I have a hen that crows like a rooster!!

[sameold, sameold]

One of my more aggresive hens that lays almost daily has starting crowing just like my rooster. My dh's and my mouths both dropped open this morning when we saw her tip her head back and let the bellows out of her. I wouldn't have believed it if I had seen it for myself. Has anyone ever heard of this before? She is a beautiful silver sebright.

[Dammit Janet]

Yes it happens. Your hen probably carries a high level of testosterone in her system and probably has spurs. They say it is bad luck to have a crowing hen but I wouldnt go getting all freaked out about it...though considering we both have gfg's...maybe they are onto something since we have had crowing hens before too!

LOL.

[Lothlorien]

aint that just like a woman! [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/rofl.gif[/img]

[Hound dog]

[img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/rofl.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/rofl.gif[/img]

[witzend]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Dammit Janet</div><div class="ubbcode-body">They say it is bad luck to have a crowing hen but I wouldnt go getting all freaked out about it..

LOL. </div></div>

Does that mean "bad luck" for the chicken? Like Sunday dinner?

[Marguerite]

It used to mean bad luck for the chicken when I was growing up. We kept battery hens - very unPC - and occasionally one would crow. I would be sent down to watch and identify which hen. Often we were still getting eggs from her - my father kept a log book in which he notes which hens were laying, how often etc. (I recall now - just a tad OCD?). Each year he would buy point-of-lay pullets, they were identified with an ankle ring (each hen had a number and was able to be tracked through his system) and every autumn he would cull the two-year-olds because THEY are the ones who stop laying through the shorter days. He would move the year-olds to the next row and replace with the new point-of lays.

So since we always had about forty or fifty hens, we did get a crowing hen every couple of years. One year we had two, and they competed with each other.

Our current flock (now dying of old age, we haven't had a rooster in eight years) are all free-range and mostly inbred. I got them from a neighbour who had kept chooks in his large backyard and just let them wander and breed. We learned early that when a brood of chicks hatches out, half will be roosters and you should only ever have one (not even that many, once the neighbours start complaining). So we often had to give ours the chop, when they got to crowing age, or they would fight each other - to the death, if we'd let them.
Then we found a few abnormalities - about half our chooks had an extra claw. ALL had spurs, including good layers who didn't crow. We were constantly trimming - I think it's because they're mostly bantams. And when chopping roosters and drawing the bird, DH found that a number of our roosters were hermaphrodites. He even found immature eggs in one and was swearing because he thought he'd chopped the wrong bird and got a good layer instead - then he went further and found the testes. Because we both studied biology years ago, we were able to identify the innards and made some interesting discoveries - although our bantams were small, they were remarkably well endowed (bearing in mind, of course, that the testes are all internal). The size was incredible - some were as large as my first thumb joint.

I gave them to my neighbour (the former chook farmer) - he was also a biologist, now retired. He fed these titbits to the magpies on his balcony, which I said was inadvisable. What was that testosterone going to do to the magpies? We did have images of something large and black & white landing on his balcony and saying, "I want my dinner NOW! References to the raptors in Jurassic Park were common.

"There are more strange things in heaven and earth, Horatio..."

And the last rooster we had, did not crow. He was also very tiny (a double handful, fully grown), but very capable. When treading our large Black Orpington, he looked like a jockey on a racehorse...

Marg

[sameold, sameold]

Yeah she is a sight to be seen. She is also from the bantum family. Very feisty. I did read that it is bad luck for a hen to crow but like Janet said we already have our gfg. LOL. It gives us something fun to talk about for awhile.

[Dammit Janet]

We have a lot of chickens and roosters. We used to keep some bantums too for me as a side thing mostly as pets. They looked just like the big ones but tinier.

[donna723]

When we lived in the country and had chickens, we never had a hen that crowed. But we did have a young rooster that would crow the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony! Every single time! Roosters each have their own individual crow and that was his! He'd just open his little beak and out it'd come!

[Big Bad Kitty]

I worked with a guy that told me that I was built like a linebacker.

Same thing?