Book Entry 82: 1969 The Rooster Attack

In my opinion if you’re going to have a rooster you need to have two.  One will crow occasionally but if there are two they will try to “out crow” one another.  I’ve even been known to hide beside the coop or in the backyard and crow too just to get them started.  I had many hours of fun playing with and watching our chickens.  Nothing is cuter than watching a mother hen teaching her new chicks to hunt and peck for food and to hide under her skirt of feathers when she calls to them.

 

As it happens we got to the point where our fifteen chickens were laying fifteen eggs a day.  There was just Larry and me to eat the eggs.  We had scrambled eggs, boiled egg, and fried eggs.  We had potato salad with eggs, egg salad, and egg sandwiches.  Out of desperation I searched for recipes calling for eggs.  I found angel food cake.  Who would think angel food cake could be an answer to prayer!  An angel food cake recipe calls for twelve large egg whites!  I figured our eggs to be small and medium size so I used fifteen egg whites in each cake.  I would use the yolks of the eggs in scrambled eggs or meatloaf or feed it to our cats.  I never wasted any eggs.

Along with all our sandwiches, salads, and breakfast eggs I now added angel food cake to our list of bountiful foods.  Larry kept a small garden which provided many vegetables for our table.  We would get a good deal from a farmer friend occasionally and split a cow for our freezers with Del and Alpha.  And we had eggs.  Boy, did we have eggs!

I remember being in the coop gathering eggs into my apron one morning.   Everything was going as it did every morning.  Most of the chickens had laid their eggs in the cubby hole nests Larry had build for them.  Those nests were easy to reach.  A few chickens always tried to build nests on the floor for their eggs so while they weren’t hard to reach it was a little difficult to bend down without banging the eggs in my apron into one another causing cracks. 

           Sometimes I felt bad for the chickens when they would argue and half-heartedly peck at me as if to say they wanted to keep their eggs and “sit” on them and hatch them.  Usually the chickens let me reach under them and take the eggs without much confrontation aside from the cackling.

I was finishing up my morning collection from the floor nests when it happened.  All of the sudden our big red rooster attacked me.  He was not an Araucona, he was a Rhode Island Red and he was really big!  He had talons on his feet and was jumping up throwing all his weight onto my legs.  I have no idea what set him off.  I hadn’t done anything I didn’t do every morning.  I had all the eggs in my apron which I began throwing at him and screaming in self defense.  I was really scared.

 Every time I threw an egg at him that rooster seemed bigger.  By the time I made my way out of the coop and pulled the door behind me he looked like a fifty pound bird instead of his actual four – five pounds.

 

I didn’t get a single egg to the house that day!  Larry happened to be in the shop and heard me screaming.  When I told him about the rooster and showed him my bleeding legs he grabbed his hatchet and went straight to the coop and procured our dinner!  I’m glad to say that fried chicken (rooster) dinner was excellent!  I enjoyed every bite!