The behavioural study problem.
1) In order to study behaviour one has to let the subject/s behave.
2) In order to study natural behaviour one has to let the subject/s behave in a natural manner.
I’ll take an extreme example just to illustrate the point. A study of a man confined to an eight cubic foot room where he is supplied food and water through a hatch is likely to give vastly different data to a study of that same man left to fend for himself in a jungle.
Does anyone disagree with this?
When trying to study natural behaviour one has to make some assumptions as to what is the more natural environment, the eight cubic foot room, or the jungle in the example above.
There is an added problem that the observer influences the behaviour of the subject. Initially in the example above the man in the cube if he is aware he is under observation will alter his behaviour to some extent because he knows he is under observation. Given a long enough time span the presence of the observer becomes less critical in influencing the man’s behaviour; the observation eventually becomes the normal.
There are certain behaviours that are hard coded into any creature, the drive to eat drink and procreate are some.
3) There is an ongoing debate about which behaviours can be considered hard coded and what behaviours are entirely dependant on environmental conditions. A simplistic phrase for this debate is the nurture versus nature.
How does one test what is natural and what is nurture?
How does one decide when what was nurture becomes natural or visa versa?
Here on BYC the vast majority of those who keep chickens rarely see what a chickens natural behaviour is. Without wishing to offend anyone for most chickens kept in back yards their environment is closer to the eight foot cubic box than it is to the jungle.
Free range. As far as the eye can see and a National Park after.
Confined with occasional afternoons out under supervision.
I spent ten years working with the chickens in Catalonia and eight of those years were spent knowingly attempting to study their behaviour. These were free range chickens. There were no physical barriers that would prevent the chickens from travelling miles in any direction.
In an average day I spent eight hours with chickens within eyesight as I worked on the land and later in even when in my house.
Essentially the chickens did exactly as they pleased on twelve acres of mixed woodland, fields of crops and the semi managed areas close to the houses. The only restriction was that for most, but not all of the time, I encouraged the chickens to roost in coops. For periods of time one tribe or another would take to the trees and often the males that got expelled from the tribes would roost where they could find a place where they felt safe. This was worlds away from the coop and run keeping conditions most here on BYC have. I would argue that this was as natural an environment as could be achieved without the chickens being completely feral.
I cared for between five and three tribes, plus the satellite males while they tried to establish their own tribes and attract the pullets that hatched as mates. There are pictures and stories relating to the events spread all over BYC from the later years. In the earlier years I didn’t have a camera but I did keep a diary.
Each tribe had at least two hens per rooster, sometimes as many as six or seven. That’s an awful lot of egg songs in a day when they were laying.
Add to this that many of the other farms in the valley also had free range groups and a roosters call from a mile away on another farm could be heard by the roosters in my care. This was similar to what a breeding pair of jungle fowl would experience. Of course, with that kind of freedom and that kind of environment changes in the environment occurred on a daily basis. This just doesn’t happen in coop and run chicken keeping. On an average day I would hear the egg song throughout the day as the hens from various tribes left their tribes to lay their eggs, sometimes in their tribe coops, sometimes in another tribes coops, often in nests on the land perhaps five hundred yards from their tribes coop and territory.
I have heard thousands of egg songs over the ten years and seen thousands of rooster responses and what I saw was what led me to believe that the so called egg song was in fact a call for a rooster and from these observations I wrote a summary article which I published here on BYC.
This thread might give an idea of the level of observation.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/cooperative-behavior.1288804/
Fortunately there were other free range keepers I got to know in Catalonia and the hens call for a rooster was understood and even here on BYC in the reviews and comments on the article I wrote others have witnessed the same behaviour although some were not aware of it’s significance.
So why isn’t the Escort call common knowledge on BYC?
There are lots of reasons. One reason was illustrated by a Catalan chicken keeping friend who when I tried to get him to join the site said to me after reading for a few days “Site is called wrong. It should be called Backyard Hens.”
There is large percentage of members here that don’t keep roosters so they wouldn’t have seen the behaviour under discussion.
They hear the sounds that the hens make and having no other evidence to suggest differently assume the sound is to do with laying the egg, which is only partially correct.
Many of those who do keep roosters do so in a coop and run environment. Why would a rooster in such conditions respond to an escort call when the hen is only a few feet from him, usually in full sight and there are no other roosters that might want to mate with the hen.
This is what I’ve observed with Henry. He rarely bothers doing much more that a token reply to the escort call because he knows exactly where the hen is and knows that there are no other roosters in the vicinity and the run is safe from predators.
The only times I’ve seen Henry respond to the escort call have been when he’s been on the allotments and the hen not in plain sight. He not only answered but went back to the coop to collect the hen.
So here is another point that needs to be taken into account; roosters are not stupid or robots and will make a risk assessment. In the case of confined groups there is no risk in the roosters eyes.
A further factor is roosters tend to respond to their favourite hens. It’s these hens he mates with most and these hens that he hopes will carry his genes forward.
In some keeping conditions the turnover of hens and roosters is so regular that the rooster doesn’t make a bond with any particular hen.
Finally for this discussion most people are not very good at observing their chickens. Often it isn’t the chicken that initially attracts the keepers attention that gives the best clue as to what is going on. Often it’s what the other chickens are doing/do when the event takes place that provides the better answer.
For a great many chicken keepers an hour a day with their chickens out of the coop and run is the amount of time they spend with their chickens bar the feeding and cleaning.
I doubt there is another person on this site that has spent as much time with chickens as I have. Most people have lives outside the world of chickens but for me for a decade my life was chickens and the other farm animals and even now living 6 miles away from the allotments where the chickens are I would bet I spend more time with chickens than the vast majority on this site. I don’t write this as any kind of condemnation of other chicken keepers, more as a statement of fact.
The egg song is in fact an escort call made by a hen for her rooster. The call is most often heard after a hen has laid an egg, but I have heard the same call for hens that have been separated from their tribe, got caught in a fight while crossing another tribes territory and in disputes over who should have nest priority when wanting to lay an egg.
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and turkey 
from Spain. But probably from elsewhere too. 
