So, you want backyard chickens, but you don’t know about the rooster bit. . . so, here’s the deal with roosters:
The pros of having a rooster:
Some of the pros for having a rooster in your flock are:
- You need one if you want to get new chicks every year.
If you want a truly sustainable flock, you have to have at least one. A good rule of thumb for the rooster to hen ratio is that for fertile eggs, you need at least one rooster for every 20 hens. Most backyard flocks are small, since city regulations often limit the number to as little as 6 chickens.
- Roosters will protect your flock from predators.
This may be true out in the country where your chickens have more room to roam, however in the city where your chickens are probably more confined to a small area in your yard, this isn’t so much the case, especially if they are in an enclosed coop at night.
- Fertile eggs are more nutritious and Fertile eggs taste better than infertile eggs.
This is highly debatable, and I have yet to see any conclusive evidence that either of these claims are true.
- Hens lay more eggs when there is a rooster around.
My dad always said that having roosters helped the hens lay more frequently, but I haven’t really noticed a difference without. My hens still lay nearly 1 egg per day in the laying season.
The cons of having a rooster:
- They are aggressive
The degree of aggressiveness depends on the breed, so if you have small children, you would want to consider not having a rooster, or at least having a more docile breed of rooster, but even the more ‘docile’ breeds are more aggressive in the spring and summer because it is breeding season, and even ‘docile’ breeds like the Rhode Island Reds can be very aggressive. The rooster that inspired the name of my blog was a Rhode Island Red.
- They crow
supposedly larger breeds crow less often than the smaller bantam breeds, with a lower pitched crow, but they are also louder. This is a problem if your city has a noise ordinance. You could silence them by having their voice box cut, but to me, that is animal cruelty.
- They eat as much as hens, but don’t lay eggs.
I think that it is ideal to have a rooster, but in the city where your neighbors are apt to complain about the noise, the best use for a rooster is mean rooster soup.
to feed them and play with them all the time. It is a challenge sometimes to keep the kids out of the coop so that the chicks have some time to scratch in the dirt, run in the grass, and eat bugs and snails – all the fun stuff that chicks like to do. . . this is Bee with her favorite chick, Rose. (Rose is an Aracauna and will lay blue or green eggs.) We have been collecting one egg nearly every day since the beginning of April from our black bantam, Gertie, and the kids get really excited about bringing that egg in every day. I think it is really good for them to see where eggs come from. These chicks won’t lay yet for quite a while, but they really make great pets.
The one problem that I do have (other than keeping the cat at bay) is keeping the chickens out of the garden. Gertie loves the corn, and has eaten the tops off of almost all of the little corn seedlings since they came up about two weeks ago. Because of this, I am afraid that the corn is a little behind in its growth. I have also had to re-plant some of the peas and quite a few other things. The one thing that she hasn’t eaten are the onions 🙂 One thing that helps is that we dumped some wheat out onto the ground and let it grow — they really love the wheatgrass, and they have eaten it down quite a bit. I keep it watered so it keeps growing back, and every time I let them out, that is the first thing they go to. I am thinking of building a little run so that they can be outside without fear of the cat getting them, as well as skunks and hawks. This would also keep them in one part of the yard, so that I won’t have to worry about my garden. Then I can put a little ramp up to the coop and they can
having, I have had to be extra watchful of the cat . . . the chicks are pets, but they look like lunch to her. This is our cat Peppermint Schnapps, so named because of her shockingly green eyes and the fact that we rescued her from a bar where the drunks were making a game of trying to throw her into the rottweiler kennel that was next door. After a few nights of this, the bar owner called me and asked if I would please take her before she was killed. She is very independent and takes care of herself, but she also wants to be where people are, which explains why she didn’t just run away from the bar . . . it was the only inhabited building for quite a distance.
One of the first things she did after we moved here was to make a quick dinner out of a nest of baby robins that I had been watching for a few days with the hopes that I could use the experience as a kind of science-project-from-a-distance for my kids — I imagined letting them watch while the birds grew and finally left the nest. No such luck with this little preditor running about. But the fact that she is so self sufficient, and yet kid friendly it is exactly the thing that makes her such a great pet. I was really disappointed but I should have known that a nest low enough for me to see was not safe with our cat around. Which brings me back to where I started . . . here she is watching the pigeons on the roof.
Well, I have seen the poor, well loved little thing (it turns out that there is only one hatchling so far) and it looks much like a miniature plucked chicken with a bulging neck and an over-sized beak. (I caught a look while the mother left her nest for a few minutes today). The other truly amazing thing about this baby is that it has tripled, maybe even quadrupled, in size since it hatched only just days ago. It is now the size of a Jumbo sized chicken egg, from something about the size of the ball of my thumb . . . truly amazing! The picture is a bit blurry, since I only had one chance to snap a picture before mommy came back to shoo me off . . . but it really doesn’t look a whole lot better than this 🙂
aquisition, two homing pigeons. One of our pairs of rollers is brooding and has two eggs. The male has become quite protective and has chased the other pigeons out of the coop. He tolerates the chicken and her chicks, but I think he would prefer that they were not there either. It has been fun to watch the whole process. Zee brought the pigeon’s first egg in the house along with the chicken’s egg the day it was laid and I had him take it back out. I put it in a shoebox with so
me sawdust and wood shavings to keep the chicken and chicks from stepping on it, but at the same time thinking that she would probably abandon it because it had been touched. The next time I went out to check on them I was pleasantly surprised to see her sitting on it. She has been sitting on it for a little over a week now, and from what I have read, it takes 18 days for a pigeon egg to hatch. My husband took a peek in the nest the other day when she was off of her eggs and verified that there was a second egg. I don’t know if the first egg will hatch or not, since it was cold for a day before she started brooding, but from what I have read, that may not matter. I am thinking that we will probably need to get a second coop if we want to keep our birds all happy . . .