Bye bye Dietrich

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

I didn’t post about it at the time because I was too upset, but the Cuckoo Marans bird in the foreground of the photograph above did, after all, turn out to be a cockerel.

We’d named him Dietrich, which seemed an entirely acceptable name regardless of gender, and had him for about four months living with us. He started to develop different physical characteristics to the other Cuckoo Marans: a longer set of wattles (the dangly bits under the beak), and a bigger comb (the bit on top). But despite asking in various forums, nobody could say for certain that she was, in fact, a he—until the morning he started jumping on every hen in the run, still too young to really know what he was doing, but providing us with enough evidence to confirm his gender as not being acceptable in the long run to neighbours in an urban area.

Both my beloved and I were devastated, as Dietrich was growing up to be a stunningly beautiful bird. We had to act quickly, and so in the end he had to go back to the breeder who we really didn’t want any more dealings with. We came away with a hen said to be his and his sister’s mother, and have probably been done over again in respect of the fact that she hasn’t apparently laid any eggs at all since she raised her babies. The breeder told us a hen can go off lay for many months after raising a brood, but I for one have my doubts. She may have simply palmed us off with a duff hen where egg-laying is concerned, or so I thought—but since her arrival in our garden, she may well be responsible for a number of small chocolate-mottled eggs that have appeared in the nesting boxes.

My beloved says Mother Marans—as she is now known—was probably crossing her legs for months, surrounded as she was by randy cockerels! If she is laying, it says something very positive about the conditions we keep our girls in as opposed to the conditions Mother Marans previously had to cope with. An unhappy hen will lay eggs, it’s a fact of biology—but they can, under certain circumstances, stop. Usually it’s a sign of age or poor health, or after a shock or relocation. But I’ve never before heard of adult hens going off lay for many months after raising chicks. And there must be a reason for her starting to lay again as soon as she left that farm.

I’m glad to have been able to rescue her from less-than-ideal conditions, even though it meant Dietrich returning to them. I so didn’t want that to happen. I’m still mystified that Mother Marans was the breeder’s last remaining Cuckoo Marans hen. How can you be a breeder of a particular bird type, and get to the point where you’re letting your last hen go? But it was, most definitely, her last—we saw no others. Lots of Orpingtons, lots of crosses, a ton of cockerels. But no Cuckoo Marans other than  one boy (two, of course, after we left that fateful day), Dietrich’s brother. He was considerably larger but nowhere near as good-looking, appearing fat and with dull feathers.

It showed us in the starkest terms of contrast what a difference the type of feed you provide makes to a bird’s overall appearance and physical condition. His brother was likely on fatty, non-organic feed. Dietrich enjoyed organic corn and pellets during his time with us, so had better musculature and a far prouder way of holding himself. He went into a pen with other cockerels, and seemed happy enough when we left him—he made a number of funny, decidedly male, noises we’d never heard before, did a little dance we’d never seen before, and strode off without a goodbye. But hey, he’s a chicken—we can’t hold that against him!

Whether he ends up on someone’s table, I can’t say and don’t want to know, but the chances are he will be around for a while yet as the breeder says she sometimes gets calls from people asking specifically for cockerels of this or that breed for breeding, not for the table. And part of her problem is that she has way too many cockerels running around, so it struck me on this visit, same as our last, that the breeder isn’t inclined to readily kill her male birds at the drop of a hat.

If we lived in the countryside, on a farm, Dietrich would have stayed with us. But all cockerels are noisy, at the least favourable times, and we would have made no friends by keeping him in a town garden. The nightmare may not be over yet: of the four hens we got from that breeder, one has so far turned out to be a cockerel but there are now question marks over one of the Buff Orpingtons, made even muddier by the fact that one of them is a so-called pure-breed, the other a cross with a Marans. So the developmental differences between the two birds may be down to different genes, not genders.

If it turns out we have another cockerel, that’s two out of four, and that’s wholly indefensible on the part of the breeder. It’s not simply bad luck on our part, it’s bad animal husbandry. Different breeds should be kept in different pens if you’re actually breeding birds. They shouldn’t be running everywhere in a free-for-all in which any cockerel can jump on any hen.

Next year my beloved has decided he’d like to raise some Faverolles from eggs, as many of the bird breeds we now have running around our garden are known to get broody often, and easily. You just get the eggs of the breed you want, and stick ‘em under a broody hen. Okay, there’s slightly more to it all than that, but you’ve got the gist! The thing is, Faverolles are auto-sexing, which means you can tell when they hatch which are male, which are female. And my hubby has confirmed he’s willing to humanely cull the male chicks (I could never do it, but it’s over in seconds, apparently). It’s that, or we have a friend who may take them off our hands and raise them for the table but we know will do so with the highest regard for animal welfare.

I remain unsure about the whole prospect. We would find it upsetting whichever option is decided upon, my partner most of all, but it is better to cull a tiny chick than palm the males off to people looking for hens, that’s for sure. And it’s a simple, harsh fact of biology that there are always too many cockerels. That, and if I were to continue buying in hens, I would simply be ignoring the realities of poultry-keeping—as in, look at all the pretty hens, think of all the lovely eggs, don’t even think about what happens to the boys.

I don’t know if blind-siding oneself is a particularly healthy approach to keeping birds. Female-only groups of hens are, of course, fundamentally unnatural and, I must admit, that fact sits as uncomfortably with me as the notion of eating fertilised eggs that haven’t had a chance to develop. But I always have to bear in mind, we give a kind and gentle home to our hens. Not all hens, let alone cockerels, are as lucky.

We’ll see. I will probably try to cultivate dowsing skills, to identify male from female eggs. If my great-aunt could do it, with, I am told by my mum, a 100 per cent success rate, maybe I can learn to do that as well. But if it were easy, wouldn’t everyone do it?

categories: animals, home farmer