By Jared Gulian
Old Man Henry and the chook house race wars
Old Man Henry is our geriatric rooster. He is mangy and decrepit. The feathers on his head are just quill stubble. He’s half blind, bow-legged, and he pauses strangely after every step. On certain misty mornings, when the light is right, he looks as though he’s stepped out of some twisted chicken fancier’s version of Dawn of the Dead.
Yet this unlikely old man is a Nobel Peace Prize winner among poultry. And it is by peacekeeping that he earns his keep. When I brought home our first two young chickens nine months ago – the sisters Henrietta and Ethel – I had no plans to get a rooster. I didn’t want to deal with baby chicks hatching left and right, and I had nightmarish visions of cracking open an egg for breakfast to find a half-formed fetus inside.
Henrietta and Ethel are sizable chickens, both Light Sussex. They eat voraciously, and very quickly after arriving they grew thick and plump. Rick began calling them ‘the fat English ladies.’
They lived together in peace for all of two days. Then they turned their backs on sisterly love and started doing what chickens do. They began the Battle for Ultimate Chicken Supremacy.
It was bizarre. In the middle of pecking peacefully, suddenly one would lift her head and run full speed straight at the other. Then they’d both start squawking, stretching out their necks to full height, and flapping their wings wildly. Imagine two sumo wrestlers in chicken suits, trying to push each other over, and you get the picture.
Rick and I watched all this with great curiosity, wondering which of the fat English ladies would win the contest and become Queen of the Whole Wide Coop. Who needs reality TV when you’ve got chickens?
Aracaunas in the ring
Shortly after the infighting started, we got our two Lavendar Aracauna – Natasha and Francoise. They have an upright, noble posture and tufted feathers on their heads. They’re a South American breed, much smaller than the Light Sussex. Yet what they lack in size they seem to make up for with a kind of haughty demeanor. The fat English ladies did not like the aristocratic South Americans at all.
Suddenly Henrietta and Ethel were brought back together by their common foe. You could almost hear them whispering to each other over by the water dispenser in the corner, “Truce, sister. United we stand. Divided we fall. Now let’s kick their puny South American asses.” The gloves were on, and the beaks were out. The Great Chook House Race War had begun.
The fat English ladies used their size to their advantage. They bullied and harassed. They chased. They pecked. Then, in a clever tactical move, they refused to let the invading South Americans eat.
Every time the Araucanas tried to get at the chicken feed, the Light Sussex would chase them away. It happened over and over, even when the Light Sussex themselves were not actually eating. Eventually those poor South Americans resigned themselves to taking food only by stealth, when the enemy’s back was turned.
The fat English ladies were winning the war. You could see them practically high-fiving each other back in their corner, where they had hatched all those wicked plans.
A visit from a neighbour
Around this time our neighbour Suzanne from down the road stopped by. We took her out to see the new chicken run and meet the chooks, and we began talking about how the birds were fighting so much. “You need a rooster,” she said. Her golden earrings sparkled in the sun and her gumboots glistened with dew.
By then several people had told me we needed a rooster. I wasn’t listening. I was still haunted by visions of half-formed fetuses in my scrambled eggs. People say that roosters calm hens, make them fight less because the rooster is unquestionably the top bird.
“I don’t know,” I said to Suzanne. “It strikes me as somehow sexist to think that hens need a rooster to keep them in line.” Suzanne looked at me strangely. “Jared, they’re not human.” Oh, yeah. Right. Clearly I was forgetting that. “I have got just the rooster for you,” she said, and she told us about Henry.
To be continued
