After Henry and Chester, you’d think we would have learned not to get a rooster, their reigns of terror severely overshadowing good ole’ Oliver’s amiability.
But no experience across my decades of keeping chickens had prepared me for the surprise that is Cornflake.
Henry, our first rooster, was hell on wheels. This Rhode Island Red was the lesson to never, ever get another rooster. A few years later, along came Chester, completely by accident, as we had purchased him as a biddy (female chick), but it turned out they got that wrong.
Fortunately, Chester was a Buff Orpington, a docile and gentle breed, and he was exactly that. After he disappeared mysteriously (poor chickens are quite vulnerable), we made sure to replace him with another Buff Orpington rooster.
Though Oliver looked like Chester, he acted halfway like Henry (no one could be as bad as Henry was). We kept a broom by the door to shoe the aggressive Oliver away if he came too close.
Chester also disappeared, which wasn’t too disappointing. That’s one instance where it was OK to let nature take its course.
So with that checkered past with roosters, it sort of surprised me that I was thinking of getting another one. Part of me wanted a rooster, and the other part warned that I’d soon regret it – sort of like you spend most of the time eating healthily and being on a diet, but suddenly you grab for a cookie.
Thus when I saw an ad for a young rooster in Roanoke being offered free, I responded. These people had thought they had all biddies, but this one ended up being a rooster, which was not allowed in their neighborhood.
I looked up the breed – Silkie – to make sure it was a gentle, docile breed (even though Chester forever ruined the guarantee on that).
We met the family in Rocky Mount. The first sign that there was something weird was that the lady got out of the van holding the rooster in her arms – no box, no cat carrier, no suit of armor.
She handed this white fluffball over to me. Her little boy looked crestfallen, eyes red and puffy, and he gave a solemn and loving farewell to Snowball.
My daughter’s friend christened the 7-month-old bird Cornflake. Though we had brought a cat carrier, he rode home peacefully on our laps.
Hens can be vicious creatures. You’ve heard the term “pecking order”? The stronger hens literally peck at and torment and injure the weaker chickens. This Cornflake was a little smaller than our big hens are, and he looked vulnerable. We couldn’t leave him alone with the hens just yet, so we put him to sleep overnight in the cat carrier on the kitchen counter.
The next day, we introduced him to the hens gradually. They vacillated from ignoring him to trying to get away from him.
By the third day he ran behind them, but they kept evading him. He gave up and ran straight back to us.
Cornflake likes to be picked up and held and pet.
Now it’s been a couple of weeks. It looks like the hens are not going to attack him, but they are in no hurry to welcome him into their inner circle yet, either. Cornflake hasn’t caught on that he is supposed to corral the hens, and guide them toward food and roosting places and dust baths. He sometimes follows behind them, but he usually wanders about on his own.
Each evening around 7 p.m., Cornflake hops up onto the porch swing or the window sill. He looks around some, and he dozes off some. Around 7:30 or 8 p.m., we pick him up and bring him to the bathroom, and he walks into the cat carrier.
There’s no need any more for an alarm clock, because his high-pitched, warbly crowing awakens us each morning. That’s a snooze button you can’t push.
Finally one of us gets up and goes to the bathroom to let Cornflake out. He likes to walk around the kitchen for a couple of minutes before we scoop him up, talk sweetly to him and pet him around his head and neck as we walk him to the chicken coop.
We open the door and put him down, where he waddles over toward the hens and crows a time or two, and the hens dart away and hop up onto a perch to get away.
They’ll all spend the day together in the coop. They haven’t pecked on or hurt him yet, so he should be safe – if not adored by his harem.
When we get home from work, we open the coop door, and they run out into the yard and go about their business, the hens wandering about in a group, the rooster hovering around the kitchen porch area.
That is, until about 7 p.m. Though the hens like to push the boundaries of night time – they’ll stay out until it’s nearly dark – Cornflake heads to his windowsill or porch swing and awaits another night in the cat carrier.
We know he’ll have to get used to sleeping in the coop one day. Cornflake needs to grow up a little more and assert himself better.
For now, though, he’ll be as pampered and coddled as he asks to be.
