never seems to get past the thrill of being a lion.  It prowls across the valley on giant puffy stormcloud paws, roars its rain against the roofs, bats houses and trees playfully with sixty-mile-an-hour gusts of wind.  The only lambs around here are the ones shivering underneath their mothers' bellies, wishing they'd been born in April, which is a much nicer month all around.

Of course, we really, really do need the rain.  I may grump about it--leaning against the window, peering out through the descending gray curtains, bitterly regretting that leak in my right barn boot--but we honestly need it and it is a blessing.  I just wish, sometimes, that it wouldn't choose to bless us all at once.

We're on clay out here; good, thick, water-resistant stuff with a heavy leavening of iron oxides that gives it the staining power of raspberry jam.  Although the ground gets pretty thirsty during the long dry heat of summer, and sucks up the winter rains like a Labrador retriever after a day on the trail, by March it's full up.  During the last storm I looked out across the pasture, which is largely a natural drainage basin surrounded by higher ground, and observed water flowing out of the shallow hillside and forming a lazy, wandering stream across the lot.  There must be some fairly extensive, tightly-packed layers of clay buried in that hillside.  When digging the garden, we've encountered some deposits dense and fine enough to make a rustic potter dance with delight, but it sure can turn a shovel blade.

There are cows on that pasture, although they aren't our cows; the landlord and the rancher down the road came to an agreement last spring, and the result has been Natural Weed Control, Large Scale.  We really did have a pretty serious weed issue before, with nearly nine acres of unused pasture rife with buried treasure:  old real estate signs, fence posts, sections of log, rusty metal hardware, and in the center of the largest field, a gigantic glorious snarl-up of several hundred feet of four-strand, heavy-wire-and-carbon-fiber-post fencing that must have served some purpose in the distant past before it all fell down and the weeds grew over it.  All I know is, it sure tore the stuffing out of the disker that the landlord hired to turn the weeds under two summers ago, and it would have been a grade-A leg-breaker for the cattle if we hadn't clued the ranch hands to its hidden presence.  It was so buried and overgrown that human hands couldn't budge it; the men finally wrenched it free with a tractor.  Currently there are about thirty cows and one bull roving around out there; they appear to be a mixture of Herefords and longhorn crosses.  The calf count is up to twenty, I think.  It could be higher; they're pretty squirrely.

But oh, that mud.  The top end of the pasture looks like it's been used for a bombing range.  The mud up there is at least eighteen inches deep.  Cows, of course, will churn up the ground; they really can't help it.  When the ground is saturated and there are pockets of slippery clay everywhere, several hundred pounds of animal stilting over it on four narrow sharp hooves has an effect rather like a lawn aerator.  Each hoof is placed with extreme care, particularly where the ground slopes, and as the weight goes onto it it sinks well out of sight.  Then, when the cow wants her hoof back, the mud doesn't want to let it go, clinging and resisting until the cow, with an aggravated snort, yanks her foot free.  Schhlorppp.  And again, and again, and again.  These girls are going to have amazing leg muscles by summer.

The calves are another story.  They skitter right over the top of it, using momentum and their lighter weight to full advantage.  Lucky little devils.

The mud of the chicken yard is a lesser creature, although still worthy of respect.  Chickens can do a real number on the ground too, with their enthusiastic scratching and trampling.  Once they have destroyed the turf, the water just pools wherever there's a shallow depression, and those pockets can slurp a boot right off your foot if you're not careful.  I've actually had less trouble with that this winter, since having a hole in one boot means detouring around anything that looks puddlish or squelchy.  But it's slick as ice out there; one foot placed wrong and there's some serious laundry to do. 

Currently we are enjoying a warming spell, which has me throwing windows open everywhere.  The barn is getting a much-needed airing, and the pockets of damp that form on the dirt floor--oh, such a bad idea, a dirt-floored barn on a slope, but you use what you have--are reluctantly firming and drying.  In another few days I'll need to check the birds' feet for the little earthen balls that tend to glue themselves to their claws as they scratch in the drying clay.  In the meantime, we'll enjoy this sign of local spring:  a brief respite from the tyranny of the mud.  I expect there will be a few more storms as we get into April, but the cycle has turned at last.

Those darn boys

One of the biggest problems with keeping chickens is dealing with the roosters.  Of course you can have a flock of hens that lay faithfully without ever seeing a rooster.  Chickens have been selectively bred for centuries, and one of the traits that has been universally encouraged is the hen's propensity to lay eggs whether or not she has a rooster.  The eggs aren't fertile without a rooster, of course, but tell that to the hen.  For that matter, if she's not genetically inclined to broodiness, she will not give a solitary darn about fertility of the eggs she works so hard to produce. 

The trouble is, it's so easy to end up with a rooster.  Although there are a few breeds of chicken that have color-coded chicks, making it easy to ensure that you are buying only the gender you want, most of them aren't nearly so accomodating.  To help their customers out, many hatcheries offer chicks that have been inspected and sexed.  These judgements are accurate between 90 and 95% of the time . . . and believe me, that five to ten percent rate of "oopsy" will crop up.  Some hatcheries also will throw in a free chick or two, and even though they may be pulled from the box of unsexed chicks, darn if they don't tend to be roosters.  There's also the phenomenon of the itinerant rooster who one day hops over your fence and makes himself at home in your flock.  Often he is wily, refusing to perch with the others at night and bolting from the yard the minute he sees a net.  In short, roosters happen.

Our first roosters were, in a word, legion.  When starting out with chickens, we placed an order with a well-known hatchery.  To meet the minimum order size of 25 chicks--the hatchery's way of guarding against the chicks getting chilled while in transit--we split the order with a co-worker.  The hatchery then made a kind-hearted effort to maximize customer service.  To keep the two groups of chicks distinct, they shipped them in a two-chambered box and "filled in the gaps" on each side with carefully-marked Red Star rooster chicks.  Instead of twenty-five chicks, we received fifty.  That was one noisy box, let me tell you, and a very lively one with one hundred little four-toed feet stampeding around in there.  The local USPS sorting center phoned us at half-past midnight when it reached them; the man was laughing so hard he could barely articulate.

It was a gesture of great generosity by the hatchery, but when those little Red Stars started growing by leaps and bounds, we quickly learned that roosters are not all sweetness and light.  Even when immature, chickens compete with one another for dominance in many unkind ways:  pecks, shoving, sneak attacks, and sparring.  Roosters take all of these behaviors and amp them up by a factor of two to ten; the losers may then go and take it out on lower-ranking birds, including the hens.  In two brief months, we had a serious problem on our hands, one that was ultimately solved by first separating the Red Stars into another pen, and then giving them away to a neighbor who promised to be quiet about turning them into chicken dinners.

But we still had too many roosters:  five, to be exact.  Only one of these was due to an error on the part of the sexing inspector.  One, an Andalusian, was a bird we had ordered.  The second Andalusian and the Easter Egger were "bonus chicks."  The last was the lone Red Star that had had too decent a personality to send off with the rest.  After putting word out among the local chicken fanciers, we found homes for three of them.  At this point I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that the matter was settled.  The remaining pair--Blue the splash Andalusian and Conrad ("The Terrible") Sussex--seemed to have reached an agreement that they would share the twenty-three hens between them.  We decided that we rather liked having roosters around.  They keep order within the flock, they guard the hens, and they are very pretty to look at.  And the recommended rooster-to-hen ratio is one rooster per ten or eleven hens.  We had the perfect balance.

But on Valentine's Day we went out to discover both birds dyed in holiday scarlet, rolling across the sand in a tangle of angry feathers.  The sad truth was, even having an abundance of hens wasn't good enough to smooth things over between these two.  Since then, I have observed that situations like this one seem to depend largely upon personality.  Some roosters are more territorial than others.  When neither rooster is willing to back down, you get an ugly fight.  But if one bird eventually turns tail, then it's all down to the winner.  If he's smart, he'll let the matter go, and permit the loser to remain within the flock.  In my flock, if the winner decides he wants to kill his opponent, he will be summarily removed from the gene pool, one way or another. 

I dealt with the matter that day by separating the two permanently.  Blue went on to become the flock patriarch, and when we lost him to dogs I incubated a set of eggs and ended up with four daughters and two sons of his.  The sons are Jake and Elwood, both sporting the blue coloration and handsome carriage of the Andalusian breed.  Unfortunately they hate each other with a fine old passion and had to be separated, creating a need for yet another pen. 

You would think that I would have learned my lesson, but no.  The following summer I took a wild hair and bought a wide variety of chicks from the local feed store.  Some of these were of famously broody breeds, like Mahogany, who I mentioned in the last post.  That led to home-grown chicks the following year, and naturally chicks always come in either male or female.  I re-homed most of the resulting roosters, but somehow there always seemed to be one or two extras that I really didn't want to get rid of.  Maybe they were prettier than the rest, or had good personalities, or sported some other trait that I liked.  But sooner or later it would come down to a decision:  either get rid of the extras, or build another pen.

So how's that working out?  Umm . . . yeah.  Currently we have eight extra pens, each with its own rooster, plus the main flock.  Of the pens, two house bantams, one contains Polish and other crested breeds, three contain "interesting mix" birds, and one is for Quercus the Eternally Confused.   Jake reigns supreme over a small flock in the south pasture, definitely the plushest accomodations in the place.  And poor old Elwood is living in the nursery, having recently been ousted from the alpha spot in the main flock by a younger rooster.  In his place I installed his son Baron, who has been patiently awaiting this day for some time.  He rules the flock with an iron claw but tolerates the presence of the two junior roosters.  That's . . . let me see . . . one dozen roosters.  Plus Hoppy, in his wheelchair.

And no, roosters don't crow only at sunrise.  I sure hope our neighbors continue to be good-natured about all this.

It must be spring . . . .

Chickens can't read calendars, but their internal clocks are pretty darned good.  Two nights ago I discovered Mahogany lurking in one of the second-tier nest boxes. 

Mahogany is a bantam Partridge Cochin just coming up on her third birthday this summer.  She is one of our smallest hens, and our most fervent brooder.  Experience has proven that Mahogany will not, in fact, give up on brooding once that little timer in her head has gone "Ding!"  Every March I find myself facing her down in a nest box atop a pile of adopted eggs, her orange eyes glaring and russet feathers a-poof.  And she doesn't believe in waiting until the weather warms up; she goes broody early and beats the rush.

Two years ago she went broody for the first time, in early March.  We were having a bitterly cold spring, and I fought with her for nearly six weeks.  Every night I would take her eggs, and the next night she would be back, glowering, beak set with determination.  I lectured her on the subject of inappropriate climates for raising chicks.  I pleaded with her to just wait another month, maybe two.  I pointed out that the flock was plenty big enough already, and we frankly didn't need new chicks.  The barn lacked a broody chamber.  And so on. 

Mahogany wasn't having any of it.  She tried changing boxes several times, which let her in for some serious grief when a bigger hen decided she wanted the box Mahogany was in.  She tried using the little box off to the side that only one other hen ever wanted.  Although she preferred to adopt the biggest clutch she could find, she did make a brief try at boxes that only contained two or three eggs, but when that didn't work she went back to the big clutches.  She eventually tried defending her nest from me, but she's a very gentle soul and her heart clearly wasn't in it.  At last came the night that I reached in to take her eggs, and Mahogany made no move to protect them, only uttered a heartbroken little clucking cry. 

It shattered me.  All of my resolve fell away like a sand castle under a big wave.  I let her keep her eggs that night, marking them with a pencil in case she accumulated more from the other hens.  And that weekend we built the nursery, a 5'X3' fully-enclosed chamber in the most sheltered corner of the barn.

Mahogany raised up three beautiful chicks that season, and was as happy as a clam.  The next spring I moved her into the nursery after only five nights of argument, whereupon she sat her clutch of three and adopted three other eggs "orphaned" by a hen who started setting, then abandoned her clutch.  In the fullness of time she presented us with a merry mixed bunch of chicks:  one Belgian Bearded, one bantam Cochin, Ag, and his golden-laced sister Aurie.  Once again, she was the most contented bird in the flock.  Other broody hens get anxious, or irritable (the Beardies in particular will take your hand off); Mahogany gets super mellow.  She's a dedicated mother, and I have to say that her chicks tend to have good personalities, however much "nature versus nurture" applies to chickens.

So, two nights ago, and there was Mahogany in her box--same one she chose last year.  When approached, she put up her hackles and uttered a peremptory "Keeeerrk!", then shuffled herself even lower in the box.  I put my hand underneath her and found that she had settled onto two eggs and the egg-shaped rock that has served us so well in the past as a decoy.  I sighed . . . and shrugged, and moved her and her rock into the nursery.  I know when I'm beaten.

Last night I gave her a quartet of "test" eggs:  I've been saving eggs from one hen in particular in case someone went broody, and these eggs were a little too old (at 10-16 days) to be viable.  So far she has been sitting tight, and soon I'll be giving her a clutch "for real."  And Mahogany will, once again, be doing what she loves.

Ag

Chickens come in many breeds, each of which was designed for a primary purpose.  Some were developed for meat, others for eggs, and quite a few were developed to provide both.  Then there are the ones whose ancestors possessed an interesting physical trait that caught the eye of long-ago breeders, resulting in careful combining of birds to lock that trait into successive generations.  These are the ornamental breeds.  They're beautiful to look at and often quite decent layers as well; there's no denying that these birds can be fully functioning members of a working flock.  But when you breed for looks, sometimes you end up with a few little surprises.  Case in point:  Ag.

Ag is the silver-laced Polish rooster that came of last summer's hatch.  His striking coloring was completely unexpected, and as is so often the case with roosters, convinced me to hang onto him for "just a little longer" to see if he could integrate into the flock without driving senior rooster Elwood crazy.  So I've gotten to watch him grow from a punk-rocker gangly chick with an '80s porcupine 'do into a tall young vision in black and white stripes.

Embarrassing baby photo of Ag, who is on the right.
His companion is a bantam Cochin chick.

 

All grown up!


Being a Polish, Ag doesn't just have feathers on his head; he has something that resembles a wilting sea urchin.  If Cruella de Vil and Phyllis Diller got together and designed a line of wigs, Ag would be the poster child.  Then there are the black beard and muffs that he inherited from his mother.  With his little dark eyes barely visible among the thicket, he looks like Bubba the Muppet, of Lubbock Lou and His Jughuggers.  Vision is not one of his strong points.  But stubbornness?  He's got that in spades.

The first real winter storm came through back in October.  We don't generally get rain during the summer, so that first rainstorm is always a big deal for the flock:  for some of them, it's a reminder of what lies ahead, but for the summer's new chicks it's an Experience.  This was a good storm, with gusting winds and fairly heavy showers.  When I opened up the barn that morning, all of the birds ran out like they usually do, but it was obvious that their hearts weren’t in it.  Elwood shortly came back inside and looked up at me firmly; taking the hint, I scattered a large amount of scratch around inside the barn, and he called the hens back indoors to eat.  I took scratch around to the other pens, noting glumly some new leaks in the roofs.  Meanwhile I spotted Ag foraging around in the yard and being blown sideways by the wind.  He couldn’t figure out what was happening, but soon scooted underneath the tarp of Donna's crate.  I figured that he would stay under cover and went back inside.

A few hours later, the weather had devolved into more intense versions of the same:  louring sky, sharp blasts of wind, and steady, steady rain.  A cautionary voice in my head suggested going out and checking on the birds again.  So I zipped up in the rain suit that lives in the breezeway, pulled on my boots, and clomped outside.

Well, every single bird in the main flock was standing inside the barn, including Donna King, who hates the barn.  Except . . . Ag, who was determinedly running around behind the barn, pacing out his turf in mule-headed defiance of the weather.  He was soaked to the skin.  Long black and white feathers stuck up in all directions, his crest was plastered flat to the top of his head, and every time a gust of wet wind hit him he would shiver, stagger backwards, and cluck crossly.  He looked like something fished up out of the shower drain, skittering around on long skinny blue legs.

Naturally when I tried to catch him, he threw a holy fit.  First the sky had tried to drown him, and now he had this gigantic blue Cookie Monster in thumping black boots chasing him around the yard with a net.  After several minutes of stalking him around the other pens, I saw him heading for the barn.  When he stepped inside, I dove after him and slammed the lower door.  The barn stayed closed up for the rest of the day.  When I checked on him again mid-afternoon, his feathers had dried out and he had stopped hiding in the corner.

Since that day, Ag has settled down somewhat.  I think the turning point for his opinion of humans came when he contracted pox--the diphtheritic, Wheezy form--and spent five days lurking in the shower stall.  I was pretty worried about him, but he turned the corner on antibiotics and before long we began putting him outside with the main flock during the day so that he could get some sun and exercise.  After a week and a half of regular handling, Ag had become downright phlegmatic about humans.  Now he hops up on top of the nursery pen every morning, expecting to be served a handful of scratch.

Hoppy

It's been a busy few weeks, with the usual mad holiday crush:  clandestine phone consultations with family regarding other family, brave sallies to the shops, the Taming of the Credit Card, semi-frantic housecleaning and wrapping, wrapping, wrapping followed by the final jaw-jutting, shoulders-back foray to the Post Office.  Really, it all went fairly smoothly this year.  But it was with great relief that we greeted Christmas Day.  After the glad clatter of fixing brunch, carols on the stereo, and unwrapping our goodies, I had a peaceful late afternoon to enjoy.  The weather was gray and chilly, so I decided it was a perfect day for clam chowder.

Fixing chowder takes some time, and it was getting steadily colder out, so the first thing I did was to bring Hoppy inside.  Hoppy is our rooster in a wheelchair.  Well, really it's more of a cart.  Hoppy had a narrow escape from a hawk about eighteen months ago.  After a prolonged recovery from some very nasty wounds, he ended up with both legs crippled.  Some experiments with a stationary sling were entirely unsatisfactory to both of us, so I built him a framework out of light scrap wood and mounted cups for feed and water on the front.  Hoppy rests in a padded sling made out of polyester fleece which holds him high enough that he can get his crazy legs under him.  Four model airplane wheels, with some piano wire for axles, provide him with mobility (although his capacity for turns is severely limited).  When we're home, he spends the day out on the front walk, or the porch if it's rainy.  The mail carrier and the UPS man have gotten used to being greeted by a little gold-and-black rooster on their way to the house.

Hoppy is, however, a creature of habit.  He knows that when it gets cold out, he'll be brought inside.  And once inside, he wants to be taken out of his cart and put to bed, where he can look forward to a handful of scratch grains.  Although we often put him inside when headed out on errands during the day, leaving him to wheel slowly about the kitchen, he views this as a demonstration of failed intelligence on our part, and delivers a thorough scolding when we get home.  In his mind, coming inside equals Bed and Scratch Now.  It's very simple; even humans should get it.

But regardless, it was cold out, and getting dark, and the chowder would keep me busy for a while.  So I brought Hoppy in and set him beside the kitchen table, telling him firmly that it was much too early for bed.  Hoppy angled a bright brown eye up at me, ruffled his feathers contemplatively, and seemed willing to let the matter go.  I washed up and began dicing bacon.

Hoppy sat patiently throughout the frying of the bacon, and the slicing of the veggies, and the sauteeing of same.  But when I was in the middle of scrubbing potatoes, I heard him flap his wings, the rooster equivalent of clearing his throat.

"Rawk."

"I know, but it's too early."

Two potatoes later, and a little louder:  "Raawk."

"Too early, dude.  Sorry."

Several minutes elapsed in silence, apart from the whickering sound of the peeler as I divested the potatoes of their skins.  Then, as I began slicing, I heard the scrabble of his toes on the linoleum, and the soft bump as he hit the bookcase.  Hoppy was getting tired of waiting.

"Rawk-rawk-rawk!"

"Can I just finish the potatoes first?"  I pleaded.

Hoppy appeared to consider it.  I cubed potatoes as quickly as I could, wincing at the little noises behind me that signalled a rooster approaching boil.  I knew it was coming, it was only a matter of time . . . and still I nearly trimmed my thumbnail with the knife when Hoppy finally blew.

"REEK-a-keer-ooo!!"

When Hoppy starts crowing in frustration, he can reach a volume comparable to a low fly-by by an F-16, and that high initial note seems like it should shatter glass.  In the closed confines of the kitchen, the sound waves rebound as if homing in directly on the nearest pair of human ears.  And he can keep it up for ages, seemingly unaffected by his own voice even as it pulverizes the nerves of everyone else in the room.  I gave up. 

"All right, all right, all right . . . ."

Hoppy kicked emphatically as I unlaced his harness and lifted him from the cart, and indulged himself in his usual  "I'm flying!  I'm flying!"  flapping while being carried from the kitchen.  Moments later he was ensconced in his tub atop the dryer, happily tucking into the promised handful of scratch.  I went back to my potatoes, and finished the rest of the chowder prep without interruption.  When I went out to fetch in Quercus, Hoppy was dozing contentedly on his towel.

He's not a difficult bird, really.  But he does have his little ways.

Hoppy, in his wheelchair.  I took up the food and water
cups so that he could get at the grass, but he was more
interested in the camera.

Baron

This morning, while letting the gang out of the barn and distributing the feeders, I took a look into the corner pen and sighed.  Baron's beak is in need of trimming again.

Baron, the son of Elwood and Charger, is a big bluff fellow with a foghorn crow and a build like a Percheron.  In manner he vaguely resembles Rumpole of the Bailey as he stumps about on his big green legs, glowering and muttering.  His body is a steel blue in color, with a darker hackle, deep rust shoulder and rusty stripes and spangles on his sides and belly.  His comb, an embarrassing collision between single and pea, slouches off the left side of his head like a half-melted ice cream, covering his eye.  And he has a persistent split in the tip of his maxillary beak that is a nuisance to him, and also his unwitting salvation.

J.R. Williams might have graced this bird's situation with a mention in one of his "Born Thirty Years Too Soon" cartoons, although chicken generations being much shorter than human ones, I think it was more like three years too soon.  He has all the makings of an excellent boss rooster:  size, presence, vitality, and voice.  His temperament is good, and he guards the hens well.  The trouble is, his father Elwood shares every one of those qualities and is still going strong.  I have wished many times that Baron had come along just a few years from now . . . or at least stuck with his original vocation.  You see, for the first four months of his life, we thought he was a hen.

Elwood has always thrown sons that matured very quickly, just like he did, and his father Blue before him.  Both Blue and Elwood were crowing at five days old, in a shrill soprano  "Pbbreepareep!"  which is a rather alarming sound to have coming from a brooder box.  They started sparring early, they hackled out early, they grew like weeds, inches taller than their sisters from three weeks of age.  So we fell into the habit of thinking that with these genetics, we'd have no trouble telling the young roosters from the young hens.

Two summers ago, Miga the Belgian Bearded sat her first clutch, mostly donations from our Easter Egger hens.  She hatched out a pile of chicks, and among them were two mixes with the blue gene from Elwood.  These two grew at a modest rate, quiet little things that kept to the background while their brothers paraded about and quarreled with each other.  One feathered out blue and gold, the other blue with some vague red barring.  Great, I thought, two more nice hens.  But when they reached four months old, I looked out the kitchen window to see the redder one stalking across the grass and realized,  Good grief, that kid's got some serious legs!

From there, it became increasingly obvious that Something was Up.  Over the following weeks that chick added height and weight like a weed sprinkled with fertilizer.  Its tiny pea comb expanded lumpily and began drooping heavily over one eye.  The rounded hennish hackle feathers dropped out, to be replaced by long ones.  Then pointed saddle feathers began peeking out of the back feathers.  Finally I gave up trying to deny the inevitable, and commemorated the whole bizarre situation by naming him Baron Ashler.  (Google it, if you like.)

So our "hen" had become a superfluous rooster; a nice enough bird, certainly, but flatly unnecessary.  Elwood was in no wise ready to retire as boss rooster.  As winter proceeded toward spring, the rest of the young roosters from the summer hatch turned obstreperous and got themselves relocated to a variety of interested neighbors.  But I hung onto Baron.  Part of it was his willingness, despite his huge size, to walk small and not challenge his father.  Part of it was his handsome plumage.  And part of it was the knowledge that surplus roosters, once given away, have a tendency to end up on the dinner table.  I hated to see that happen to this big, placid bird with his ridiculous comb.  At some point in late spring he collected a small split on the end of his beak, but it seemed to do him no harm, so we kept an eye on it and waited for it to grow out.

And then, in summer, Baron finally made his power play.  We came home from a trip to find Elwood had been bloodily and firmly ousted from the alpha spot, with Baron now in charge.  Unfortunately for Baron, our sympathies lay with Elwood.  Baron was unceremoniously deposited in the nursery pen, and Elwood shakily came out from behind the barn door and reclaimed his position in the flock.

So now we come back to that split in Baron's beak.  When Baron attacked Elwood, I had every intention of getting rid of the young snot as soon as possible.  But Baron aggravated his old injury in the battle.  The split migrated up into the quick, and even with a dremel I wasn't able to eradicate it.  Since then it's become a constant source of maintenance:  every couple of months, we note that Baron has developed a pair of fangs at the end of his beak, and catch him up and sand things back.  Baron hates being caught and he hates being dremeled, but he's gotten a lot better about it and doesn't yell so much.

And why is that split his salvation?  Because it means he stays here.  With a beak like that, his chances of becoming a nice stew are virtually 100% if I give him to a neighbor.  So Baron waits patiently, in the cosiest, cushiest spot in the barn.  One of these days Elwood's arthritic feet will start to get the better of him, and he'll get retired to a sunny pen in the south pasture like the one his brother has.  And Baron will get his turn as leader.

Baron at six months old.  He's shy about turning
his covered eye towards the camera.