The rooster crows again: It was good while it lasted
A sad-happy story about the importance of will
Picture: Brad the Rooster in his heyday
I have a rooster. His origin story begins with the pandemic, when for the first time in years, I was without a single chicken. Two weeks prior to COVID lockdown, my entire flock was decimated by a fox (yes, there are foxes in Berkeley). And then, when lockdown began, everybody was sold out of chickens.
But I had my connections. A friend hooked me up with a friend (an onion farmer named Jorge who was also a chicken breeder) who had chicks. But they were straight run.
Goodness. It’s time to make room for some definitions.
What are straight run chicks?
Most hatcheries (the places that sell chicks) sex their chicks before selling them. So when they are for sale, you have a 90% chance of getting a hen if you’ve ordered female chicks. Also, there are some breeds that exhibit characteristics specific to male and female chicks, like with gold, black, and red sex links (hybrid chickens) that can offer 100% guarantees.
In the seven years I’ve had chickens, I’ve never had one grow into a rooster. So the hatcheries are pretty accurate.
This is pretty remarkable because untrained folks can’t tell the difference between female and male chicks. I tried. I looked up vent sexing on the internet, and held a chick upside down, squeezed gently, and blew on their bottom and all the bottoms looked the same; not a single one had a “bump” and I wasn’t sure whether or not to celebrate that I may have gotten the rare jackpot of 100% female chicks in a straight run delivery or admit that this shit is hard. You’re supposed to squeeze hard enough that the chick defecates. If you don’t squeeze hard enough, there won’t be anything to see. But if you squeeze too hard, you end up squishing the chick and uh, causing a sort of uh, hernia. Bottom line: it ain’t easy to sex a chick.
Then there are straight run chicks that aren’t sexed, and are a mix of unknown female and male chickens. This means if you order ten straight run chicks, you could end up with anywhere from zero to ten female hens. But more likely somewhere in the middle at 50/50. I’m not a statistics guru. But there you go.
Jorge gave me nine chicks on the sidewalk outside of my friend’s store. Four of them ended up being cockerels (teenage roosters). I ended up keeping one cockerel, because one day, he defended the pullets (teenage hens) from a predator. He broke a leg during the confrontation, but he protected them and saved their lives.
It was during the pure fear of COVID, and the thought of going to a vet and exposing myself to a deadly disease paralyzed me. So I took a toilet roll, some tape, and did some amateur first aid to heal his leg. He had a good appetite and I fed him and he eventually healed. Dear reader: I didn’t do THAT great a job, because his leg healed backward and one of his feet point the opposite way. But he’s alive, years later. He grew up to be a vicious rooster, one that attacks me at every turn. I felt such tenderness to him that I violated one of my golden rules. I named him.
And thus, Brad the Rooster.
How often does a rooster crow?
Brad the Rooster crows. He crows in the morning. He crows in the afternoon. In the evening. He crows more often than a hobbit has mealtimes. He crows when he hears us grinding coffee in the kitchen. He crows when he wants to be fed. He crows when he damn well feels like it. I put a crow collar on him to decrease the volume of his crowing. I felt virtuous, because someone referred me to a veterinarian who will decrow roosters via voicebox surgery. And a crow collar, which is basically a velcro band you wrap around a rooster’s neck (not too tight, but tight enough that he will crow more softly) was way less invasive. He still crows. He still crows loudly.
You’d think I am the bane of my neighborhood. But Brad the Rooster is inexplicably popular. I made it clear to my neighbors that if he ever bothered them, I’d dispatch him, because I prioritize their comfort over the life of a chicken.
When I told them this, I received a flurry of emails from several neighbors, all of the ones nearby, telling me that I dare NOT get rid of him. The exact words of one neighbor (with whom I’ve barely socialized over the twenty-plus years I’ve lived here) were, “The purpose of this note is to tell you how much we enjoy Brad. I have never met him, but his voice is something I look forward to hearing every day. I think I can even tell his mood when he vocalizes. For me he provides a very nice sense of continuity, stability, and the feeling that all is better in the world as he performs his rooster duties.”
Huh.
What does it mean when a rooster crows?
In the early days of this flock, I had more than one rooster. They crowed more often, then, because one of the reasons a rooster crows is to say he exists (and he’s ready to fight). They will crow to show dominance, in a crow-off competition. In some ways, this is not like human life.
Roosters also crow to signal danger. They’ll crow to say there’s good food somewhere. They will crow after mating. Before mating. And he doesn’t care how loud he is, because guess what? He closes his own ears whenever he crows.
In sum, I’ve learned that roosters crow because they can.
Brad the Rooster was the king of the coop. He was a boss. He bit me and scratched me. He was at the top of the pecking order and made sure the hens were safe. Because he was around, the hens didn’t peck each other.
But he did hump them. A lot. When roosters mount hens (and it looks a little like one chicken standing on another), they can scratch off back feathers while trying to hop on. He copulated with the hens so much that half of them had bald spots larger than the size of my hand. His “favorite” hen had absolutely no feathers on her back from tail to beak; she had a reverse mohawk.
I got the hens protective saddles from Etsy. And they wriggled out of them.
In the end, what really helped was getting more hens. So that instead of five chickens to one rooster, I had eight hens to one rooster.
But then Brad the Rooster stopped crowing one day
Brad the Rooster had a quiet day in late Summer of last year. Then he had a quiet week. His crows got croaky. Then he just went quiet. His feathers looked ratty. It was, by then, Autumn; the sun was gold and pale, so that it felt like the golden hour was now golden daytime. The last of the tomatoes were still on the vines, but would never ripen. Even though it was well before Thanksgiving, Christmas decorations were already up in stores, begging us all to buy things.
I thought the rooster was molting, which is when chickens shed their old feathers and grow new ones, mostly in preparation for winter. Rooster and hens alike, molt. They look like they’re postpartum women losing hair and developing bald spots. It takes a while, often several weeks, and molting hens will stop laying when they molt. Maybe, I thought, he’s just gone quiet because of molting. Molting can be hard on a chicken. It takes a lot of energy to generate new feathers.
Over the next month, he stopped moving around as much, making a nesting box his main lounge. Nesting boxes, by the way, are the quiet nooks where hens lay eggs. When he did go out, the hens pecked at him. Even the hens on the lowest rungs of the hierarchy, pecked, especially at his bad foot. Until they drew blood. And then they pecked some more.
The rooster was quiet. He had been demoted to the lowest rung.
My mom was also ailing.
She had a stroke in the summertime. She called to tell me she was having “trouble with turning left” one day. I asked to talk to my dad, who said she was fine. He put her back on the phone. She made little sense. “I have trouble turning left,” she repeated. When I hung up, I decided to call 911 and send an ambulance to them.
Um. Did you know there is no way to call 911 for someone in a different state and county? I had to call her local police department and ask THEM to dispatch 911.
My mom went quiet along with Brad the Rooster.
Who loves roosters?
My neighbors love Brad the Rooster. But also, my mom loved Brad the Rooster. She likes roosters in general. She lived her entire life in service of my father. My father was a stroke survivor and not in the best of health; she excelled in her role as his caregiver, especially after a career as an ICU nurse. When I asked why she wasn’t enjoying her life as much as she should, she told me she would enjoy her life after her duties were over. In other words, she meant, after her husband died.
She loved it when I sent videos of the rooster. Admired his plumage. Loved his crowing.
All while I rolled my eyes. “He’s so mean, Mom.”
“But he’s beautiful!”
I kept him, because for the first time in years, the hens weren’t victimized by predators. I’d not suffered a single loss. And yes, he is a magnificent looking rooster, a melange of black and petrol and rust feathers that look like an oil slick under a clear sky. Or Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring.
“Thank you, he is gorgeous,” I reply, and add, “…in PICTURES that have NO VOLUME!”
And the hens love the rooster, too. The flock is certainly more peaceful with a rooster. When I integrated younger hens into the flock, they discovered that if they huddled next to Brad the Rooster, the established hens wouldn’t bother them so much.
What do you do with an ailing rooster?
One of the hard parts about urban farming is making the judgment call of what to do when your livestock is ailing. Do you prolong their suffering? Do you pull all the stops to help them survive? Or do you end their suffering in the quickest way?
Around the holidays, after some improvement in her rehabilitation, my mom suddenly took a turn for the worse. She stopped being able to walk without falling. Even her speech worsened. As a person devoted to being in service of others, she found herself incapable of anything at all, let alone those golden years she’d promised herself. She decided to go into hospice.
My father did not understand her decision.
“She wants to die,” I told him.
He argued with me and told me to convince my mom to live.
“But it’s her choice,” I said.
And that is where we disagreed.
“Who gives up like that? Why doesn’t she fight to live?” These were the questions my father asked for weeks on end. He begged her to eat. She would not eat.
Over the next month, my father’s questions became more specific.“This isn’t a terminal illness like cancer. She already survived the stroke. Why isn’t she getting better?”
I stopped telling him it was the choice she made.
Brad the Rooster, if he could whimper, would. But he could not whimper. And because he could not crow, he did not crow. Every once in a while, he let out a raspy gasp, which I quickly figured out was his attempt to crow.
Here is the thing. One thing I’ve learned on my urban farm is that there is a difference between livestock and pets. This is not to say that livestock can’t be pets. In the beginning, I named my chickens, and had entire flocks with a naming scheme, making sure to cuddle each hen and learn their different personalities. After all, all the animals in my life had been pets. I had no other model.
The first year I had chickens, I named them after women in The Great Gatsby. Later, my daughter named the chickens in the second flock after Disney princesses, much to my chagrin. Then they died and I was so incredibly sad.
After multiple heartbreaks, I stopped naming my chickens. They were, I vowed, a food source. I would treat the chickens with respect. I would care for them. But I would not get attached. Chickens would not be my pets.
Until Brad the Rooster. Who had, through an act of bravado, won my heart. And then a name.
It dawned on me that I may have to slaughter him. It is not easy to slaughter a chicken, but I’ve done it. But I couldn’t bring myself to kill Brad the Rooster.
My mom loved him. I couldn’t kill him. My mom was dying. I couldn’t kill him.
And so everyday, as I gathered eggs, I greeted him in the nesting box. He lived there. It was the rainiest winter in decades, and the eggs were covered in mud. We were all grateful for a rain that finally ended a years-long drought, but with it came misery. On the news, rivers overflowed. Mudslides took homes down the hillsides. Floods trapped entire towns. People died.
Just get better, I would tell him.
Death on a farm
My mom died in March, two months into hospice.
On a farm, life goes on. I got up each day and fed the chickens. I checked on Brad the Rooster. The rain still came, but the daylight hours grew longer. The bee hives grew. I planted crops and they transformed from tiny two-leafed seedlings into tomato plants and peppers and lettuce and beans, all of which I then transplanted into the garden.
Brad the Rooster stayed huddled. He was no longer attacking me. He let me touch him. The feathers fell out but they had not grown back, so that he looked almost like a Thanksgiving turkey. I saw his crow collar, one that I’d put on years prior. I always took care to make sure it was loose.
If he was going to die, I thought, why keep the crow collar on him?
So I removed the crow collar, removing velcro that felt almost stitched together.
I don’t know if the crow collar was the root cause of his condition. But removing it was the turning point in his health. Maybe he found his will to live.
But as soon as I removed his crow collar, he tried to crow. It came out as a hoarse gasp. He flapped his wings.
Over the next week, he attempted to crow frequently. He relished his own crowing. And flapped his wings as if applauding himself.
The next week, I noticed feathers growing again. He still looked ratty, but he looked game at last.
The next month, he began to properly crow again, even if still not at full volume.
By Summer, he was crowing at full blast.
Nerding out on nature, chickens, bees, and urban farming and ensuing life lessons for anyone and everyone who has looked at a flower and wondered why and how flowers evolved.