SCORES & OUTDOORS: Truths and myths about roosters

by Roland D. Hallee

You must, at sometime, heard a rooster crow in the morning. It’s pretty cool.

Roosters are often portrayed as crowing at the break of dawn and will almost start crowing before the age of four months. He can often be seen sitting on fence posts or other objects, where he crows to proclaim his territory. However, this idea is more romantic than real, as a rooster can, and will, crow at any time of the day.

Some roosters are especially vociferous, crowing almost constantly, while others only crow a few times a day. These differences are dependent both upon the rooster’s breed and individual personality. He has several other calls as well, and can cluck, similar to the hen. Roosters will occasionally make a patterned series of clucks to attract hens to a source of food, the same way a mother hen does for her chicks.

A capon is a castrated rooster. Caponization affects the disposition of the bird. The process eliminates the male hormones, lessening the male sex instincts and changing their behavior: the bird becomes more docile and less active and tends not to fight. This procedure produces a unique type of poultry meat which is favored by a specialized market.

Did you hear the one about the person who asked another, “How cold was it last night?” The second person responded, “It was so cold I saw a rooster cross the road with a cape on.” It’s corny, but you can smile.

The name rooster was coined in the United States. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, the older term cockerel is more widely used. Also known as cocks, that is more of a general name for a male of other species of bird, for example, Cock sparrow.

The rooster was an emblem of symbolic importance in Gaul at the time of the invasion of Julius Caesar and was associated with the god Lugus, a deity of the Celtic pantheon.

Roosting is the action of perching aloft to sleep at night, and is done by both sexes. The rooster is polygamous, but cannot guard several nests of eggs at once. But he sure tries.

I remember when I was just a youngster the family would travel annually to our grandfather’s farm in northern Canada, in a small mining town named Mont Brun (Brown Mountain), about eight miles north of Rouyn-Noranda, approximately 260 miles north of Ottawa) to spend two weeks. Once a prosperous silver mining town, most of the mines had been shut down by that time, and the area was depressed. It has since recovered.

It was not always fun and games as we all had chores we had to finish before we were allowed to do anything else. And, if you can picture where this farm was, there wasn’t too much else to do. (My mother would say that just over the hill was the end of the world. We didn’t dare to go find out for ourselves.)

The older boys tended the pigs, milked the cows and carried the raw milk, in buckets, by hand to a porch on the back of the house, where my younger brother and I would feed the milk to a centrifugal, hand-cranked machine that would separate the milk from the cream, and begin the process of making butter, which was one of the girls’ chores.

However, another job that my younger brother and I had was to feed the chickens in the coop. Well, there was this rooster with which to contend. He was nasty, ornery and just plain didn’t like us being around. He would hide behind the door of the coop, waiting in ambush for the unsuspecting “city kids.” I had nightmares about that rooster.

More aggressive roosters will drop and extend both wings and puff out all their body feathers to give hens and/or other cocks the impression of a larger size, and charge through the hen yard like a bull. That particular rooster would do that to my brother and I, nipped away at the back of our ankles and scared the dickens out of us. Man, how I hated that rooster.

Roosters, however, can also be extremely graceful. The cockerel “waltz,” as it is known, occurs when the rooster struts in a half circle with one wing extended down, signifying to the females his dominance, and usually, the female will submit by running or moving away from the rooster in acknowledgement. On rare occasions, the hen will attempt to fight the rooster for dominance. Once dominance is established, the rooster will rarely waltz again.When other roosters are in the hen yard, this waltz is used significantly more and most roosters will waltz together if dominance has not been established; either one will back off, or the two will fight. The rooster will waltz again if he is taken out of the pen for a period, usually 24 hours, and put back.

So, the next time you hear a rooster crow, envision two kids running across the hen yard with a rooster in hot pursuit. My grandfather thought it was funny.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

A Canadian-based NHL team has not won the Stanley Cup in 32 years (1993). Which team was that and who did they defeat?