Thank you! I have a couple of older boys, we aren’t friends yet. Very interested in learning to groom my chickens. I’ve been mainly hands off with them from the beginning. Other than sitting in with them quietly observing. What a lot of in-depth information!
Great article. I keep them differently so I don't always see the same behaviors or come to the same conclusions but that is to be expected. How we manage them or, better yet, allow them to manage themselves has an effect on how they behave. I agree, roosters are not evil. The interaction within a flock is pretty complicated and pretty logical as you have shown.
Thanks for sharing all your insight on rooster and flock behavior! This is very helpful in knowing how to integrate a cockerel into my flock. I have tried a few times and failed, but will approach it differently this time. I have some chicks in the brooder and I'm sure at least one is a cockerel, maybe two. It would be so nice to have a reliable rooster one of these days.
Thanks you for reading the article.
The house nest box is a long story ;)
What it has allowed me to do is study egg laying behaviour and hatching at close quarters.
The two article below, a lot shorter, outline a bit of what I observed.
This is a very enjoyable and interesting article. It's nice to read something that presents roosters in a positive light without anthropomorphizing them.
This is a great article that examines the motivations of behavior. I am keeping this for future reference and will be recommending it to other keepers that have roosters.
This was so informative for me, a first time chicken keeper. I have four cockerels and ten pullets, all about 17 weeks old, so knowing why they all do that they do is both fascinating and helpful. Every paragraph had me thinking of each cockerel. If only I could figure out which one should be the “keeper!”
Thank you so much for this wonderful article! I was able to learn a lot about what different behaviours will set him off. He is a very aggressive rooster and needs to calm down. I want to keep him as he is pretty but I can't with his behaviour. This article is super informative and teaches me how to deal with aggressive roosters quite clearly. Thank you so much again for this super helpful information!
Not having chickens of my own YET, I had no idea that flock dynamics were so complex and amazing. Thank you for gathering all of your observations together for this article.
Thank you for reading the article. There are some articles in my Must Read Articles page in my profile that deal with some of the complexities of chicken behaviour.