Monsters in the Dark

Autumn is the cold and damp season here at 6600 feet above sea level, which gives us the unusual experience of waking up to a yard socked in by clouds. The days are getting shorter too, so we go to work in the dark and come home to a few fading minutes of light to work by in the evening. On a particularly cloudy morning last week, I made my way to the chicken coop in the dark through a dense cloud obscuring my vision for all but the few feet in front of me. In the beam of my flashlight, I could see wisps of mist shifting in the air like sodden ghosts.

Yes, it is the season for ghost stories, but instead I have a monster story. It is a true story of something that occurred last October. I've been saving it to tell you now.

It started with the snow. We'd been getting light, but frequent snow for the previous couple of weeks, which is not unusual in the autumn.  There is also nothing strange about finding deer tracks in the fresh snow around our house each morning, but earlier that week I had also seen paw prints on our deck and around the yard that looked like those of a cat.

One morning walking out to the chicken coop in the dark, flashlight in hand, I noticed as I rounded the garage that there were larger paw prints intermingled among the deer tracks. We hear coyotes every night and see them frequently tracking the deer from a distance. I was suddenly wary.

Approaching a deer in the dark is dangerous enough, but running into a coyote is even more troubling. Besides my own safety should I startle one in the dark, I am not particularly keen for the coyotes to be on the property taking notice of the chickens. With a flush of concern, I tightened my grip on the flashlight. I swung the beam around to make certain there was nothing else in the area as I made my way to the safety of the barn. At least, I thought it was safe.

The entrance to the chicken coop is inside the barn. As I opened the outer barn door that leads to their inside run, I noticed that they were unusually quiet that morning. Usually, they are at the coop door clucking and pecking in anticipation of freedom, but not on this particular morning. The coop was still and eerily silent. Expecting a sense of relief when I entered the barn, my concern about the tracks outside was quickly renewed.  Could an animal make its way into the coop somehow? 

I called out my usual song. "Hey, hey, hey, chicka-bay-bay-bays!" Silence answered.

Trying to shrug off the mounting tension, I stayed on task. Ignoring the fact that there were no chickens waiting impatiently on the other side of the coop door, I unlocked it and swung it open before making a perfunctory turn to drop the flashlight on a shelf nearby so I could have both hands free for the scratch bucket.

As I was shifting the flashlight to the shelf I saw something in the narrow beam of light, something huge and grey. It registered in my brain just as I settled the flashlight into place. The shaggy, grey mass was crouched low to the ground, lumbering slowly toward the doorway, exiting the coop. 

I started and cried out. What could this be? A possum? A raccoon? How? Had it chewed its way in? These thoughts flashed through my mind in the millisecond it had taken me to jump away.

I had no time to regain composure as I recoiled in horror. Even in the darkness, my unaccustomed eyes could make out the dark mass of the grotesque monster relentlessly plodding toward me. My poor hens! Poor me! What deadly, sharp teeth and powerful jaws it must have in its terrible maw. And claws... Did it have claws? My mind raced. My heart pounded.

I took several slow steps back. My eyes were wide with horror and I could not look away from its lumpy, headless, misshapen body...

In the dim, indirect light provided by the flashlight I had just set aside, my eyes adjusted and I realized that its bulbous body was the same shape, size and color of our rooster, Javier. His down-turned head had been outside the pool of light during the instant I saw it. His feathers had been fluffed out to insulate against the cold, making him look even larger than usual. It might have helped to have worn my glasses too.

The hens were slowly rousing from their deep sleeps on the frigid roost. And after hearing a few coos from the room, I knew everyone was safe.

It goes to show that our minds can make us see the things we expect. On this particular morning I expected to find a monster in the chicken coop rather than chickens.

Typical for me it was a lot of drama about nothing, but there were consequences.  Once Javier had sensed weakness I had to put up with two days of him posturing and threatening me when I came in the coop. We worked it out with lots of petting to show him I'm not scared. He detests, but tolerates, being petted. My little monster.

Now, I just have to remember my glasses and hope I don't mistake a coyote for a chicken another time.  Happy Halloween!

The Rooster Whisperers

I love my rooster.  From a human perspective he's a little stinker on his best days, but as roosters go, he's pretty great.  He keeps his flock in order. He pronounces his reign at the top of his lungs frequently enough to keep the other roosters in their own yards. He protects the girls from predators and each other.  He calls them when there is food. His frequent mating keeps the egg production up.

He can be pretty brutal with the girls. He believes in his testosterone-bathed, cashew-sized, bird brain that it's all for the best... and they believe it too. If one considers that he is the vanguard between the girls and predators, their survival role is simplified to coming when called or getting out of the way when he sounds the alarm. Whether the girls like him or not isn't relevant.  Some cling to his side seeking protection from the other girls and a prize spot when he finds a treat he wants to share.  Others steer clear of him, as though they were polarized magnets.  It's a working system and he knows how to run it.

If hens are ambivalent about roosters, imagine how rare it is for a farmer to love a rooster.  I'd heard so many horror stories of aggressive, attack roosters that I was a little nervous about bringing one home. Javier certainly is an intimidating size, and he was not happy about being taken from his home by complete strangers.

We were lucky, though, that he had been handled a lot by his previous owners, so he wasn't completely terrified of humans. Still in his early days here he didn't trust us and was intent on being in charge. Or at least that is how the rooster whisperers might have described his dilemma.

I've found the rooster whisperers on various blogs and message boards about chickens. They are a highly controversial group of chicken farmers who are usually shouted down for their recklessness and blind admiration of all demonic poultry.  Most of the whisperers say they've never met a bad rooster.  All of them say that neither threatening, nor assaulting, nor running in terror will induce a rooster to behave with any semblance of rooster-civility. Based on my limited experience I have reason to believe the rooster whispers are right.

The trick, they say, is to think like a chicken. In chicken-think, humans are potentially threatening, a status that garners the aggression of roosters protecting their flocks. Brandish a stick in any direction, wave your arms in the air, talk excitedly and the rooster will think one means to hurt him. This triggers an aggressive response from posturing to outright attack. Given this, one would think the goal would be to be non-threatening, but roosters tend to read that as submission. They also sense fear and read that as submission too. Roosters react to submission by being more aggressive in order to establish dominance. A rooster, as I have observed, will almost certainly jump at anyone he thinks he can bully.

The rooster whisperers focus on creating a balance between exerting dominance over the rooster, being benevolent toward the rooster and being a predictable element within the flock. An easier way to think about it is establishing mutual respect in which the flock keeper respects the rooster as the head of the flock and doesn't disrupt his order.  The rooster in turn is taught to treat the flock keeper as a peer, which is not a friendly relationship in rooster-think. Peers are competition, but not necessarily subject to attack. A good peer relationship among roosters is more like aloof acceptance.

When I first got Javier, I was very intimidated by him, but I tried not to let him see it.  That was easier said than done, because he was prone to making sudden, skittering sideways runs at me, which almost always made me start and gasp. I usually managed to stay firmly where I stood, and eventually recover the presence of mind to take a couple of sideways steps back toward him. We would square off in our side-facing crouches studying each other with one eye, until I would relax my shoulders and calmly walk away with my chin held high as if my point had been made.

One rooster whisperer I follow espouses picking them up when they get ornery.  The difficulty here is catching them. Salt can  catch Javier every time, but even if I catch up with Javier I often fumble the hold. Fortunately in those early days Javier was just as uncertain about my abilities as I was about his, so he didn't make a serious advance on me.

It was during that time that Javier began his current practice of taking scratch from my hand. I used it as a means of getting him to approach me and of gaining his trust. The old food bribe worked, but there is a price.  The little stinker bites. Fortunately, he doesn't bit hard.

To this day, the girls race for the scratch I throw on the ground, while he stands perfectly still glaring at me insistently, waiting for his handful.  When I put my hand down his beak dives into my hand and begins biting. Sometimes he eats, but usually he just bites me as he calls out excitedly, "tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck!" This is his rooster-speak for "Look here, girls! I've invented food! Come look! I'm amazing!" And they do come running to eat out of my hand, while he steps back to look on in pride. When the scratch runs out, he starts glaring at me again. We repeat this until I'm bored with it. For his part he is never tired of insisting I serve him so he can bite me and claim credit for the tasty treats he gifts to the girls. Stinker is definitely the best description for him.

Once I got used to being bitten by a rooster, I stopped being frightened of Javier. I've learned, however that he never lets his guard down and neither should I.  The first time he really squared off with me, worked out spectacularly in my favor because I didn't even see it coming. I was leaning over feeder, pouring in some fresh pellets, when I felt something solid hit me hard on the back of the leg. It didn't hurt because I was wearing galoshes and I was too busy concentrating on not spilling the feed to be startled. I didn't even react.

I realized what must have happened in the couple of seconds it took for me to finish filling the feeder. When I was done, I calmly stood up and turned around.  The guilty scoundrel was alone with me in the coop, still eyeing me with raw disdain.

I thought, "I'm still bigger." I took two measured steps toward him then swiftly leaned down and grabbed him around his body, catching his feet in my hands, pinning his wings with my arms.  I stood up and pulled his body toward mine. As soon as his wing contacted my chest, he leaned his head into me and his body relaxed into mine. I stood there stroking him for a moment as though soothing a baby.

Then I held out my arms to let him go.  He leaped to the ground and barked angrily at me. His eyes flashed daggers before he turned to stalk away. Boys don't want to be hugged by their mamas, especially in front of girls. Roosters are no different, so we don't have these sorts of confrontations often.

Indeed, nowadays, I enter the coop looking for him. We look each other over in silent acknowledgement and then I carefully step around him to go about the chores. He follows me, I think partly to make sure I know he's still in charge, partly to show the girls he's on guard for them, and partly to make sure I don't suddenly drop a watermelon rind or other treat that he needs to distribute to the girls. With only one rooster to my account, I can't say that I'm a rooster whisperer, but Javier and I have found our way to mutual respect. He may be a stinker, but he's the the stinker in charge of my chicken coop.