Mysterious Spinning Island Freaks Roosters

Summer Riot

Last Summer this hill was a desert, and this Summer it's a jungle about to clamber over the chicken house.
Never mind that the moisture is only a foot deep and the dug ponds have shrunk back into the deep shale trenches. The ground cover is so thick that roosters who ranged up and down and even across the road last year, now stay within a hundred feet of the chicken house, eating volunteer crops and everything in Davey's garden. Davey has been building cages for his vegetables , but the roosters still leap up just to knock down the tomatoes.

The deer had their fawns in Davey's orchard and wouldn't even run from the dogs. The dogs are agreed not to chase anything that won't run. Before the deer wandered off to see the big woods, they deer broke off some of Davey's fruit trees to get at the growing tips, so Davey as been building caging his rees.
But there haven't been any critters recently trying to eat the chickens themselves. The coyotes have gone wandering for the summer, and the foxes and weasels, and coons must be stuffed with a mincemeat of mice and fermented fuit, sleeping back in the cover.
We have never that I know of had a problem with the Harrier hawks, which are temporarily off their range, with the owls, even when we have illuminated white chicken roosting on the open deck. No problem with the crows who share the corn beside the chickens , or the vultures which only eat the dead. The skunks, which are technically weasels, are still living with a passage into the rooster quarters, where they eat with the roosters without conflict.
For a while, the neighborhood dogs were a problem. The Roosters do know that it's their job to guard the hens and, being also wide and bright targets, have taken most of the hits from the dogs.
Now that the neighbors have taken charge of their dogs, there has been no problem with them either.

So there would be little predator problem at all, except that the sexual predators among the roosters themselves are the worst threat to the hens.

One night a month or so back, when Davey was up at Lake Bonaparte to do some fireplace repairs, the roosters broke through one of the barricaded windows that he had slapped up to keep them from the hens.
The roosters mangled one hen, killed another, and kept the rest from getting to the food and water until I showed up.

I decided right there, this rooster rescue business has gone too far. We had to get rid of the three or four roosters most inclined to rush the hens, the ones that always wanted to pile on, to pull out their feathers, bite combs, and use their spurs. Some of these buckaroos have wicked spurs; they could ride a dog .

Maybe it was a mistake not to wring a few necks right then, instead of leaving the cull to Davey. But getting and harvesting is Davey's end of the chicken business here; my job is to keep them alive.
And anyway, There is road kill fresh every day on this hill , and I occasionally take a liver or bring back a pheasant from that source, but I long ago lost my taste or guns and killing . Mostly, all those years ago, when I shot the bear in Alaska and saw him l(ike I can see him right now) running around and gushering blood, with his head flapping on only a hinge of hide. So I left the slaughter to Davey.

Beauties and Fiends

Charles Darwin, a great observer of mating fowls, reported that for cocks courting, “beauty is even sometimes more important than success in battle.”
But the typical list of rooster virtues often leaves out (and maybe just takes for granted) that most obvious quality of roosters.The personal choices of hens have been developing rooster beauty since feathers began. Human breeders have tried to advance and elaborate upon it, but the breeders and the hens more or less agree on absolute Beauty, even though neither they nor I can define it. Nobody really thinks that the fourteen inch fingernails on the emperor's uncle, or the twelve foot tail on a Japanese trophy Rooster is more beautiful than nails that can fret a lute or a tail the bird can hold high. . And neither would be an asset in the act of mating or all out battle.
You can see the beauty factor working right here in Chicken town.
From the roost of nineteen roosters, Eric the Aracuna is the first choice of four or five out of our twelve hens, though his beauty is subtle and we might expect them to prefer gaudy George, the other Aracuna rooster.
Aracunas are named after the Chilean Indian tribe which was discovered by the Spanish to be raising them. Long before the Mayflower and the European ancestors of our Plymouth Rocks, Eric's fore-birds came across the Pacific as contributing passengers in Polynesian sea canoes. I myself used to take my hen Miss Kitty on canoe travels and she always wanted to ride on the bow, even though she had had to flap constantly to say aboard, and it would have so much easier to sit on a thwart. She was a great and eager traveler. I know of a hen who roosted on the warm engine block of a pick-up truck one winter night, and the next day rode twenty miles into Ithaca , where she was found wandering the streets with scorched fee.
Anyway, The Aracuna Indians of Chile who met and ate or traded with the Polynesians, and adopted their chickens , bred them forward to be wily, inconspicuous hens (who would evade predators and lay colored eggs) and bearded, milld-mannered, defensive males who would distract predators and win females, but not attack people. These are my kind of chickens. I am not put off by the fact that the hens also are bearded.
Gorgeous George is vainer than Eric and more likely to start fights, or pile on to fights in progress, and often ends up on top of the chicken house after the others try to pull out his hackles and tread on him. Then he stays up there to display and crow. He is great to look at, but his best assets may be his lack of an easy- to-grab comb, his open-field running skill, and his flightiness. These are all characteristics also of the Aracuna hens, especially chicken Honey, who is the first to leave the hen house and the last to return. She's built for speed and can shoot right between the legs of any inflated rooster.

Eric the red Aracuna not only has a subtler beauty than his cousin George, but he also brainier and more stylishly defensive. But both of them, are low in the male pecking order, particularly Eric who is right down there with the Dominikers and is more persecuted..
The persecution of Eric is due to yet another quality of roosters which needs to be added to the list : Namely, Enviousness.
Lyndon Johnson, that America President who most resembled a rooster and who certainly had a bag full of barn yard analogies, remarked that the two things most likely to bring political ruin, are sex and envy. He might have said the same thing about Roosters. Maybe he did.

The eighteen other roosters in his roost envy Eric his beauty and his success with the hens. Some of the others only succeed in mating when they way- lay the hens as they are trying to get in the door to roost in the evening, just like they try to punk the resented Eric on his way home. The others have to screw each other, or fight among themselves for seconds with unwilling hens. They can't feel good about this. A rooster's beauty is as important not just for his mating success, but because of his vanity , which is tied up with his dignity and pride. And then comes humility. Humility appears when dignity has been trampled and plucked, ....or when posturing becomes real fighting and someone looses.....or both loose, as seems to be the case with two of the lower status cocks of Dot's flock of six. They got into a fight with each other last night , bloodied each other , and are now keeping closer company in shared misery and common understanding.
Eric has his quiet dignity, his mild mannered beauty, and only one Dominiker for a friend. I have more than once had to rescue Eric from the gang bangers and shove him in Davey's house. When I put Eric in the house, Davey gives him a rubber salamander, which Eric murders for ten minutes without doing it any harm, but it restores his dignity some.

Have I mentioned that roosters are sex fiends?
Not always, not necessarily, not all the time, but way beyond your teenage dreams.
Chickens in locked houses are like co-ed prison populations. The roosters serially tread and retread every hen that tries to get to the food or water.
After the murder rape of a Dominiker hen I tacked bin lids over the passages between the main hen house and the south room, where, for now, the roosters now roost all by them selves.