The Ballad of Be-Bop the Rooster

Ode to a pathetic chicken

As egg prices have climbed to unthinkable levels, there has been much talk of backyard chicken flocks as an offset mechanism for the inflated egg economy. Here is a tale from my own experience in that regard:

Years ago my wife and I bought our first flock of chickens for our backyard. We bought ten of them. On the night we brought them home, one jumped the fence and was never seen again. Another one turned out to be a rooster. We decided to keep the rooster because we paid ten dollars for him and we did not want to waste the money. We named him Be-Bop.

Be-Bop was nobody’s idea of a rooster. He was, in fact, a loser—if roosters can be losers, anyway, then surely Be-Bop qualified.

Part of it may have been our fault. Because we have neighbors, we did not want Be-Bop’s crowing to bother anyone, so we placed around his scrawny neck a “rooster collar,” a strip of Velcro that is supposed to muffle his voice. It worked: Be-Bop’s crowing would start off big and bold but quickly taper off into a pathetic, gargling belch. This awful crowing was rather quiet, and nobody hearing Be-Bop crow would mistake him for a proud animal. This probably rubbed off on him to a certain extent.

In spite of the rooster collar, Be-Bop might have nonetheless retained a sense of dignity or aplomb had he been an innately dignified or graceful animal, but he was neither. In truth, Be-Bop was a coward. Where many roosters are defensive of their flock’s eggs and protective of their flock, Be-Bop was a sissy. He ran away from anyone who came near him. He cared not if I gathered the eggs of his flock; he only looked at me with fear and stayed far away from me while I took the eggs. If I startled or spooked one of his hens, he showed no concern. I used to watch him stampede over his flock in an effort to run away from me, like a cowardly man elbowing aside women and children to hop aboard the lifeboat of a sinking ship.

He was a disgraceful rooster and a mockery of his ancient heritage, and the worst part was he probably knew this and did not care.

The principle function of a rooster, aside from protecting his flock, is fertilizing eggs. Be-Bop was also very bad at this, and one gets the impression that his hens looked upon him with scorn and derision.

In general, when attempting to mate, roosters will approach a female and do a funny little dance with one wing pointing towards the ground. If the female is receptive to the dance and the rooster, she will show it, and the rooster will do his business. 

Be-Bop was an almost-total failure in this regard. In the beginning he would do his little rooster dance, but the hens would respond every single time by squawking with fright and running away. After several weeks of this, ashamed and angry over his spurned affections, Be-Bop decided simply to chase his hens around the chicken yard with no pretense whatsoever, running after them in a pitiable kind of fat-man waddle while they squawked and flapped and jumped away from him. Occasionally, no gentleman, he pecked their heads as they ran. The hens quite obviously hated him, and they ran away from him at every opportunity. After a long time he would finally catch a hen and get the job done, after which point he would give way with several wretched, pitiable crows. He was a pitiful spectacle, and every member of his dismissive flock knew it and hated him for it.

Be-Bop did try once to actually do some good, but even at this he failed. Hawks are one of the principle enemies of chickens; a hawk can decapitate a chicken quite quickly, and many farmers lose many birds to airborne predators like this. Roosters act as a good frontline of defense against these pests: when a rooster spots a hawk, he will give way with a strange, throaty squawk, at which point all of his hens will run for shelter into a coop or barn. I witnessed Be-Bop do this once—he let forth with his warning squawk, at which point all the hens ran squawking for cover—but he was mistaken: what had flown overhead was not a hawk but a common sparrow. So even when he did something right, he still got it wrong. Be-Bop was not merely a cowardly pantywaist, he was also apparently quite stupid.

I had not known that there could be such variance of quality among roosters. I had assumed that, having evolved to fill a fairly specific niche, they would all mostly operate in the same way: efficiently and with dignity and self-esteem. I was wrong. Be-Bop proved me wrong.

In the end we gave Be-Bop back to the rooster farm whence he came. The chicken farmer placed him in a pen with some other roosters and gave us a chicken in exchange. As we watched, the other roosters began to beat up on Be-Bop, and he—a coward, and a pathetic bird—allowed himself to be beaten up.