Pity the Rooster

Even as the craze for backyard chickens spreads, no one wants the roosters

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I’ve got a chicken problem, which is that my flock of backyard birds includes two roosters. The first is a Golden-Laced Wyandotte with a regal disposition, a comb that dangles rakishly over one eye, and a crow you could hear from Crowley. About a year old and awash with cocksure virility, Girly Man (so named by the kids because for months we thought he was a hen) is your archetypal barnyard rooster: a handsome, strutting, foppish sentry and staunch defender of the dozen hens in his harem.

The second is a scrawny, unscrupulous, lothario of a White Leghorn with an inferiority complex and a crow like a rusty screen door. He lurks under the henhouse and, when he thinks Girly Man isn’t watching, ambushes unsuspecting hens with furtive attempts to pass his weaselly genes on to future generations. This isn’t much fun for the hens since each time Girly Man catches Mr. White ravishing one of his concubines, he responds by knocking the interloper from his perch, then climbing aboard to demonstrate how a real rooster gets it done.

Mr. White has also developed a nasty habit of biting the hand that feeds him. You’ll be on your way down with a bucket of kitchen scraps or cracked corn when the crazy thing will come at you, head down, wings out, and start maniacally trying to tear strips off your shoes. Mr. White is, in other words, a real pecker: a candidate for the final solution offered by the local feed & seed guy and seasoned chicken man, Mr. Larry. Anytime I complain about my rooster problem, Larry raises his eyebrows and makes a lassoing motion … as if whirling something around his head.

So it goes. In the world of chicken-keeping, it doesn’t pay to get too attached. In the eight years we’ve kept backyard chickens, we have introduced an awful lot of nocturnal predators to the joys of a good chicken dinner. Conservatively, I’d say that we’ve probably owned fifty chickens by now but never more than a handful at any time. After the first ten or so, you stop naming most of them. After twenty, the kids do too.

Pity the rooster. Even as the craze for backyard chickens has spread across suburban America, no one wants the roosters. Not only are they bad-tempered early risers, loud enough to be unwelcome in all but the most rural settings, they are superfluous to egg production since hens don’t require the services of a rooster to lay. Anyway, no one who has seen a rooster doing what he was put on earth to do would describe him as a considerate lover. With even the most romantically inclined SNAR (sensitive, new-age rooster), courtship is a perfunctory affair. Finding some morsel of food on the ground, Girly Man will pick it up and drop it over and over again, hopping about from one leg to the other, waggling his wattles and chortling noisily. This rigmarole seems irresistible to the hens, who always come dashing over to see what he’s found, only to be sprung upon and serviced with eye-watering enthusiasm. It seems a high price to pay for a squashed grasshopper.

At the risk of sounding like a pervert, I like having a rooster around. I love his take-no-prisoners reveille at the crack of  … okay, two hours before … dawn. He’s gorgeous to look at, and you don’t need to watch his wattle-shaking antics for long to understand how descriptive phrases like “cock of the walk,” “strutting one’s stuff,” and “ruling the roost” found their way into our vocabulary. A good rooster serves as a sentry, keeping a proprietorial watch over his flock and providing some protection from daytime predators. He is also highly communicative, with a colorful range of calls, clucks, yodels and purrs to get his point across. Anytime a hawk or buzzard appears, Girly Man will emit a long, low snurrrrl-ling sound, at which all the hens freeze like statues, moving nothing but their beady eyes until he ruffles his feathers and chuckles an “all-clear.” On a spring evening, from a plastic lawn chair with a drink in hand, this is cheap entertainment. But a second-tier, bad-tempered, mean-spirited rooster with an inferiority complex really can be hard to have around. So maybe it’s time for us to take Mr. Larry’s advice and rename Mr. White in honor of the unwanted rooster’s other contribution to our culinary lexicon: “Coq au Vin.”