The other night I was woken up around 2 a.m. by what I thought was someone screaming the name "Rachel". You know, that high-pitched, drawn-out scream like you are looking for someone lost in the woods. It didn't help that I was not sleeping well since I heard hunting rifle shots earlier in the evening. (I'm hoping someone was hog hunting, but more likely they were shining deer. Welcome to life in the rural south.)
So I'm lying in bed, in a sleepy-foggy-stupor, trying to locate the general direction of the screams. I'm also wondering why the dog is not doing her usual low pitched growl whenever she picks up the scent of imaginary threats. And after a few more screams, coming from the general direction of the barn and back side of the property, I realize its not a person but rather a rooster producing this ruckus in the middle of the night. Forget cock-a-doodle-do, this rooster usually sounds more like "ER-ur-RUUUR!", and in this situation it was using the first syllable to warm-up the vocal cords and throwing all the effort into the second and third.
Which then begs the question, why the heck would a rooster be crowing at 2 a.m.? Unfortunately this is far from a solitary episode. There are nights when I hear them crowing about the time I'm going to bed, a few other times I've heard them around 2 a.m. if I'm having trouble sleeping. This was starting to remind me of those old Dr. Pepper commercials about 10-2-4, except during night time hours. And with winter solstice less than a month away, first light is somewhere around 5:45 and sunrise around 6:30 a.m. Tonight the alpha-male even threw in a few crows for good measure when I turned on the barn lights at 6 p.m. to evening chores, about an hour and a half after sunset.
Back to the original question, why the heck would a rooster be crowing at 2 a.m.? Yes, I do have one of those rural yard/security lights on the end of the barn, but very little of that light reaches the chicken coop. And it happens regardless of the phase of the moon so I can't blame that. It seems to only be one or two birds that are the culprits of this cacophony. When the alpha-male crowed tonight, it was the same pitch and tone as what I usually hear during other night-crowing sessions.
Being the educated person I'm supposed to be, I run a Google Scholar search. And I try extension.org. And still not having found the answer I do a regular Yahoo! search and find myself on the forum page of backyardchickens.com. Good news, I'm not the only one with weird roosters. Bad news, any disturbance can seem to cause this.
So when my friend butt-dialed me from a concert around 10:30 one night last week and I blamed her for waking the birds and causing them to start crowing? Maybe that wasn't so far from the truth after all.
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