Feed bucket aggression. He is associating you with appearance of fresh eats that taste sweetest when they first appear. Interaction may already be to point where you have been rewarding his approaches by putting out feed for him even after food already present. Counter measure I employ does not assume problem is dominance related, nor am I scared of roosters.
You are in my boat. I have grown up around every kind of farm animal (except chickens) and even have six horses now. I have never been afraid of any of them, other than respecting the breeding males. We have a stallion now, and even though he’s young, he doesn’t worry me as much as the thought of one/all of my roos going rogue. I think I’ve been reading too much!
This sounds like a good plan. Don't handle the cockerels any more than is necessary as this will keep some of their natural fear of you in place. Once they are familiar with you, you become part of their flock and they'll try to dominate you. My two roosters are not human aggressive. I leave them alone and they leave me alone, but they DO come around when I am feeding the flock. They'll follow and move out of my way when necessary. I also use a long stick to move birds out of my way if necessary, so they don't look at the stick as coming from me. I have a 12 week old cockerel is the son of one of my roosters and he looks to be following in his father's footsteps. I've left him alone and I haven't had any aggression from him at all.
