THE THREE TENORS

But who rules the roost?

MOST hen pens have a cockerel who will control the birds and literally rule the roost. Well more by accident than design I somehow ended up with three of them when I began to collect the rare breed Scots Dumpys and while each displays quite different characteristics you can set your watch by them.

The Adhan - Islamic call to prayer

 In fact I was quite amused when scientists recently concluded that cockerels will instinctively crow at the same time every day regardless of whether they can see dawn breaking or not - this is great for me as a Muslim living in the Scottish Borders. Yes we are a bit of a rare breed too and with the nearest mosque being around 50 miles away, it is unlikely I will ever hear the call to prayer from Edinburgh. Plus most mosques in the UK are banned from allowing the call to be made unlike in most Muslim countries where a cacophony of calls to prayers known as The Adhan can reverberate across towns and cities.

 So thanks to my three cockerels I don't need to set my clock for the dawn prayer, known as Fajr which is the first of five daily prayers offered by practising Muslims. My 'three tenors' wake me up with their voluminous cock-a-doodle-doos every morning regardless of the weather.

Napoleon & Josephine

 But let's return to my feathered friends. As I say they are all quite different and the oldest is, I believe, Napoleon who came to me from Northampton with his soul mate Josephine. He was not the first rooster but he is, without doubt, the alpha male in the group and set about asserting his authority with all the hens on the day he arrived. Despite his duties as lead rooster, Napoleon and Josephine share the same cree every night and are inseparable on an evening.

 Napoleon is black and has a superb scarlet comb (the red bit on top of his head) and a magnificent pair of wattles (the two dangly bits below his chin). He often shakes his head and shows off his wattles and the whole performance is known as "tidbitting" and is designed to attract the other hens, which it does.

 This had a salutory effect on the light cuckoo-coloured rooster Horatio, hatched in a hen house in the Isle of Wight last June, who was ruler of the roost until Napoleon arrived. Poor Horatio has some catching up to do but I think the arrival of another, more senior rooster, has knocked his confidence.

 And just when he thought things couldn't get worse they did when Jumpin' Jack crashed onto the scene from leafy Cheshire. Despite being younger than Horatio he bounces around the pen on his long legs producing an annoying swagger. The perfect bred Scots Dumpy is supposed to have very short legs and a boat-like shape which almost causes it to waddle as it makes its way around, but JJ's long-legged defect doesn't seem to concern him at all.

 Not only does he spend his day ducking and diving out of the way of the other two roosters, it appears the majority of hens don't like him either and get quite aggressive when he comes a courting ... in the poultry world it's called treading! He's very pushy and has already had a downward effect on egg production because his unwanted and unwelcome attention has upset some of the hens.

 I am getting another coup built and I think that JJ will have to move out for a while to give the hens some breathing space.

 In the meantime here are my three roosters giving their best cock-a-doodle-doos for the camera - first up is JJ, followed by Horatio and last but not least Napoleon with a tidbitting demo as well. Which one do you think excels? And if you are a poultry expert any advice would be gratefully received in the interests of maintaining harmony among my chooks.

Scots Dumpys ... the unsung heroes of the Scottish nation

A new Scottish emblem?

Stately: A Scots Dump cockerel

THE first occupants of my smallholding came from an endangered species of hens called Scots Dumpys and, as their name suggests, they originate from Scotland and have a history stretching back to 900AD.
 They were in danger of becoming extinct in the last century and are still on a watch list by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.
 Legend has it that because of their excellent hearing they were used by the Celts and the Picts in Scotland to raise the alarm if would-be invaders pitched up over the border from England. The hens would send out high-pitched clucking sounds if they felt in danger and the tell-tale crunch of a stranger treading on a distant bunch of thistles, which still grow in abundance, would be enough to raise the alarm. I'm told this is why the thistle became an emblem of Scotland but I would've thought if that was the case, then the Dumpy should also have been equally acknowledged.
 The Americans have their Bald Eagle so why not have the Dumpy as the country's bird? Perhaps it is a suggestion I can make to Scotland's First Minister and SNP leader Alex Salmond in the run up to the independence referendum.
 My little bunch certainly know how to raise a racket if disturbed although sometimes I think they do it deliberately just to see me running outside waving my hockey stick ... happily I've not encountered any Border raiders although an overly inquisitive hen harrier caused consternation the other day by hovering overhead.
 My first Dumpys, known as The Originals, came from a chicken house on the Isle of Wight and were all cuckoo coloured comprising of seven hens and one cockerel called Horatio. They all hatched on June 7 2012 and I took possession of them in the August. Shortly afterwards they were joined by Beryl and Ruby, two very aloof black Dumpys from Halifax and two more, Napoleon (pictured above right) and Josephine, came from Northampton. By September I had four more cuckoo-coloured birds from Cheshire known as The Newbies  - Maisy, Daisy, Little Dorrit and Jumping Jack.
 Their names reflect their characters but perhaps the most loving and giving were The Newbies; they were certainly the most affectionate, enjoyed being handled, and the first to produce eggs which they did from mid-December on an almost daily basis and with great pride. Occasional visitors to the hen pen love The Newbies, with the exception of Jack but I'll deal with him another time.

St Boswell's research centre

 Just a few days ago I noticed Maisy climbing into a nesting box and she looked fine but several hours later she was dead. I still can not believe it because everything seemed so normal that day. I took her body to an animal laboratory in nearby St Boswells to get a post mortem examination done in the hope of establishing the cause of death. The staff are really friendly and  incredibly efficient - I suppose they have to be because if livestock go down everyone needs to know if the cause is a serious disease like foot and mouth or something similar. Within 24 hours I had the answer - Maisy had succumbed to egg yolk peritonitus which in human terms is similar to an ectopic pregnancy. Sadly she didn't show any of the symptoms I've since looked up on Google so I'm not sure anything could've been done to save her.

 What I do have is a video clip taken a few weeks back of Maisy after she'd been bathed and shampooed (my hens love their spa day as I will show you in future postings) - and, as you can hear we were sitting listening to Prime Minister's Question Time on Radio 4 in the kitchen when she laid an egg just before David Cameron was ambushed by Bradford West's Respect MP George Galloway over the situation in Mali..
 This little clip is my tribute to a wonderful hen and her brief, but happy life.