The chickens are going crazy. Apparently, tis the season.
A common late afternoon activity of mine and many others in the village is sitting on the little porch that attaches to each hut. It is my favorite time of day; the sun is finally relenting, the malaria mosquito are still hiding under their buckets, and the kids are running around free from the school day. I like to sit and watch people come in from the fields, yell out salutations, and find out what kind of things are growing in their land. Lately however, because of the lack of rain, there is very little growing and so that conversation ends pretty quickly. Luckily a new form of entertainment has popped up in the form of a nature channel special: chicken mating season.
My yard is a common place for chickens to gather. There is always something growing for them to gobble on (jerks), there is plenty of good dirt and my compost for them to steal worms out of a scratch (again, jerks), and they are protected from cows and their wagons crashing through because of the gate that keeps my little yard in. It has been an ongoing frustration to have these chickens enjoy my garden because, as noted before, they munch on everything and take away my soil-replenishing worms. But I have come into my zen with them and by now just enjoy watching them run around with their chicks and observe how chickens behave when let loose in the world.
Which has now taken on a whole new level of excitement as the roosters in my village have reached maturity and are taking it out on my poor hens. It starts with a hen scratching around in my compost pile, happily clucking and perhaps pecking if a younger hen tries to get some scratching action. All of a sudden a studly rooster approaches, shimmying up to the lady. Unimpressed by his advances, she waddles off to another pile of dirt. But he hasn’t even given her his best stuff! ‘Come on baby, look at these shiny red feathers. Don’t they set off my googly black eyes?’. To which she sticks up her nose exclaiming that she’s already 12 chicks rich and the last baby-daddy didn’t stick around to protect them from stomping feet or hungry cats. This does nothing to dissuade the stud of course; he just sees her as ever-more fertile. At this point, as the lady has turned away and is walking towards home, he puts it in gear road-runner style (you know when he’s moving so fast that his feet just look like wheels?).
And the chase is on! The hen has taken off too, jumping up on buckets, running through gates, flying up to rooftops and back down to avoid this predator. But he is right after her nipping at any other chicken or rooster that tries to get in his way. Finally, he has gained on her enough that he can reach out his neck and bite down on the feathers on top of her head. Once he gets a good mouthful he’ll pounce on top, dip himself into her and within 20 seconds the whole thing is over. They both shake it off like it was just another nooner and go their separate directions strutting the ultimate walk-of-shame.
I have caught this action every day for the last week and it never ceases to entertain. It’s amazing how badly the roosters want to procreate and how terrorizing it seems to be for the hens.
