Well do you love me (I can really move)
Well do you love me (I'm in the groove)
Ah do you love me (do you love me)
Now that I can dance
With the way you look I understand you were not impressed...
Don't you love me anymore?
(lyrics by Berry Gordy Jr., Elvis Costello, and Albert Hammond & Diane Warren, respectively)
Such a handsome feller!
ReplyDeleteIn the first photo, he looks like a drum major! Love it!
ReplyDeleteSounds like a Stephen King passage!
ReplyDeleteThen I saw the lyrics reference and I knew it was true. Better watch out!
That must be where we got the phrase "strutting his stuff."
ReplyDeleteWhat a beauty he is. I bet the hens all love him!
Cock o' the walk!
ReplyDeleteI've never seen photos of them doing that. Nice!
My wife and I want to do some husbandry in the next couple of years here - but we have some other things to square away first.
Hilarious! I am learning to look at chickens in a whole new way! But it is getting harder for me to eat chicken for dinner :o/
ReplyDeleteHA, Dread Pirate, that's a great story. I guess the hens had been waiting their chance to give him a hard time! Those are great photos and commentary Rurality. You've got me laughing at work...
ReplyDeleteHa,ha,ha..great post..
ReplyDelete"the high heel he used to be has been ground down"
ReplyDeletethat's for the last pic, where he realizes he's lost his audience. He's still pretty spectacular though. And still a pretty high heel.
(also elvis costello, btw)
This is "the rooster who is going to end up in the stewpot if he doesn't quit attacking me" from a previous post.
ReplyDeleteHe hasn't been after me lately. I developed a particularly high-pitched squeal that is useful because to Jasmine it means "help, I need help," and she comes running. (When I actually yell "help" she just stares at me.) The first and last time I had to squeal because the rooster was threatening, Jasmine chased him all across the yard and around the corner and halfway down the farm road. That was one surprised rooster, and he hasn't bothered me since. I don't think he liked me laughing at him either, but he had such a surprised look on his face! :)
He is sneaky though and we always have to be wary. If there were kids around I would not let him live. Roosters have been known to blind children! But I think we can fend for ourselves, and he is pretty. And possibly carries the blue-egg gene. (He's an Easter Egger.)
Yep, cock of the walk, strutting his stuff, cocksure... you realize where all those expressions came from!
Stay tuned for what happened to the other two roosters...
DPR some chickens are smarter than others, I think. This rooster is not one of the intelligensia though. When I was in the first stages of my "coyote prevention program," I left the chickens in the coop for decreasing lengths of time each day. Well, the first day when I went to check on them, the rooster was inside the cat litter box that the hens like to lay eggs in. He had turned the box over so that the door was on the ground, and he was trapped! Poor dear. Well he did that three days in a row! (I was laughing at his failure to learn from mistakes, when I realized that I'd put a hole in my socks from the same toenail for three days in a row...)
Charles, I see that you sensed my failure to find the definitive lyric for the last picture. Due to lack of time I had to settle for that one but really wanted one that said something either about sour grapes (considered the John Prine song) or more where that came from, or more fish in the ocean or some such. Just couldn't think of anything great and ran out of time!
I *LOVED* the lyrics for the first photo! Great shots! Funny rooster.
ReplyDeleteThose pictures are wonderful, as usual. Whole blogs could be written about chickens. The material is non-ending.
ReplyDeleteHilarious beyond words!
ReplyDeleteMy maternal grandmother had about 22 chickens the week before she passed away and we had to slaughter all of them because the foxes were getting bolder with her absence (and we would rather eat them than let the foxes have them).
In the end, we loved her little rooster so much, we spared him. He was a tiny little fellow, with I suppose "Small Rooster Syndrome." He was more of a sensitive fellow and had one particular girlfriend always by his side. We spared her too since they seemed so in love with each other.
I love chickens! I am working on becoming a vegetarian myself, though alas I am also something of a gourmet...
I haven't been attacked by a chicken yet; a visiting friend did have one of the chickens jump on her head and start pecking away. She covered her eyes with one hand and brushed off the chicken with the other. Whew!
Your chickens, again, are hilarious!
My sister gave me 5 chicks that were rescued from those horrible commercial chicken houses and 2 of them grew up to be roosters. Well, I naively thought that if the chickens were raised in a better enviroment they would grow up okay. Wrong! those were the weirdest chickens I have ever seen. They would not scratch or roost and once I gave them a tomato they just stared at it. One of the roosters finally tried to eat it. Anyway, the roosters got very aggressive and one day one of them bit me on the arm and would not let go! I had to kick it to get it off. He made a good Sunday dinner. Those things are mutated too and in 6 months they weighed over 15 lbs! I fried the breasts as chicken fingers and could only get 1 side of the breast in a large skillet at one time.
ReplyDeleteIf I were a Hen, I'd be all over him.
ReplyDeleteHe looks like the Brad Pitt of Roosters.
Karen I think he would have been singing those exact lyrics if he could! He's pretty full of himself.
ReplyDeleteHick you're right! If I had time for side projects that would be a good one, LOL. Many cats have their own blogs, and I've seen a goat one, but chicken blogs may be the true wave of the future!
Maktaaq, they can hit you a LOT harder than you would think. This guy has given me a few serious bruises. We tried the vegetarian thing for a while but I was hungry constantly! Now we just do vegetarian days sometimes.
Weldergirl you probably had Cornish Crosses (Cornish X). They can be a little sad... bred to gain weight very quickly and be butchered young... at 6 or 8 weeks I think. Sometimes they get so heavy that their legs can't support them. That is the standard chicken that you buy in the store. The females don't grow as fast as the males. They are sold as Cornish Hens. This breed just isn't going to make a good yard chicken. They are designed to have the best feed-to-weight ratio so that's what most people have to produce broiler chickens.
Jillian, LOL! He definitely thinks he's the Brad Pitt of roosters! Or maybe the young Marlon Brando of roosters.
Yes, I think I read that they were called Cornish Rocks. We ate the roosters because they were just so dangerous because of their size. I wanted to keep the hens since I did not know about their problems, but they all croaked at about 7 or 8 months of what appeared to be a heart attack. They rarely moved much because their weight just was too much on their feet. I did not know they would be like that and now I can't hardly stand to buy chicken in a grocery store. They are so messed up.
ReplyDeleteWe recently butchered and ate (well hubby butchered, I ate) two of our excess roosters. Tasted a lot different than store-bought chicken!
ReplyDeletehahaha! This was really cute. You know I collect roosters, well im going to buy some nice frames and print some of your photos out to hang in my kitchen (if you don't mind)(I still think you should make a calendar)!
ReplyDeleteCarrie won! eh, well we kinda knew it was coming...
I love the pics. Mom and Dad's chickens are 10 weeks old today, and the roosters are just now really starting to show off. They're mostly jumping up in the air at each other, flapping then going their separate ways. Fortunately, none of the breeds are all that agressive. I was too busy watching them, fascinated with my first real exposure to chickens, to take any pictures.
ReplyDeleteHe is a pretty rooster. I have six hens and one rooster. He is spposedly a Black Jersey Giant cross but I thnk he's a black sex link cross. He is big though and some of my hens are small - so he is really rough on them. I have one older hen that I've had to isolate because her vent is bloody from his constantly jumpy on her. Her back is bare too. He's very full of himself as well but not mean - I can pick him up turn him upside down and sand his spurs and he just lays there but if a stranger or a man walks into the yard - watch out!
ReplyDeleteJenni, feel free.
ReplyDeleteMira even my non-agressive Buff Orpington roosters got a little agitated with each other as they got older. The Easter egger rooster here bloodied the much bigger Orpington pretty badly... he didn't like the competition.
Anon, that's the same problem we had with the Buff Orps. They were beautiful and sweet, but just too big for the smaller hens (esp. the Lakenvelders).
Very handsome! I found your blog when doing a "tiny rooster" search. I have a tiny rooster of my own, Mr. Joy, who is a great dancer in his own right, even though he's lacking most of his toes.
ReplyDeleteHe even has his own website you might appreciate...Click on my name for link
Your Mr. Joy certainly seems a lot nicer than any rooster we've had! (Especially this one.)
ReplyDelete