A Portrait of a Good Rooster
Or, life with a violent sexual predator in your backyard
The reason we started to call our rooster Jumpy was fairly uninspired: he jumped up on things. But you have to understand how funny it was to see a fluffball chick jumping several times his own height onto anything handy.
He’d jump onto the food bowl. He’d try to jump to the rim of the rubbermaid container he and his sisters were in. Often, and most memorably, he jumped onto the back of his adopted mother Mayapple, the broody hen that hatched him (she was the subject of another chicken post). He’d jockey around on her back, slipping and sliding on her feathers, usually falling off with a squeak and a flutter of wings. Like human toddlers, baby chicks seem to be made of rubber and have no problem flopping on their face over and over again.
The name “Jumpy” stuck, but at the time we didn’t know what we had on our hands.
Any given clutch of eggs is a coin toss if you’re looking for egg production: a fifty fifty chance of any one egg being a rooster means you might have to figure out what to do with, say, ten roosters out of the dozen eggs incubated. Roosters are infamously bad-tempered, so the process of sexing chicks is a whole science in itself. Too many roosters will probably result in a constant cockfight. So my wife and I were on the lookout for what this random clutch of eggs would produce in the way of a hen/rooster ratio. The eggs had come from a friend and we stuck them under the broody hen, knowing she’d raise any egg given to her (this is how you get hens raising pheasant eggs and why cowbirds are brood parasites).
We probably shouldn’t have been as lucky as we were. He ended up being the only rooster out of the clutch. Jumpy’s jumping behavior was a good sign that he was a rooster from the get-go. We also noticed his feet looked huge compared to the other chicks, and that his feathers laid differently on his back. And one morning, we heard an adorable crowing from out in the coop. That meant, in addition to Mayapple, we had a nice ratio of hens to rooster and wouldn’t have an unlicensed cockfighting ring in our yard.
It didn’t save us from all the violence, though. As I hinted not so subtly in the subtitle, roosters are rough animals, and usually roughest on their hens. He’d relentlessly pursue his girls around, pinning them down to do the deed. You start to appreciate the meaning of the word “consent” after watching livestock for a few years.
When people asked what it was like to have a rooster, I’d tell them that it was like “having a sexual predator living in the backyard,” and I wasn’t joking.
(This is what it looks like when your rooster thinks he owns the place)
Besides questionable ardor, Jumpy also seemed to relish fighting. When angered, he’d do a backflip maneuver to bring his spurs to bear. I wish I had better pictures of the spurs, but they were formidable: in turkey hunting, successful hunters often measure trophy toms by whether you can hang the male turkey from a branch by his spurs. Jumpy had spurs to rival most turkeys. When he attacked, and it was often during his first few years, your shins often got the worst of it. He’d backflip those spurs right at you.
Unfortunately the person most often on the other end of Jumpy’s outbursts of extreme violence was my wife Sarah. She sports scars earned after a few run-ins with him. Famously, he’d attack her after she came back from her commute. Why? Once she had fed him and the hens some leftover lunch scraps and Jumpy had decided that if she didn’t drop them scraps every time she came home, Sarah was holding out on the flock and deserved an ass-whooping. In his younger days, before age smoothed the rough edges of his personality, Jumpy would attack her just for walking the wrong way across the yard. Once, he broke a spur off in her boot, resulting in some blood-letting (it grew back). Not that I was spared. I didn’t kick him with the toe but a few times I had to throw him with my foot like a soccer ball to keep him in line.
After enough of these encounters, I started to add “violent” to the “sexual predator” commentary. And “misogynist,” given that he seemed to hate women. So, the rooster was “a violent, misogynistic, sexual predator you keep in your backyard.”
Before you start to wonder if we were masochists, you should understand that Jumpy also ferociously, even suicidally, defended his hens. Even if you’re keeping chickens in a suburban environment, you learn that everything wants to kill hens. A few anecdotes:
More than once, Jumpy would protect the girls from hawk attacks. He’d usher them under cover and then stand out in the open screaming his head off. BAAAAAAWK, BOK BOK BOK, BAAAAWKKK! He dared the hawks to come down for a fight, which none of them did.
The big guy always stayed on watch. When he felt threatened, he’d utter a Brrrrrrreeeeeee! call that the hens learned to trust. Since he didn’t lay eggs, he didn’t need to constantly eat and could stay on vigil instead. One night, I remember he and I standing at the edge of the woods listening to fox vixens screaming in the twilit forest. It’s one of my favorite memories with him.
I saw Jumpy charge after a dog that got off the leash and headed into our driveway. The dog probably had 60 pounds on him, but Jumpy was okay with death as long as he whooped someone’s ass.
In a tragic attack that took one of our hens named Kiwi, Jumpy managed to make enough noise to wake me up at 3AM to stop the raccoon attack in progress. I think he never forgave himself for letting it happen. I forgave him, though.
One day, two groundhogs started fighting in the woods near the house. Probably a territorial dispute. Jumpy decided that the only person allowed to beat the shit out of people in our yard was him. He rushed right into the fray and sent both groundhogs running in opposite directions.
Jumpy liked everyone in bed early. He escorted the hens back to the coop each night. You could almost see him doing a headcount.
Every time we moved the chicken tractor, Jumpy would inspect it for safety.
I’d let the hens out of their run for hours and hours at a time, so he probably saved them more times than I know.
As you can see, a violent sexual predator in your backyard does have some advantages, especially when you’re up against the constant onslaught that nature can throw at a chicken.
But as it happens, having an unpredictable and deranged rapist in your backyard doesn’t mesh well with having children running around. We held onto Jumpy and the hens for about two and a half years after our daughter was born. But as our oldest started to venture outside more, it seemed like too much of a risk. Those spurs could land you in the hospital. Heck, one in the jugular could kill you.
All that said, Jumpy seemed to recognize the difference between kids and adults. And we never saw him make any kind of aggressive move toward a child. I think he knew he’d be chicken soup if he did something like that.
As I wrote about a few months ago, we easily gave away Mayapple, since a broody hen is a commodity. But giving away a rooster? Almost unheard of. People routinely put roosters down for bad behavior, or cull them for being layabouts. I tried a few avenues to give him away, but didn’t have success. I’d feed the chickens in the morning feeling a little guilty that I’d probably have to soak his gristly corpse in wing sauce to even think about eating him.
A neighbor’s misfortune ended up being Jumpy’s salvation. After back to back tragedies - a tree falling on the coop and then a dog attack - our neighbors had a single rooster left and no hens. We managed to give him our two remaining egg-layers and Jumpy, who I am sure beat the shit out of the smaller rooster and asserted dominance in short time.
On the right day, I can still hear our rooster crowing where he lives about a quarter mile away. I still get nostalgic, but I don’t think my shins will.
Love it!!!