NOW PLAYING: Goodbye, Roosters 01 August, 2000 In our little flock of 30 chickens, we had seven roosters -- six Rhode Island Reds and the "free, rare exotic" bird we call "ChickenHawk." That's an awful lot of roosters, and the poor hens were getting abused. Chicken sex isn't exactly soft 'n' gentle in the best of situations; and with seven roosters around, "gang-rape" is probably a more accurate description. As a result, our poor peeper hens were starting to go bald on their backs and heads. (A rooster grabs the feathers on a hen's back in his beak, and if he holds her, he hops on and grabs some feathers on her head while digging his spurs into her side and getting a "quickie." Sometimes he gets a mouthful of feathers when the hen won't stop running from him, and the hen gets a bald spot.) It became evident that the roosters were going to have to go, one way or another. We had decided to keep the two roosters that we "knew" -- Big Boy, who is the largest of the 'Reds and the ruler of the roost, and ChickenHawk, who is a beautiful rooster with wild looking multi-colored feathers. He's also the horniest damned rooster in the place, and would likely pick up the slack once the other five cocks were gone. Those five were virtually indistinguishable to us. At one time we had names for two others -- Mojo and Little Boy -- but when they grew up, we had a tough time telling them apart. I was all set to just kill off the five "excess" roosters -- it would be a waste, though, since The Wife refused eat them. Our peepers are really pets at this point, and it took her long enough to begin eating their eggs, let alone consider eating an actual bird. Never happen. So she put an ad in the classifieds: "Free Roosters" and they had 10 days to be "adopted" before the ad stopped. After that, they would be goners. We got a few calls about them, but no takers. Things looked grim for the five roosters. Then came a call from some folks just down the road -- they had a large flock of chickens, all different kinds, and their Rhode Island Red rooster had just keeled over and died. They wanted one of ours to replace him. It turned out that they took two of our roosters, and in doing so, they showed us a neat trick that they had learned about catching the chickens with a fishing net. We had a 5-foot heavy-gauge wire rod with a crook at the end, which we'd never used, and it would supposedly snag a chicken's leg, then you could grab him. Well, a simple $5 fishing net works like a charm -- you just scoop them up. It stirs up the chickens, but they get excited about almost anything anyway. We said goodbye to our boys as they drove off -- though they're just a mile or so down the road, and we've been invited to come see them when we want to. Two down, three to go. I had decided to just go ahead and kill off the other three -- we hadn't received many calls about them, and everytime I saw them all jumping on a hen I'd get mad. But it rained the next couple of days and I didn't feel like chasing down the roosters in the mud and the rain, so they got a reprieve. Luckily for both the roosters and me (I really wasn't looking forward to the job of dispatching them), a couple from Fort Bragg called and said that they wanted the last three roosters. They had 11 acres and wanted to have some chickens running around the place. We told them about how we got our day-old peepers and that they could get a little flock to raise, too. So after using the fishing net on the three roosters, we put them in the back of a pickup truck headed for the Army base and a life of roaming around. We got a phone call last night, informing us that our three boys were having a great time and "what was the name of that chicken place again?" McMurray Hatchery, we said. We're glad that the roosters found good homes -- and so are the hens, I think. I hope their feathers grow back soon.
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