Rooster Behavior in Your Backyard Flock

Over the years, my wife Elaine and I have usually kept two or three roosters in separate but adjoining pens. Some males have managed to live alongside one another without much trouble, while others have constantly challenged each other. A few have even developed their own unusual relationships. If you are considering adding one or more roosters to your backyard flock, learning how they behave and interact can help create a more peaceful group while also providing males for breeding and raising chicks.

Dynamics

A good example of rooster hierarchy involved Boss and Johnny, two heritage Rhode Island Red males that arrived as two-day-old chicks. From the very beginning, Boss established himself as the dominant bird. He did not constantly harass Johnny, but there were definite boundaries that Johnny was not permitted to cross. The clearest rule was that Johnny was not allowed to mate with the hens. Whenever he attempted it, Boss immediately appeared and stopped him.

The most unusual part of their relationship was that Johnny never crowed while he was inside the pen. Elaine and I sometimes wondered whether he had once tried to crow when we were not watching and had been punished by Boss. There was no way for us to know whether that had actually happened. What we did know was that Johnny was apparently permitted to crow once he was outside in the yard.

During the evenings, when we allowed the flock to forage in the yard, Elaine generally sat on the front step and watched them. One evening, Johnny walked over to her, settled beside her left side, and began crowing continuously. Boss immediately hurried over to the opposite side of Elaine, positioned himself beside her right shoulder, and started crowing just as persistently.

That became the regular routine during evening foraging. The two roosters would stand on opposite sides of Elaine and engage in what amounted to a crowing contest. We assumed Johnny felt safer with Elaine nearby, while Boss seemed determined to demonstrate that he was still the dominant rooster, regardless of how loudly Johnny protested.

Merciless

About a year later, Boss apparently became sick with some type of illness. One morning, I discovered Johnny standing over him and aggressively pecking and striking at him. I removed Boss from the flock, but he died the following day.

The incident demonstrated just how unforgiving rooster hierarchies can sometimes become. When the social order changes, certain males may aggressively take advantage of an opportunity to move upward in rank, just as Johnny did that morning.

Why Roosters Rumble

Christine Haxton of Troutville, Virginia, keeps around five dozen chickens, including 14 roosters. She has developed a particular appreciation for male chickens through years of watching them.

“I love roosters,” she says. “They have far more personality than hens do, which makes them much more interesting to be around and observe.”

Three Reasons for Brawling

Based on her observations, Haxton believes that roosters generally fight for three primary reasons. Two of the most obvious causes are competition for dominance and competition for hens.

Male chickens can begin displaying aggressive behavior when they are only a few weeks old. These early confrontations are part of the process of establishing the flock’s social hierarchy. Some contests consist of nothing more than prolonged staring. Others involve chest-to-chest pushing, while more intense encounters can include birds jumping at one another and delivering pecks.

A chicken run containing four or five two-month-old cockerels can therefore become a remarkably chaotic environment. As a schoolteacher, I would compare it to a cafeteria filled entirely with 12-year-old boys engaged in a never-ending food fight.

By five or six months of age, young males, or cockerels, are generally ready to begin mating. By that point, the flock hierarchy has usually become much clearer, and most of the fighting has subsided. In our own flock, Elaine and I would normally have already given away or prepared for the table the cockerels we did not want to become future flock leaders.

According to Haxton, the third reason roosters fight is territorial defense. This is also why a rooster may begin crowing after hearing another male somewhere in the distance. In effect, the crowing bird is announcing that he controls the area and that another rooster is not welcome.

“A really good rooster will even crow when a stranger walks or drives down your driveway,” Haxton says. She believes the message is essentially, “This is my yard. Get out of here.”

Most of Haxton’s roosters are gentle and affectionate with her and her family, but their behavior can change when unfamiliar people arrive.

“One of my roosters will even walk up to strangers when they leave their cars and follow them. He has never attacked anybody, and I don’t think he would. What he seems to be saying, though, is, ‘I’ve got my eye on you, so watch it, buster.’”

I have observed virtually the same response at our home. Don, our four-year-old heritage Rhode Island Red rooster, starts crowing whenever someone walks or drives down our driveway. If he recognizes Elaine, me, or our vehicle, he stops. When the person or car is unfamiliar, however, his crowing becomes noticeably more intense after he sees the newcomer.

This territorial instinct is one reason both Haxton and I consider roosters to be remarkably effective backyard watchdogs.

How Many Hens?

Haxton believes that one rooster can comfortably serve approximately 10 hens and considers that a useful ratio for a flock. Healthy males can mate more than 20 times in a single day. When a rooster has only four or five hens available, his repeated mating attempts can wear away feathers and damage the backs of several females.

Haxton also points out that individual hens may receive more attention from a rooster than others. Some females may be more willing to submit to mating, while others may simply be less successful at escaping a persistent male.

Haxton has one particular hen that is especially adept at avoiding a rooster’s advances.

“She almost always remains in the henhouse long after everybody else has gone out,” Haxton explains. “Most roosters want to mate as soon as they come out of the coop in the morning, so that hen avoids the intense chasing and sexual displays that happen every morning.”

Once she eventually leaves the henhouse, she continues monitoring the rooster. If he starts walking toward her, she simply moves somewhere else. If he actually attempts to mount her, she immediately retreats back inside the henhouse.

Based on Elaine’s and my experience, keeping roughly five to seven hens for every rooster can work, although it is less favorable than a ratio of about 10 hens per male. This is particularly true when the rooster is younger than two years old.

Don, for example, still mates more than a dozen times a day, with most of his activity taking place in the evening. In the morning, he makes several less enthusiastic attempts before concentrating on eating and watching Friday, the one-year-old offspring in the neighboring pen.

Friday is much more sexually active than his father and can easily mate about twice as often. That is one major reason Don has only five hens in his enclosure while Friday has eight.

How Adult Roosters Sort Things Out

How adult roosters manage their social relationships depends on several factors, including the individual personalities of the birds involved. Carrie Shinsky of Meyer Hatchery offers an important perspective on the subject.

“Roosters that are raised together will usually have their dominance sorted out, but you have to watch for the less dominant bird being beaten up,” she says. “They need to have space to have their own harems and territory or at least room to get away from each other if they do get harassed.”

Unfortunately, growing up together does not always guarantee peaceful relationships. Sometimes two roosters develop a lasting hostility toward one another.

Orville and Oscar were two heritage Buff Orpingtons that shared the same pen, and their relationship was disastrous despite having been raised together from the beginning. Oscar displayed an unusually strong sex drive from the moment he hatched. On his very first day outside the egg, he performed a mating dance around a chick that was only a few hours old. The young pullet was barely able to stand properly while Oscar was already performing his characteristic rooster shuffle around her.

Oscar became even more aggressive as he matured. He repeatedly chased and pecked Orville throughout the day. Whenever Orville approached a hen, Oscar would attack him.

Those behaviors were already serious, but the final problem was Oscar attempting to mate with hens while they were inside nesting boxes trying to lay their eggs. The hens were frightened of Oscar just as much as Orville was. A rooster displaying that level of aggression toward both flockmates and hens cannot safely remain in the flock.

Don, by contrast, was raised alongside his brother Roger, and the two males never seriously fought. They lived together peacefully, although it was always obvious that Don was the dominant rooster and performed all the mating.

Eventually, Roger was given to our daughter Sarah when she began keeping chickens of her own.

Sparring

If you maintain two separate flocks in neighboring runs, regular rooster confrontations are something you may need to expect. After Oscar was removed, Orville began meeting Don at the central post separating their two pens for battles every morning.

Whichever rooster was released from his coop first would immediately hurry to the post and wait for the other bird to appear.

Once both males had taken their positions, they would stare at one another before repeatedly moving their heads up and down. They would pace side by side, matching each other's movements, and eventually leap toward one another.

These encounters generally lasted around 15 minutes. Afterward, the two roosters would return to their normal activities, including eating and mating with their respective hens.

The dramatic “meet me at the pole” contests continued until Elaine and I eventually gave Orville away after deciding that we wanted to concentrate on raising Rhode Island Reds.

Don's next neighboring rooster was Al. His repeated confrontations with Don eventually convinced us to install an additional layer of green plastic fencing between the two runs, alongside the existing wire barrier.

Al apparently never accepted the fact that Don was both larger and more capable in a fight. One morning, I left for my job as a schoolteacher while the two birds were still fighting well beyond their normal 15-minute morning confrontation.

When I returned home that afternoon, I found Al sitting dazed in a pool of his own blood, with numerous cuts covering his body. Don, on the other hand, had only a tiny injury on one toe.

Adding another physical barrier between neighboring pens can therefore be an important precaution when keeping multiple roosters. Even birds that normally engage in relatively harmless displays can seriously injure one another if their confrontations escalate.

Elaine and I have always enjoyed keeping roosters. Their distinctive personalities, entertaining behavior, and natural tendency to alert the flock to unfamiliar visitors can make them fascinating additions to a backyard flock.