Free Ranging: An Honorary Rare Bird

Jon Carroll of The San Francisco Chronicle, posted a wondrous piece in '05 on The Unitarian Jihad (sent to us by alert friend and Follower Octopus of The Swash Zone).  Excerpt:

"Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States! Too long has your attention been waylaid by the bright baubles of extremist thought. Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions (except Buddhism -- 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism subcommittee) made your head hurt. Too long have you been buffeted by angry people who think that God talks to them. You have a right to your moderation! You have the power to be calm! We will use the IED of truth to explode the SUV of dogmatic expression!

People of the United States, why is everyone yelling at you??? Whatever happened to ... you know, everything? Why is the news dominated by nutballs saying that the Ten Commandments have to be tattooed inside the eyelids of every American, or that Allah has told them to kill Americans in order to rid the world of Satan, or that Yahweh has instructed them to go live wherever they feel like, or that Shiva thinks bombing mosques is a great idea? Sister Immaculate Dagger of Peace notes for the record that we mean no disrespect to Jews, Muslims, Christians or Hindus. Referred back to the committee of the whole for further discussion."

After he grabbed my highly-distractible attention with that piece (we rare fowl are, indeed, subject to being waylaid by bright baubles), which was posted in '05, Carroll went on to win my fickle fowl heart with today's post entitled Chicken Data Available Here.  He reviews an excellent article in a periodical to which Loulou needs an instant online subscription (Hottie Alert, girls!).

Beefcake

And there are T-Shirts!  We at Hen's Teeth will naturally prefer the Blue t-shirts over the other color.

Carroll waxes ecstatic on Blue Copper Marans and their chocolate colored eggs, on the suburban backyard poultry movement, and on literature for the chicken cognescenti. Be still, my heart: sex, elitist journalism, T-shirts, AND chocolate!

Pondering the iconic question, "Why do hen's cackle?", Carroll writes,

I can see a hen now, ready for her big scene, saying, "OK, what's my motivation here? I cackle, but why do I cackle? Why do I walk from over here to over there? Why do I peck at the ground? Am I hungry? Have I not been fed? I could, of course, run around like a -"

"Don't go there," says the poultry owner, knowing how badly thoughts of predation upset the delicate balance of the coop.

Humans study hens' cackling in order to gain greater insight into their behavior, which is occasionally confusing. Cackling is divided into two groups, "kuks" and "KAAKS." They have a range of frequencies between 1 and 4 kHz. I can pretty much imagine what that range might be, having heard chickens in both vocalization modes.

BTW: The answer to the question "What motivates a hen to make those noises?" is "We don't know, say experts."

Ah, poultry mysticism...a sort of Kackling  Kabal.  


For his deep insight into the lives and loves of a severely underrepresented minority, The Southern Liberal Women/Hen's Teeth, I hereby name journalist Jon Carroll an Honorary Hen's Tooth and present him with the chocolate egg image that he unaccountably could not reproduce for his own column.