Bruce and Elaine Ingram share their tips and tricks for understanding and managing rooster behavior.
Written by Bruce Ingram Over the years my wife, Ellen, and I have usually had two or three roosters strung out in a pair of adjacent pens. Some roosters tolerated each other, some didn’t, and still others established their own kind of relationship. If you plan to include a rooster or a few in your backyard flock, it is hoped that understanding their behavior and dynamics will help you have a more harmonious flock, as well as give you births for chicks.
dynamics
In terms of these dynamics, Boss and Johnny, for example, were two heritage Rhode Island Red males who arrived as two-day-old chicks. From the beginning, the Chief was the clear Alpha, and although he did not bully Johnny, there are lines the latter would not dare cross. The most obvious of these was that Johnny was not allowed to mate; And any time he tried to do that, Boss Johnny was immediately (pun intended) to put a stop to any nonsense like that.
The most interesting part of their relationship was that Johnny never yelled while inside the pen. Did Johnny ever, whom Elaine or I didn’t see, try to yell and get hit? It was impossible to answer this, of course, but Johnny was “allowed” to yell while he was outside in the yard.
In the evenings when we take our flock out to graze in the yard, Elaine usually sits on the slope to observe the proceedings. One day, Johnny walked up to her, parked himself on her left side, and started yelling non-stop. The chief immediately ran up the ramp, stood to the right side of my wife, and began his endless yelling.
From then on, this was the search pattern for the evening: dueling cocks crowing, with my wife in between. We surmised that Johnny felt protected by Elaine’s presence, and we guessed the Chief had sat there to make the case that he remained the alpha male – despite Johnny’s vocal outbursts.
merciless
A year or so later, Puss must have fallen ill with some ailment, as one morning she found Johnny standing over him and pecking at him and whipping him. I removed the chief from his flock and he died the next day. When it comes to pecking order, you’ll likely find some roosters to be quite ruthless in advancing through the ranks, as Johnny was back in the day.
Why Roosters Rumble?
Christine Haxton of Troutville, Virginia, keeps about five dozen chickens, 14 of which are roosters. She recognizes male charms.
She says, “I love cocks.” “They have a lot more personality than chickens, which makes it much more interesting to be around and observe.”
Three reasons to quarrel
From these observations, Haxton believes that roosters fight for three reasons. Obviously two of the reasons they fight are dominance and chickens, she says. Males begin their feisty displays when they are a few weeks old. It’s all part of the process of sorting and creating an eclectic order. Sometimes these fights involve simple staring contests, other times chest thumping, and sometimes flying leaps at each other accompanied by small blips. Running a chicken with four or five two-month-old cockerels is a dysfunctional place.
As a school teacher, I would describe it as a cafeteria populated solely by 12-year-old males engaged in a never-ending food fight. By the time the roosters (less than a year old) are five or six months old, they are ready to mate. By then, the offside system was likely to have been established, and brawling had largely ceased. Of course, by that time, Elaine and I usually gave up or cooked the cake we didn’t want to become the next generation leaders of the herd.
The third reason Haxton says roosters might fight is to establish or defend territory. That is why the Russians are sobbing when the distant voices of roosters sound. Basically, every boisterous man says, “I’m in charge here, and you’re not.”
“A really good rooster will crow when a stranger walks or drives by in your driveway,” Huxton says. “I think what they’re communicating with is, ‘This is our garden.'” Get out of here.’ Most of my Dickies are very obedient and gentle around me and my family. But they change their mood when someone visits them.
One of my cocks will run up to strangers when they leave their cars and follow them around. He’s never attacked anyone, and I don’t think he would. What he seems to say, though, is, “I’ve got my eyes on you, so watch it, you jerk.”
I’ve noticed the same behavior in our home. Don, our 4-year-old heritage, Rhode Island red rooster, starts screaming anytime someone drives or walks in our driveway. If he sees Elaine, me, or our car, the blast stops. If the individual or the vehicle is unknown, the intensity of the scream increases once he or she makes eye contact. This territorial instinct is why Haxton and I think roosters make excellent watchdogs.
How many chickens?
Haxton asserts that a rooster can easily serve 10 or so chickens, and she says that’s a good ratio, too. Healthy males can often copulate twenty or more times a day. If a rooster, for example, has only four or five chickens in a coop, he may scrape the backs of several chickens because of his constant patting. The Virginia chicken enthusiast adds that some hens appear to be preferable targets either because they are more willing than others to submit to mating or because these females may not be so good at avoiding roe advances.
For example, Haxton has one chicken that is exceptionally skilled at avoiding mating.
“You’re always in the chicken coop long after everyone else is out,” says Haxton. “Most roosters like to mate as soon as they come out of the coop in the morning, so that the hen will avoid the intense chasing and sexual displays that happen every morning.
“Once she is out, she seems to always be watching the rooster, and if he walks in her direction, she moves to another place. If the rooster tries to mount her, she immediately runs to the chicken coop.”
From my and Elaine’s experience, a ratio of 5 to 7 hens to one rooster will work, although it’s not as ideal as a ratio of 10 to one, especially if the rooster is less than two years old. For example, Don still mates a dozen or more times a day, mostly in the evening. In the morning, Don makes a few half-hearted attempts to climb, then turns his attention to eating the roosters in the barn next door, Friday, his one-year-old offspring. Friday easily performs sexually twice as well as Don. This is the main reason why Don has only five chickens while Friday’s pen has eight.
How do adult roosters classify things?
How does an adult rooster sort through the whole dynamics issue? This depends on a number of things, including the temperament of the individuals involved. Carrie Shinseki of Meyer Hatchery muses on this topic.
“Roosters raised together usually have their dominance set, but watch the less dominant bird get mauled,” she says. “They need space to have their own harem and land or at least space to get away from each other if they are being harassed.”
Of course, there is sometimes the proverbial bad blood between roosters that grew up together. For example, Orville and Oscar were two Buff Orpington heirlooms who dwelt in the same pen and it was a disaster, even though they lived together their entire lives. Oscar has been a testosterone misfit since the day we watched him hatch. On his first day after emerging from the egg, he performed a mating dance for a chick that was only a few hours old. The poor little shot was still trying to get a foothold while Oscar shuffled his half-cock around.
Oscar’s aggressiveness increased as he got older. He would chase and peck Orville at all hours of the day, and if the latter approached a chicken, the former would attack. Those excesses were bad enough, but what turned Orville into Sunday lunch one day was when he began trying to mate with the hens while they were inside nesting boxes and trying to lay eggs. The hens were just as terrified of Oscar as he was of Orville, and a rooster like that should simply be removed from the flock.
On the other hand, Don and his brother Roger were hatched and raised together, never fought and got along very well. But it was clear that Don was the alpha and would do all the mating. Later, we gave the Roger to our daughter Sarah when she started raising chickens.
sparring
If you breed separate flocks in adjacent runs, you can expect daily sparring between roosters. Having sent Oscar, Orville has been matching Don in the middle position between running for the daily morning fights. Whichever rooster is released from his coop first, he will immediately run to the pole and wait for his opponent.
Once both fighters were in position, they would stare at each other for a while, bobbing their heads up and down, walking back and forth side by side, and finally launching their bodies against each other. These displays usually lasted for 15 minutes until it was time for both males to eat and/or mate with their hens. The epic “Meet Me at the Pole” battles continued until Elaine and I gave up on Orville when we decided to raise the Rhode Island Reds.
The next rooster to live near Don was Al, whose litters eventually made us put a layer of green plastic fencing (in addition to wire fencing) between the walkways. Al simply didn’t learn that Don was bigger and braver than he was. One day when I left to work as a school teacher, they were still fighting long after the “15-minute daily warm-up” skirmish had ended most of the hostilities that day. When I got home that afternoon, a stunned Al was sitting in a pool of his own blood, slashing across his body. I checked Don and he had a small scratch on one finger. An extra layer of fencing can help ensure that roosters don’t hurt each other.
Eileen and I are huge fans of roosters. You will likely enjoy their antics, personalities, and guard dog traits just as much as we do.
Bruce Ingram He is a freelance writer/photographer and author of 10 books, incl Live the locavore lifestyle (A Book About Living Off Earth) and a fictional series of four books for young adults about life in high school. To order, call him at B[email protected]. To find out more, go to website Or visit his site Facebook page.