Saturday, October 4, 2014

What do Animals Know?

What do Animals Know?

Two of my hens were squabbling in the foyer this morning.  White Hen#1, who is sitting on 3 eggs in a nest in the foyer, was upset that, Suzette,  the black French hen, was coming to look at the eggs, and maybe try to sit on them and lay another egg there.  (Chickens like to lay their eggs where there are already other eggs, especially if someone is sitting on them. That way they pass on their genes with little or no effort.)  And chickens don’t care whose eggs they sit on.  They will even sit on duck eggs and hatch them.  (Then maybe the hen starts wondering why her babies are always going in the water, and not drowning!)  The hen who spends 3 weeks sitting on the eggs is the de facto mother of the babies, the one who takes care of them, teaches them how and what to eat, and protects them.  The biological mothers take no interest in them.   After about 6 weeks, the chicks are big enough to take care of themselves
Chickens are well known for their dominance hierarchy, they invented the idea.  That’s why it’s called the pecking order.  (And humans seem to have copied this idea.)  Suzette outranks the 2 white hens because she joined the flock before they were even hatched.  So WH#1 can’t make Suzette go away from her nest.  It’s amazing that this WH always comes to me for help, because she knows I outrank all the hens!  She comes up the stairs to the door to the house, squawking loudly for me to come and get that other hen away.  She’s the only one who seems to have developed this personal relationship with me. 
Another interesting thing is that Suzette, the black hen who came to look at the eggs, is actually the biological mother of the 3 eggs WH is sitting on.  Maybe she was coming to check on her babies!  Does she know they are hers?  Who knows what animals know!
We have 2 roosters, Inky, who is a pure black “Gallo Nero”, and Goldy, who is black and white and shines like gold in the sun.  It will be interesting to see how the chicks turn out.  Goldy is a very lucky rooster.  He was bought by a Chinese family, who have a store called China Town across the railroad tracks from us, for their dinner!  But he escaped and made his way over the tracks, ending up in our yard and even going into one of our coops!  I happened to see him in there and closed the door.  Later the Chinese family came by, asking if we had seen the rooster.  They even had a picture of him on a cell phone.  Sante thought he was too beautiful to eat and offered to trade one of ours for Goldy. 
We had too many roosters “troppi galli”, because the last couple of hatchings had been all males, until we finally had one in the spring with 5 females.  Alba, an Italian farmwife friend of ours, said the gender of the chicks depends on the phase of the moon, and the temperature – higher temperature means females.  I haven’t checked this out on Google yet.
Most people kill the excess roosters and eat them, but we are unable to do this.  We got Alba to kill a couple of them for us and gave her one.  The roosters had a very happy life, running around the yard, scratching up weeds and insects , and chasing hens all day, and that’s the important thing.
There is an interesting story about how White Hen #1 and 2 were hatched.