Hercules is Banished

One evening, recently, I entered the chicken run to close up the attached coop. As usual, I hung up the food to keep rodents from eating the chicken feed. I checked the waterer, and noticed it was low. So I unplugged it. (It's a heated fountain.) I lugged it out of the hoop run, through the pasture gate, and over to one of the yard hydrants. When I prepared to wash and fill the canister, I noticed that it was covered with tiny splashes of blood. 

My heart stopped for a split second and my mind raced. I wondered if some vermin had dug their way in and harmed or killed a chicken. I had seen signs of digging on days when the ground was thawed a bit. I wondered if one of the birds had gotten injured and was cannibalized. None of the options seemed good.

When the reservoir was scrubbed and filled, I carefully flipped it over, so as not to spill it. Then I carefully lugged the heavy thing back to the hoop house. I leveled the waterer to prevent leaks, plugged it back in, and stood against the door, observing the birds and looking for signs of a scuffle or digging. I saw neither. All the birds seemed fine. The only thing that seemed odd was that Hercules, the biggest rooster, had pink saddle feathers. 

So I began to count. Five times I counted them, and each time I came up one short. I sighed. My heart sank. I prepared mentally to find a dead hen in the coop. Since the pop door on the coop is so low, and the coop so dark, I exited the run and walked around to the coop side. First I checked the nest boxes, thinking an injured bird might hunker down in a close, dark space. All four were empty. Then I unlatched and lifted off one side of the roof. All looked normal, except that there were small spatters of blood on the coop doors and walls.

Perplexed, I retraced my steps and walked into the hoop house again. When I counted again, I came up with the correct number. One of the hens must have hopped out of the coop just before I peered inside. 

Then my close inspections began, and I found that a big, reddish hen had bled at the base of her comb. Her feathers were spiky and wet there and where the blood had dripped onto her neck. The tiny splatters were probably from the dripping blood tickling and causing her to shake her head, which flung off some of the blood from her feathers as if from a paint brush. She was eating and moving about normally, so I let them all roost for the night and closed them up safely, as usual. 

I determined that the rooster, who was stained pink, was the culprit. He was rough with the "girls." And with the predator problems and the cold weather, they had been penned up, so they could not escape him. He often pecked the back of their heads fiercely when treading them, or nipped them and pinned them down while staying clamped on. 

So the next morning, when Hercules did his usual strutting and made his scuffling advances toward me, I opened the run door a crack and let him slip outside. The hen's wound was clearly better and the others were leaving her alone, so I completed my chicken chores and tended the goat. I put water and food out for the exiled rooster, but he was beside himself and paced the perimeter of the coop all day, crowing in what seemed like rage and sorrow. I felt guilty. But I also felt that I had no choice.

It was my intention to repeat this scenario each morning, but when I went out for my evening chores in the barn, Hercules had already roosted above one of the sliding horse stall doors. Although I flipped on the barn lights, he showed no intention of moving. His long tail feathers curved down, and he eyed me witheringly with one of his beady, red-rimmed, yellow eyes. 

As my little ones were in the house with my 15 year old, I didn't feel comfortable lugging a ladder over, grappling with a struggling roo, climbing down with him as an unwilling companion, opening the barn door, opening the pasture gate, opening the chicken run, and stuffing him into the pop door on the coop. It would take so long. What if he made me lose my balance? What if I lost my grip on him and he was out in the fast-falling dark and not roosted? So I left him. But I did leave a light on, to deter any prowling raccoons.

And this has been our arrangement ever since. Hercules is a lot less agitated by being separated from the females, and the hens have been happy and uninjured since his departure. He roams outside the pasture now or in the barn, occasionally perching in some prominent place and repeatedly crowing as loudly as he his able for a longish spell, as if defiantly proclaiming his ownership, despite his limitations. Sometimes he even makes his way to the house, ascends to the picnic table on the patio, and struts back and forth on its top, crying out for intervals as if with impotent rage. 

The one rooster left with the hens is a bantam named Rosie. (Read more about him here.) He still looks like a half-plucked cornish game hen, and the "girls" ignore or easily spurn his half-hearted and wimpy advances. He spends most of his time pulling his naked legs up against his body for warmth, hunkering down in the bedding on the floor of the run in order to conserve his body heat, or eating with slow steadiness, as if determined to gain enough size to be able to throw his weight around. We tried calling him Petey instead (like Pete Rose) once we learned he was a male, but with his bright pink skin and mild temper, Rosie he remains.