Spring brings showers, flowers, seedlings, weeding, and chicks. By summer, the weeds are trees, snakes are in the grass, and of course, the babies are becoming chickens. Hens are easy — they’re quiet, don’t eat much; you keep the best and the rest are not usually hard to find homes for. But the roosters...
These essential other halves of the chicken world have been deemed necessary by nature at about a 1:1 ratio with hens, but most of us find that incompatible with our need for sleep. It’s also a bit hard to watch all that premium organic feed going down their gullets knowing that it will never come out the other end wrapped in a nice little shell. Keeping a few roosters around is great for the flock — they search out tasty snacks for the girls, protect them from interlopers (which sometimes includes you), and they wake up the farm every morning, letting you know that the world is starting off the new day right. But this spring we hatched 13 roos out of 24 birds, and that’s way too many. In addition to our hatchlings, we brought in another 26 chicks to bolster our genetics and expand the breed variety for future plans. Roughly half of those are boys, too.
Most will have a nice leisurely time pecking at an unlimited supply of grain and grass until they start finding their crowing voice, and that’s about when they go off to freezer camp. A few lucky roosters get to stay on the farm and carry on the good work. The question is — which ones?
We have a great line started from our first rooster, Merle, followed by his son Mini Merle and his grandson, Mini Merle, Jr. Junior is quickly becoming my favorite, as he is friendly, inquisitive, nice to the ladies, doesn’t pick fights, and so far has been very food motivated (signs of a good forager). But before I got to meet Junior, I had made plans to replace this line with a purebred Cream Legbar to provide the necessary component for blue and green egg-laying crosses and autosexing chicks. While Junior is developing his big boy voice, he’s got two Legbars seven weeks behind him with the advantage of being raised with the new heritage breeds we’re adding to our Easter Basket egg flock. To make it more interesting, we’ve also got a batch of Speckled Sussex coming up with the Legbars, intended for our core dual purpose (eggs and meat) flock and my grandiose ambitions of proving the skeptics wrong about not being able to produce exhibition quality from hatchery stock (I’m 99% sure they’re right, but 1% chances are my kind of challenge). Decisions, decisions.
Our plans for 2022 only require three roosters and could possibly work with two. So far we are narrowed down to six contenders. Three for the plan (1 Legbar, 2 Sussex), and maybe one backup. Then there’s the Legbar bantam that somehow snuck into our order unrequested, which Farley is arguing for as a good candidate for her new dream of having a ‘house rooster’. Yes, that is exactly what it sounds like. That brings it down to the Merles. Mini Merle will have to be very nice to Farley over the next few months to have a chance at beating out Junior for next year’s backup rooster spot.