The Choir in Our Yard

Or you could sometimes call it a cacophony.  Between the "lovely" honking/beeping/screeching noises of these guys and girls:

Excepting, of course, Charles

And the full body QUACK from these ladies (not so much the gentlemen):

There are, of course, the roosters.  Ah....the crowing of the roosters.  Maybe you remember this post, when I caught them on "tape".   and you could hear all of them-some with lovely voices, some without.

Copernicus, with an alto crow:

Peter, with a mezzo-soprano crow:

Albert with his high soprano:

and Henry, with his Tarzan impression:

Oh wait, that was Albert again.  They look the same.  Sorry.

So lovely.  But now, we have another member to the choir.  Beethoven.

Isn't he a handsome man?  I can't wait to see how he's going to turn out.  You might remember Beethoven better from here.  He was called Sparrow at the time, as we didn't know the sex of him yet.  Happily, he is the only roo out of the four chicks that Fat Black hatched out for us in July.  We've known he was a roo for many weeks now.  He got his sickle feathers really fast and he just reddened up weeks before the girls.  It was an easy call on his part--he gave us lots of clues.

So though we've known for forever he was a roo, he hadn't sung.  But today he did for the first time.  I've been waiting.  He's a funny boy; he sits on my shoulder when I call all the chickens/ducks/geese for dinner.  He pecks the food in the bucket until I pour it into the trough.  Luckily he's an Ameraucana, so he won't get too big.  It would be something to carry a 10 pound rooster on my shoulder.  At 7 pounds, he should be a handful, but hopefully he'll still fit.  He's a buddy of mine, and I like having him (except when he has poopy feet).

Five roosters it is.  For right now, Beethoven has only crowed once, and it was the crow of an immature rooster.  But he'll keep practicing, and he'll get better, and then we'll see where he fits into the choir that is in our yard.