Brigitte Bowers: Sprucing up for spring, with hens and a rooster

My husband, Matt, likes to make things out of wood. He hand-crafted much of the furniture in our home. He built a 2,000-square-foot shop, almost entirely by himself, to code. He constructed the shed for our goat and pig. These have all been useful, sturdy things.

But he also makes things that have little purpose, and he is prone to binges of fanciful box building.

For about three months a few years ago, I watched as my husband ambled off to his shop every Saturday morning. He’d be gone for hours, and then return. I’d watch him again in the afternoon as he tottered back to the house, his arms laden with a collection of boxes I did not want or need.

“Those are really pretty,” I’d tell him, and the boxes were indeed lovely. “But we already have four of them in the entryway, seven in the playroom, and five in the living room. We don’t really have space for more.”

Crestfallen, he’d look down at his new boxes, all of them too small to hold anything larger than a pair of earrings, and then line them up along the fireplace mantle. I’d leave them there for a few days before moving them to the laundry room, where many of them still remain, exiled in the dark recesses of the same cabinets where I keep Christmas decorations I don’t display but can’t bear to discard.

So I was happy when Matt decided to give up on boxes and finally build the chicken coop I’d been talking about for over a decade. I just wanted another shelter like the one for the goat and pig, but what I got instead was an elaborate coop, designed for orderly egg-laying. It included laying boxes, a perch, a bottom of chicken wire that could be easily mucked out, and two doors, one at either end, for ventilation. Each door could be locked at night for security. The coop was raised on stilts to prevent access by neighborhood foxes, skunks, opossums, and our own dogs.

Matt and I have had hens throughout the years, with always at least one rooster because my father told me once when I was a teenager that hens lay better if a rooster is around, and I forever after believed him. I believed him because we had about 20 hens then, all of them laying double-yokers every morning, and triple-yokers were not unusual.

That was also the period of the malevolent leghorn rooster. He had developed a homicidal loathing of my paternal grandmother, who lived in a trailer on a clearing below our house. Her front door faced our living room window, and I could observe her when, every day around noon, she stood at the threshold and peered out, looking for the rooster. Then she emerged, a baseball bat in hand, and made her way down the steps, thinking that perhaps this one time, finally, the rooster had forgotten about her, or, even better, had been eaten by a passing coyote.

But then the rooster would appear from under the trailer and run at her, leaping onto her shoulders and pecking at her lavender-tinted hair. She could not, of course, club the rooster while he was on her head, and so she always ran toward our house, screaming for help, the rooster riding her shoulder and pecking away. The time came, eventually, when the rooster ran out of luck and my grandmother saw him before he saw her. Her power and accuracy were admirable. She batted the rooster across the yard, and he never got up again.

So, even though I already knew something about the violent inclinations of roosters when my husband and I first moved into our house 22 years ago, we nevertheless acquired a bantam rooster and named him Gaucho. Gaucho was a fine pet at first. He enjoyed being picked up and carried around. He crowed every morning and throughout the day, a low, melodious crow that was more song than random noise. And he was beautiful, as bantams are, with multi-colored wings of red, green, and orange that shimmered as he strutted about the yard.

At night, Gaucho roosted in the drake elm in our yard and avoided, somehow, the murderous intent of our dogs. But Gaucho eventually became territorial. When I entered the pen to feed the chickens, I had to carry a stick. Gaucho would run at me, his feathers puffed up, intent on attack. No matter how many times I thwacked him with the stick, Gaucho did not learn that attacking humans was a foolish pastime. It was during one of these encounters that I remembered my grandmother’s war with the leghorn and realized that, all of these years later, I had become just like her.

We have had other roosters over the years, each of them savage in varying degrees, but I have always liked the sound of a rooster in the morning. I like it enough, in fact, that in the past I was willing to endure the possibility of attack every time I entered the chicken pen. It is a little like the relationship between Inspector Clouseau and Cato. A territorial rooster keeps me alert.

But I suspect the real reason I am inclined to raise roosters is that I don’t want to let my dad down. He believed roosters were necessary for optimal laying, and I want him to have been right. What if I don’t keep a rooster and our hens lay double-yokers every day?

And so, now that it is spring and time to spruce up the chicken coop and acquire new chickens once again, I must ponder the wisdom of purchasing another rooster. Am I still nimble enough to prevail in battle? Is my vision clear enough to espy a rooster aiming toward me, bent on assault?

In the end, I have decided to stock up only on hens this year. I envision them clucking peacefully as they roam about the pen, and retiring dutifully every evening to the coop my husband built. I will lock them in and they will sleep. In the morning I will let them out once again, and then I will extract their single-yoke eggs from the laying boxes.

This story was originally published March 20, 2015 at 5:00 PM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: Sprucing up for spring, with hens and a rooster."