Hen Chronicles: They can be soft-spoken . . . or not

When Liz and I acquired Nala, Stella and Snow, I figured their coop and pen would be a relatively quiet place because we did not add a rooster to the mix. Life in a rooster-free zone meant no eggs to incubate, no chicks to raise from scratch and no cock-a-doodle-do at the crack of dawn.

Even without a boisterous male overlord, however, the hens can be a noisy trio - more so than I would have anticipated.

The girls have their softspoken moments. Occasionally. When they settle onto their roost for the night, their barely audible clucking can best be described as a cooing sound. So too, when they have just had their fill of chicken feed they pad around their pen fairly quietly, "speaking" in a gentle undertone that seems to convey a sense of contentment.

But when they believe they’re overdue for a feeding, which is most of the time, they cackle and squawk loudly enough to remind any forgetful owner that it’s chow time. It isn’t so much an angry complaint as an indignant protest, but either way, the sound carries.

I read recently that folks who study such things have identified some two dozen or more different chicken sounds. Just as people sometimes claim that the Inuit have an unusually large number of words for snow, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that chickens (who, near as I can tell, live to eat) have an unusually large number of “words” for one simple message: “feed me.”