ANIMALIA: Rooster / Hahn A white one, like Rigoletto..... / Ein...

Rooster / Hahn

A white one, like Rigoletto..... / Ein weisser wie Rigoletto....

8 comments so far...

Fizgig June 30, 2020, 11:51 AM

"Make sure you get my best side now...." =)
Handsome rooster.... Nice capture!

Sonja June 30, 2020, 12:22 PM

It was strange that they kept lost of rooster of several colours in the same enclosure. They where mostly peaceful, all just prancing about a bit and pretending not to see each other and the enclosure was very clean and grassy, as if they where meant to be admired like in a zoo.

Fizgig June 30, 2020, 08:09 PM

If they got along, it's likely they were raised together =)

Sonja July 06, 2020, 12:54 PM

I thought at a certain age, when the rooster stops to be a chick an inexperianced human can not tell easyly from it's sisters, it starts to get unfriedly with the other little roosters, no matter if they are all brothers running stressfree in the same barnyard.
Anyways, that was a bunch of male chickens looking well grown up and in assorted colour schemes, living together amicably. Obviously, the owner is not into getting a lot of eggs but to have most showy animals strutting about.

Fizgig July 07, 2020, 12:41 PM

Yeah, that's a myth.... If they grow up together they tolerate one another just fine. They don't tolerate other roosters if introduced as adults. Even a flock of them that get along fine will turn on an introduced rooster unfamiliar to them. It's a territorial thing. Of course there are, in nature, exceptions to every convention.... Sometimes introducing a foreign rooster among adult individuals that got along fine for many years will kill the peaceful coexistence dynamic and force the farmer to remove all but one rooster. Saw it happen often enough with my grandparents' chickens. They had huge flocks of 'em and wanted to add more roosters to protect the hens and caused all hell to break loose in doing so. But time-and-again if the roosters were hatched & raised together they got along without incident. Chicken are much smarter than people realize =)

Sonja July 10, 2020, 10:36 AM

I remember the chickens our landlord in Mlada Boleslav had. He bought them as they where yellow and fluffy, a big tray full. They did all fight permanently as soon they where not very smal and cute any longer. They even killed each other and ate at the carcass of their weaker brother hidden below the henhouse once the owner was not counting and a bit to slow to to note and kill the weakest bird for the next soup in time.
But perhaps that was a size problem with the voliere and shelter inside? The pretty rosters here do wander within a mesh fence in green grass all day as they please, living in a old conctruction wagen modified to be a mobile henhouse that is moved on to new pastures when he ground shows signs of chicken overuse. Those miserable looking birds of Dedek where kept more - well - efficiently.
He told us the only problem is, the bird all turned out to be boys, a hen would be happy there with her sisters but in his tray where to many male chickens.

Fizgig July 10, 2020, 01:49 PM

Well, it's not unheard of for the weak/sick in a flock to be attacked... Nature's way of ensuring the health/stability of the rest of the flock by culling out the threat. But, of course, not having suitable/ideal habitat can also stress the flock dynamics. They do have hierarchy within the flock, too, so some squabbling isn't out of the question but those squabbles generally don't end in death -- unless other factors I mentioned come into play. Chickens generally thrive in an open range type of settings where they are free to roam, but do have places to shelter -- trees do just as well as any house. Happier still are the ones used as pest control by their farmers.... My grandparents used to round up or herd the adults chickens into the fields to take care of pests on crops. They had a ball chasing after things & always came back well fed =) Occasionally they were "lent" to neighbors who didn't raise chickens of their own [or didn't have enough of them] to clear fields of pests, but the birds were always returned to what they knew as home by sunset when they'd be looking to roost for the night. The chickens' Christmas was the day the large corncrib was cleared out at the end of the harvest season.... They would gather all the farm cats and toss them up into the corncrib, while the chickens and ducks waited below for the workers to start moving the corn out & exposing the field mouse nests in the process. The mice would, of course, scatter and the chase was on. The chickens were as enthusiastic in their chase in the farmyard as the cats were in their work in the corncrib itself. So funny to see the flock of hens chasing their prize while the roosters chased the flock as it was their duty to protect them --- "chaos" doesn't begin to cover it ;)

Anyway, yeah.... Chickens that aren't properly housed will often turn on each other --- including hens, not just roosters. That's why when you see chickens in those massive warehouses -- being raised for meat -- having their beaks shaved/dulled so they can't hurt each other.

It's statistically very unusual to get so many male birds in a random sample of eggs...

Sonja July 12, 2020, 08:08 AM

I have a hunch now that so much it is talked about the early sexing and culling of all the male hatchlings that back then in the comunist CSSR this was already practiced too, only that those chicks where really left alive sometimes and sold to people with spare own yardspace under the hand by someone at the Kolchos responsible for disposal-- and perhaps they told their black market customers the chicks where randomly taken away from the farm to make them buy, thinking they might get eggs one day. Our Landlord anyway got no eggs, just a bunch of aggressive and sickly little cocks for whom he bought some veterinary stuff (also black market) to put under the feed to get less infections. His wife who tried to herd mostly her valuta-cattle (me and Karl, that is), cooked the ones he cought before their brethren killed them and she prodded us to share dinner with them and take seconds. I then was more afraid of conflict with the only people I was seeing most of the day and felt somewhat dependant of than of the health dangers, to tell them where to go and what to do to themselves there in order to avoid my own needless penicilin dose with the slepice na paprice. Some sort of stockholm syndrome one might say, I was just glad to at least be no chicken. ;o)

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