Revelations

Sometimes while you're travelling down the dusty path of life you are given certain truths. You take for granted what someone tells you, what you've heard or think you remember. You can go about your business knee deep in falsehoods and never even know it if you never bother to glance at your feet.

Recently, I discovered a falsehood. A mistake if you will. Though this wasn't intentional or sneaky or sly it opened my eyes to the realization that there are still some things I take soul deep for granted, just because a stranger told me so. And just so much I still don't know.

In my last post I invited you to meet the girls of our backyard flock. I have to apologize to you for passing on the misconception in the title post.

Coco is in fact not a girl. A new truth we learned three nights ago when we awoke to a distinct cock-a-doodle-do at five in the morning. That glorious crow opened our eyes to other behaivor and traits in our dear Coco that are very blatantly male.

Her...I mean his comb is quite a bit larger than the others. He pushes out his neck feathers into a mane when he's scared, fighting or irritated. He's quite a sight bigger (and always has been) than the girls. He's got beautiful green hued black tail feathers much longer than the other three. His feet are enormous. And then there was the tell-tale crowing which repeated this morning.

We did not want roos for a specific reason (mainly that we can only have 4 chickens in the city but agression was also a factor) so all these signs of testosterone have been ignored because I was ignorant of what a rooster really does and is. Being a first time chicken owner and not wanting roosters I never researched roosters, I had no idea of their behaivor and looks. I took the word of the feed store (and the extra pricing to have a sexed group of chickens) as an unfailable truth. But human chicken sexers are not free from error. No one is.

There really isn't much to do about it at this point. If we had discovered she was a he earlier we would probably have just sent him off to freezer camp, but for the past four months we've repeatedly told the kids these four would not be eaten. I would like to at least keep one truth in tact.