Keeping Cockerels quiet

[GD91]

Hi everyone.

Well, the story is I incubated some Pekin bantam eggs & tada! I have 2 Cockerels!

Now we made the mistake of naming & taming them (My husbands fault). They are both very affectionate, one more so than the other. Now its a case of WHO DO WE KEEP?

I want the cockerels mainly for breeding purposes, just so everyone knows.

I live in a town & locally there are no rules against keeping cockerels. There is only the noise rule - No noise between the hours of 11pm & 7AM.
We live in the northwest UK where for 6-8 months of the year it is only light between the hours of 7 - 8am & 5-6pm

So my first aim is to successfully find out how to keep Cockerels quiet in a town during those hours of 11pm - 7AM.

My first thought was to use a hood designed for blindfolding a bird of prey.

If I put one of those on a cockerel at night, the theory should be he can't see, so he shouldn't make noise. Plus, I thought maybe popping on a hood while he sits on his perch is not as intrusive as walking in the coop, picking a rooster up & putting him in a separate dark box away from his hens where he must sit until he is released.

What do you think of using a hood?

Of course it will take some training & only go on last thing at night & be removed first thing in the morning, but I feel pretty positive it may well work. If a hawk is trainable to wear one, a cockerel should be.

I'm certainly willing to put in the work to breed my own chickens.

Looked them up & they are very cheap to.

 

[DaveMorey]

Do you have windows in your coop? If so, what about fashioning some kind of a blind to "blacken" the room. Much like folks that have pet birds indoors that cover the cage at night to quiet the birds. I am not sure of your setup but blinds might be less laborious intensive.

 

[Chickensandbirds]

In our experience with cockerels, they didn't crow after roost time. They did, however, begin crowing at 4:30 AM. We just brought them indoors (into the utility/laundry room) and let them perch and crow until after sunrise (or about 6:30 - 7:00 AM). -was hilarious listening to crowing cockerels over morning coffee - indoors! -worked well, though. We eventually had to re-home them due to crowing about the lawn and garden at all hours during the day. -quite the disturbance to some of our neighbors.

 

[GD91]

We have a 6ft door with two layers of chicken wire to let light in. On the outside there is a sheet to pull down in bad weather. There is no window on our side where we keep the chickens because we knocked it through to create a door, but they are separated from our neighbors side by building a frame & fixing a wall of 3 layers of chicken wire & he has a large window on his side. The coop is a converted layout, basically we shared an old brick garage with a steel roof with our neighbor & we never used it. When we got chickens we figured we might aswell convert our side of the garage to be chicken friendly. We installed some basic insulation, fixed the many leaks in the roof, the roof was all ready ventilated because its correlgated or whatever you call it & basically did it up as it hasn't been touched for about 10 years because our landlord won't do anything.

I would have used wood to separate the two areas but it was too expensive & we already had 50 metres of chicken wire. Also the space was very dark as it was & I didn't want to cut of more natural daylight from the hens when they choose to stay in from bad weather because we just don't see much daylight here anyway.

Plus our neighbor is new so I don't want to ask him to do anything about his window yet... He hasn't even moved in, but he said he was planning to live underneath us long term. I don't even know if he's seen the birds, we had them before he rented the flat, I hope so because they have been out & he hasn't mentioned them

but he already knows we have 2 dogs & a cat & we know he has 3 kids.
He's a nice guy so hopefully it will be fine, we gave him half of our share of the garage to use to soften him up

he said thanks, because he would be needing the space for his vehicles or something.

He's got a condemned boiler & that's why he's not moved in yet, waiting on the landlord.

I may well find I will end up putting a proper partition in because if he's storing cars or what - not
1) Chicken dust going to cars.
2) Car fumes going to chickens.

He's got a motorbike in there covered by a sheet, so dust may not be too much of a problem.

That's if he can even get his cars in, my DH reckons he's barking up a tree if he thinks he can fit a car down the side of the building to get in the garages.
But as I reminded him "Yes, well don't mention it dear, we must keep him amicable."

Its much easier, we have already had the neighbor from hell move out a few months ago, taking her brown rats with her!

She was a messy cow who used to just literally throw her food & waste out through the front door into a stinky corner, and my tomcat caught 2 rats in her rubbish & lost a lot of fur doing it. Never seen rats fight a cat before, it was scary & very noisy, i thought they were going to kill him, but we ended up with one disembowled & he chased the 2nd down the side & under the gate

Couldn't bring mine indoors, we have a neighbor next door & below us & a shop below us to. Its a converted house with a mad layout. We have a one bedroom flat in it.