A Gallo for our Gallina

Yesterday, the friend who gave us the beautiful girl chicken last week brought us a rooster to create a matched set. The rooster is not as pretty as the hen, but is still quite attractive. I don't know chickens, but I think he is a different kind of chicken than she is. Currently he is smaller than she, but I imagine he is just younger.

The first meeting of this newly created couple was inauspicious, as the female (whose name, by the way, has been upgraded from "Beauty" to "Gorgeous") immediately attempted to murder her prospective spouse. Being rather larger than he, she cornered him and pecked at him unmercifully, while he cowered.

"Handsome," the rooster, was rescued from the chicken coop, and peacefully slumbered for several hours in a large cardboard box in a corner of the kitchen, until one of the cats joined him in the box. We discovered that roosters can cover a significant distance in a directly vertical direction, when necessary. His velocity and altitude even freaked out the cat, but not as much as the cat freaked out Handsome, apparently! Handsome ran around the kitchen, bawking, and he kept seeing his reflection in the oven door and trying to run into the other chicken he saw there. I have no idea what the motivation for this could have been. Really.

Eventually, Handsome calmed down and found a new hiding place. We have a long, narrow table along one wall of the kitchen, which has a shelf just above floor level, and the largest cooking pots reside on that shelf (hidden under the tablecloth). The rooster perched up on the rim of one of the pots, totally hidden from sight, and stayed there all day.

At around dusk everyday, Gorgeous leaves the chicken coop (she can scramble up the wire and fly out over the top of the wire when she feels like it) and comes to visit us in the house. When we return her to the coop, she settles into her house for the night. It's like a bedtime ritual now. Just before Gorgeous was due to arrive in the house, Handsome came out from under the table and began to check out the rest of his surroundings. We shooed Handsome out of the house, and he hid under a table on the porch, which is currently surrounded by empty cardboard boxes (waiting to be knocked down and stored for future use). When Gorgeous came for her afternoon visit, we chased her out of the house as well, and she decided to hide under the same table.

We didn't know where they both were, until slightly later, when we wanted to move them to the comparative safety of their coop for the night. Christopher found them. He said, "I can't tell in the dark, but it looks like one of them is huddled in the corner, and the other is stalking back and forth under there." Yes, that would be Handsome and Gorgeous. Talk about a hen-pecked husband!


We put them both back into the chicken coop, and they settled into the house together for the night. This morning, they seem to be able to get along without threatening and cowering. We shall see. It could be the start of a beautiful relationship.