Yep
Kiki edited it
The Day I fell in Love with Roos
My home is in the high desert of San Diego County. Half way between the Sea of Cortez, the Pacific Ocean, and very near the Mexican border.
The first year I was there I lost my whole flock to predation. Coyotes it seems come out in the morning as well. I hadn't a clue.
So I decided to buy adult birds that had been raised up here and who were wily enough to understand there is no such thing as "safe". I found a fellow that was advertising in the Penny Saver. No internet at the time. Two dollars a bird.
What a deal! I figured I'd buy three or four hens and a rooster. I figured if I didn't like roosters I'd send him back. Again I went there totally unprepared.
It was a place that had been a chicken farm. Old bones from battery cages lay everywhere some even in line out a hundred feet. Foundations for at least four more were evident. The only thing left was an old barn at least a hundred years old, or so it seemed.
The man was nice and his wife had told him not to hatch more eggs but he had the incubator going in his office in a shed next to the barn. It was then I realized I hadn't brought a cage of any kind.
"No problem," he said and he grabbed up some battery cage and cut off a piece and fastened an end on it. About three feet long, a dome arrangement and it had a little door. He said, "You man the cage and I will catch the birds."
OH my gawd there were chickens everywhere, mostly in the barn for shade and water. He grabbed up a huge net and asked me which ones I wanted. My only preference was they couldn't be white.
He caught a black, a red and a mottly brown and another that looked like she was an Ameraucana. That was before I understood they were Easter Eggers. My "to go" cage didn't look very full at all.
So he caught a couple of really pretty large fowl hens. And when I said I wanted a roo he said I should take two. Those roos could run, he snagged two very pretty roosters. One looked like a jungle fowl and the other was a little more plain.
All during that ruckus there was a hen just standing about six feet from me watching the excitement. He said, "Do you want that rooster as well?" I was confused till he pointed out the hen. "That's a roo?" "Yep," he said. So IN the cage with the confused roo.
I paid him and off we went the ten miles home. The only chickens I named out of that crew were the roosters. Waylin, Willie and Bubba. Oh and one hen I named Momma.
Waylin had a mighty crow gradually dropping his head as he finished. Willie had a kind of strangled crow and his neck went off to the side a bit as he finished. Bubba, well he was Bubba. Stood and watched and that was it.
I fell in love with roosters with that crew.
