Aurora Rules the Roost
The following video is over 5 minutes long. I edited it down from nearly 20 minutes of recording. It shows a fascinating piece of chicken behavior. It is not for someone who believes that chickens are friendly fluffy balls of feathers that all love each other. This is a display of dominance that I have not recorded before and it involves a lot of pecking.
What you will see is the following. Everyone is roosted and settled but Aurora. Aurora comes in and decides that Sydney needs to be dominated tonight. I do not know how or why she makes that decision.
Aurora can barely reach her on the high roost, seemingly getting on her tip toes to reach Sydney. That does not dissuade her. She pecks at Sydney until Sydney makes the mistake of moving which puts her into more effective range for Aurora.
Aurora garbs and pulls Sydney off the high roost and gets off her roost to go after her.
There is some pecking and chasing until the most fascinating part of the video occurs.
Sydney submits. She goes prone of the floor with her wings partially spread. You can really see Aurora's dominance here. It is almost like she is a cruel prison guard with a prisoner in hand cuffs on the ground. You can almost hear Strother Martin saying "What we've got here is a failure to communicate"
Aurora stands over her, pecks her, pulls at her wings, and makes Sydney stay in that position for quite a while. Sydney remains in the position even after Aurora has left.
Eventually Sydney gets up and resumes her position on the high roost.
All of this had nothing to do with Aurora wanting Sydney's spot on the high roost. Aurora went back to her spot on the low roost. This was simply about dominance.
Now the observations from the next day were most interesting. Sydney and Aurora spent time together free ranging, they briefly ate together from my hand at the same time, and Sydney and Aurora roosted together last night.
Is this a big step to building an integrated pecking order? It seems so. Time will tell.
