As we watched the chicks grow, we noticed that none of the chicks had any kind of a cock's comb when they were tiny, but that they all started to develop one as they grew. None of them had anything that resembled the traditional silhouette on the top of the weather vane -- but there was one that seemed to have more of a cock's comb than the others. And each day it had a little more, and a little more ... "I'm suspicious of that chicken," I told Dave one day.
And then, one morning, Dave came in and said, "Guess what I just heard!"
There could no longer be any doubt: We had a rooster. Or a morning alarm clock.
And boy, does he ever act like a rooster! A person understand better just what "cocky" means now. He's always the first to run forward to investigate things; when we were working outside near his house today, he started crowing regularly -- just to show us he was the rooster, it seemed like. And he really struts in there. Dave said it's like he's saying, "Yeah, I have eleven ladies!"
We are actually happy to have a rooster. Having one rooster in the bunch means there's no question about the pecking order, so there's no need to fight to establish it. And my aunt Lillian told me that the eggs have less cholesterol with a rooster in the flock.Sofia has named him "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo." Dave says that's better than the name he was thinking of: "Soup of the Day."
1 comment:
Wherever your children roam, the sound of a rooster crowing will always be an aural link to the farm in South Dakota for them.
My grandparents have been gone for forty years and more and my childhood for more like fifty, but the call of a rooster or the squeak of a windmill (the old iron kind that kept the stock tank full and that small children were forbidden to climb) takes me straight back to summer mornings in the hills of Sac County.
Dave, if the rascal wakes you too early and often remind him there's a category of soup of the day called 'Local, Loud and Dee-licious'.
Post a Comment