Chickens

I stepped over a fence and spotted two landbirds, one large, fluffy rooster with a complex red crown. Wandering close by was a smaller grey hen with feathered cheeks and no crown. The first proclaimed dawn to the world, over and over again, with those unmistakable four syllables that herald himself and the morning. They sound like chickenese for: "He-re-I-come!", which people might understand better by replacing the "I" with "it" (and "come" with "comes"). He takes a few steps, looks around, turns his head and looks again, repeats, flaps his wings, and sings once more. He most often begins his fourth syllable with a slight croak - I wonder if it feels good to always emphasize the last syllable as if one were speaking French. Maybe he is a French rooster.

The gray one doesn't shout - she clucks and croaks. She lets soft, ragged, repeated sounds, as if she were saying "Come to breakfast, everybody. Come on, hurry, it's getting cold", or some other kind of gentle nagging. Even to someone who has never known of chickens, I thought, determining the gender of each bird seems elementary.

I followed the pair up a few stone steps and out a wooden door. They weren't bent on getting away, they just wandered in some direction while clucking and croaking and shouting and flapping and pecking. And I thought of the marvelously complex processes that ensue inside their bodies to keep them upright, to lift up a leg and scratch, to flap their wings, or to cluck. Billions of cells demonstrate astounding teamwork to compose a walking and clucking behemoth fifteen inches tall. And I wondered what the chickens would have to say about that. I guess "cluck cluck".

The distribution of the colored feathers on their bodies was also very noteworthy. Not disparate or random at all - chickens' feathers follow a symmetric, beautiful pattern, each of distinct but similar shape and color to their neighbors, a smoothly changing fat-bird-shaped manifold, on which several fields are defined. The rooster's top-body feathers were striking. A brighter orange than the dark ones below, these weave in broadening, orderly layers from its neck down to its thorax, not unlike the donning of a cardinal (either the bird of the robed clergyman). And iridescent purple feathers rise up the end of its like a sign for any who understands it. Pretty.