The Rooster and the Hawk

Having chickens has been both a rewarding and a learning experience. When I was a kid my favorite cartoons were the Warner Brothers Classics. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and let us not forget Foghorn Leghorn. I loved those cartoons. But it wasn't until I was 45 and had a back yard full of chickens that I realized that whoever wrote the scripts and stories for those Foghorn Leghorn cartoons had to have owned chickens at some time.
Our rooster, whose name is Kernal, is a lot like Foghorn. He dances around the girls, pleading with them for attention while they do the "not now" dance away from him and he gives up and moves on to the next. Foghorn was always at war with the yard dog. Ours aren't at war, per se, as our dogs have been trained to leave the chickens alone and so they really don't do much more than trail behind them, waiting for them to drop treats. Oh yeah, they love chicken poop. But Kernal hasn't been told they are not at war.   Because the dogs don't terrorize the chickens I think it gives Kernal a false sense of superiority. He eyeballs them when they get close and rubbernecks them all the way by while they don't pay him a bit of mind.

Stan feeds the chickens and the dogs wait their turn patiently.

  But Kernal is so protective of his flock. One day I could hear him crowing rather excessively. He was still pretty young, so I thought, "wow, he's going to be a vocal one."  But he kept on and kept on, so I went out.  Again, we're urban chicken owners and I think the city frowns on people owning them, so I don't like to draw any unnecessary attention to our yard.  He came running towards me when I walked out the back door. I walked around the yard and he kept circling me and crowning. Something was not right, and I was just figuring it out, much to his dismay.  I did a head count on the hens and sure enough, one was missing. A young one too, which was disturbing.  We had been seeing a hawk fly over at least once a day but I didn't see any feathers laying anywhere.  A hawk would leave a pile of feathers, more than likely. Or at least a few.  I looked in all the hiding places they have around the yard and could find no sign of her.  Stan went out in the back alley to look around and he found a white boxer running frantically around a parked car. He looked under the car and there she was. The boxer would have had her had Kernal not alerted us to her disappearance. Stan ran the boxer off and managed to get the hen back in the yard.
     If a bird of prey flies over the house (or an occasional plane and he gets excited), Kernal will make a sound deep in his throat (or gizzard?) and every hen in the yard will freeze and look up from whatever they are doing. If he does it again they are likely to take cover. I learned from one of the chicken sites I follow that this is an arial call. Our old rooster, "Roo," used to make an arial call when I threw the tennis ball for Addie. But he was never too bright.
     Another day, I answered the constant crowing, did the hen count and found one was missing.  And, since he was dancing a lot around the garage, I opened the garage door and there was Granny, our oldest and favorite hen.  She had gotten locked in the garage when I was in there earlier in the day. They always follow me into the garage. I don't know if it's because they know that's where the grub is kept or they are just nosy.  I think they are just nosy.
     One of the things our rooster does that Stan and I love to watch is when he calls his hens to dinner.  We used to bring them morsels from the house on occasion and we'd give it to them indiscriminately. Now, we give the food to him and he calls them in to eat it. He dances and chortles and they come running like there is no tomorrow.  We can walk outside with the most delicious things for him and he still will take it, put it on the ground, and call them to eat it. He does take care of his girls, beyond a doubt.

     Last winter we had a pretty long stretch where we had snow covered ground and the chickens don't like to get in the snow much so they'll stay in their pen and only venture out rarely.  I was sitting at my desk doing some work on the computer. My desk has a broad view of the back yard and I was deep into a piece I was writing when Kernal started his crowing.  After the 4th or 5th crow I looked out the window and scanned the yard. Looked like they were all right there in the pen and close to it, yet he continued to crow.  One hen was outside the pen pecking at some scratch I had thrown out earlier.  Again, I looked around the yard and happened to spot a striped tail in my peach tree. At first, I thought it was a raccoon, but I immediately realized that this striped tail was connected to a hawk.  Or a Falcon. A very young one, but he was eying my hen who was oblivious to any of it. After all, Kernal wasn't sounding off with his arial call, he was just crowing incessantly.  I jumped up from my desk and called into the living room to Stan, "HAWK," and grabbed my camera.

Look closely in the tree, just below and to the right of the
owl decoy, there sits the hawk.  You can see my hen
in the lower left corner outside the pen. Kernal was in the door
to the pen.

 I took the first couple of shots from my window and then I thought I'd better shoo him away. I'm sure he was hungry enough to take a feeble shot at my hen, but all he would probably get done would be to maim her or maybe even kill her but he would  not have been been able to carry her off.  So I headed out the back door, knowing he would fly when he saw me so I started shooting.  And he did.  As soon as he saw me walk toward the pen he flew. I don't know how long he had been sitting in the tree, taunting Kernal, wondering if he could take dinner home from this particular greasy spoon, and I don't know if he had been building up the nerve to try it. But when he did fly, everything happened very quickly. He swooped down toward the hen, Kernal let out his arial call. The hen, hearing the call and possibly now seeing the hawk coming straight at her, beat feet back toward the pen and Kernal.... Oh, our brave, brave rooster, Kernal.  Well, Kernal charged.  Then and there, he put his life on the line for his hen. He charged straight at that hawk, hackles up and ready for battle. I watched as he laid his life on the line for the sole purpose of the continuation of his species. Sacrificing himself to save the ones who reproduce.  The hawk (thankfully) thought better of things at the last moment and up over the fence he flew and disappeared.

He still comes by to visit the bird feeders and unfortunately I have seen him feast on the occasional dove, which are more his size. I think he stops just because he knows he can aggravate Kernal.  He hasn't yet tried another hit on any of my chickens but when I hear the constant crowing you can bet I go check to see what's the matter.