Of Chicken and Men

“You didn’t know they don’t lay eggs in the winter?”

I looked at him, a bit embarrassed.

“You must learn more about animals. In the winter they expend their energy on growing more plumage; so they don’t lay any eggs.”

He was an old man in a blue bucket hat, with Jewish features, and a quick laugh. He wanted to demonstrate to me the importance of studying animal behavior, so as the chickens approached the patio table where we were enjoying our lunch, he grabbed ahold of a piece of bread and held out a crumb between his thumb and index finger.

“Lets see who comes and gets it first.”

Between the group of chickens, a couple were of the ordinary variety (the type one usually has a clear mental image of in their head) while the rest were Chinese chickens, who have extra feathers on their heads that make it look like they are wearing extravagant “Sunday Church” hats. The first to approach him was an “ordinary” chicken, which is slightly larger than the Chinese chicken, and perhaps, as a result, a little less shy. The old man tried to get one of the Chinese chickens to eat from his palm, but they hesitated.

“It’s because they don’t know you,” he remarked.

Then he began to throw the crumbs out on the patio to see who would grab them first. The old man wanted to show me something about the two Chinese roosters that were in the crowd, which he called “the bosses.” As he threw crumbs at them, it became clear that they would approach the piece of bread but would always be too slow on the uptake; a female chicken would come in and snatch it from them immediately. Not only that, but at times it looked as if they were simply waiting for the female chickens to arrive and take the crumb from right under their beaks.

As the man explained: that was precisely what was happening. “It’s chivalry,” he explained. The more I observed, the more convinced I became that he was right. The roosters would head to the crumb, stand over it, and let out a cluck to announce to the other chickens the food's location, while never reaching down to peck at it. The rooster was instinctively awarding the food to the female chickens, under the assumption that they needed it to produce eggs.

Soon a regular rooster arrived at the scene, larger and more majestic than its Chinese counterparts. The old man explained that this rooster had actually been given to him by one of his grown children, who had had it cooped up inside his family’s house until the animal became too much of a burden. When he threw crumbs at this rooster, it did not hesitate and quickly snatched up the free food without even considering the female chickens around him.

“That’s because he grew up in isolation and was never socialized. It’s not chivalrous. It’s a ‘modern’ chicken.”