If he senses a problem, he will quickly signal the hens to run for cover. And often he will run for cover while he is calling to the hens! The feet and spurs on a full-grown rooster are his lethal weapons. They are quite dangerous if they want to be, and a rooster attack on your own property should not be accepted. Roosters that attack other chickens is also unacceptable. The behavior can be tamed. Aggressive roosters are dangerous to you and the other animals on the farm.
A well-behaved rooster will have the talons and spurs ready to use to defend the flock if a chicken predator invades the area. Often a rooster will sacrifice himself as he defends the hens. It is sad to see, but that is the nature of it. We like having multiple roosters on our farm for this reason.
They will step up and defend the flock if we are not around. The optimal ratio, to avoid over mating the hens and wear from treading, is eight to 12 hens per rooster for regular and heavy breed chickens. If your rooster has to service a lot of hens, the fertility rate for the fertilized eggs may be low. If you have too many roosters in the flock, fertility might be low due to the infighting between the roosters. Crowded conditions, stress, old age, weather, injuries, low nutrition, and age of the breeding hens and roosters all affect the fertility of the eggs.
Some farmers will rotate roosters or groups of hens among more than one rooster. Chickens often have pecking order disputes. The two bean-shaped testes are located high in the abdominal cavity near the backbone in front of the kidney.
Sperm are produced in the lining of these ducts. During active mating, the testes shrink during days with less light and grow regularly when daylight hours increase. The testes do more than produce sperm. They also produce the hormones that influence mating, male behavior, the size of the tail feathers, the spurs on the insides of their feet, and the red wattles beneath their chins. Yes, a rooster will mate with all the hens. Even if the rooster is a different breed or size. A rooster can usually mate with hens comfortably.
Chickens do not need to mate to lay eggs. Hens will lay eggs whether a rooster is around or not. A hen only needs a rooster if you want the eggs to be fertilized to hatch baby chicks. Young roosters known as cockerels will reach sexual maturity between 4 and 5 months old. At this age, the rooster begins producing sperm. Roosters remain fertile for several years but as they age the quality of sperm the rooster produces starts to decrease.
Chickens are polygamous and do not mate for life. This is the opposite of certain species of birds such as Swans that do mate for life. A hen and rooster must mate before the egg is formed. If the rooster and hen have mated, and she lays an egg afterward the egg should be fertilized.
A single copulation of hen and rooster could produce up to 14 fertilized eggs over this two-week period. If you are buying eggs from a grocery store they are not usually fertilized. I made that name up, but this move is commonly referred to as: the wing drag, wing drop or wing flicking. The Two-step In conjunction with the wing drag, a rooster will often dance in a circle, trying to position himself behind her to assume the mating position.
Tidbitting Picking up actual or pretend morsels of food while calling the hen over to investigate is the oldest trick in the book. With apologies to Hasbro and my daughters whose Play Doh I pirated for this illustration, I present you with a rudimentary model of the rooster reproductive system. Parts are not to scale. It looks like a small bump and is not at all similar in form or function to a penis except to the extent that semen exits through it.
The rooster gets into position, which resembles a piggy-back ride, standing on her back, holding her neck feathers with his beak and steadying himself with his feet.
This activity is known as treading. If hens required a rooster in order to lay, few suburbanites would be able to keep chickens. And, if birds produced liquid urine coops would quickly become smelly and need frequently cleaning.
Far fewer suburbanites would be willing to do much more coop cleaning and simply not keep hens. So, these simple adaptations meet several needs. Skip to content How Do Chickens Mate? Imagine the future of suburban chickens if a hen had to have a rooster present to lay eggs.
One rooster will easily keep eight to a dozen hens fertile. Privacy Policy Terms.
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