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Call of the Wild

This morning, about half an hour before sunrise, I perched on a concrete block next to the chicken house with one eye on my chickens eating their scratch and the other on the eastern horizon in the charming act of blushing. Far off in the distance I heard the call of a Canada goose and looked up to see a mini-V of just four geese flying toward us from the northeast.

Flying Canada Geese

“Here come your wild cousins,” I said to the girls. As the tiny formation drew closer, one of the honkers honked again, much louder this time. In complete synchrony, as if from a collective consciousness, the chickens stretched their necks to full length, a posture of total alertness, and began to sing in unison, a high-pitched trilling I’d never heard from them before. The sound was like a choir of Spanish-speaking sopranos stuck on a rolled “R.” They kept it up for ten or twenty seconds, and the longer it continued, the more wild and unearthly it sounded to me.

Neither the posture nor the song seemed characterized by a sense of alarm, but rather by a heightened awareness, a reflexive response to the call of the wild. I imagined it was something like the inchoate feeling I sometimes get when I remember something I didn’t know I knew, something seemingly ancient. The wild geese called and the chickens were compelled to answer from a store of primitive memory that preceded their domestication. How far back in time might this primitive connection go?

Modern-day chickens and wild geese are now of two separate orders (Galliformes, land fowl, and Anseriformes, water fowl), but this split did not occur until approximately 90 million years ago. How deep in the brain do such evolutionary memories reside? When my chickens heard the geese, did they tap into a foggy fragment of 90 million year old instinct?

Did they remember when they could fly for longer than 13 seconds and actually look kind of graceful doing so?

chicken trying to fly

The Moulting Season for Waterfowl

Promptly after the termination of the breeding season both ducks and geese moult their winter plumage. The moulting period generally begins about the middle of the month of June and continues for five or six weeks. Geese usually undergo their moult more rapidly than do ducks and, moreover, the new coat of feath­ers acquired by them is of a more permanent nature; that is, good for the ensuing year. The wing feath­ers are the first to be shed and it is remarkable how quickly a new com­plement of flight feathers are de­veloped. After the wings, the tail and body feathers follow and as a rule by the first of August the moult is completed.

muscovy-duck

With ducks, this process is not quite so simple. The first moult after the breeding season is a sort of temporary one for the male of most breeds of domestic ducks, although, where the plumage of both sexes is alike this temporary moult is not readily discernible. Still, it is, never­theless, a fact that the drakes in all domestic breeds, save the Muscovy, take on plumage closely resembling that of the female during the sum­mer months, regardless of the plu­mage similarities of the two sexes during the breeding season. However, this change is especially noticeable in breeds of the Rouen color pattern, where much of the iri­descent plumage of the drake is replaced with the more somber penciled feathers of the female. The lustrous green head and neck become brown, the claret breast and finely penciled gray flanks are exchanged for more heavily penciled dull brown feathers while the curling sex feathers dis­appear entirely for the time being.

But the Rouen is not the only breed in which this period of un­dress is conspicuous. The Buff drake’s seal brown head fades into a light fawn and the Penciled Run­ner drake becomes scarcely distinguishible from his mate, as does also the Blue Swedish drake.

The moulting season is a very criti­cal one for waterfowl. The old coat of feathers is shed so suddenly and the new ones grown so rapidly that the constitution of the specimen is severely taxed. The result is many birds, not in prime condition, just before shedding their plumage, fail to survive the added strain put upon the system. Oscar Grow

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