Red, White, and Earl

A never ending source of both amusement and consternation are the three roosters who came to... well, roost... with us this year. For reasons that were never fully clear to me, my husband brought home three roosters from the Mayor's (see post: The Mayor of Mark Haley) house sometime in the spring. They're handsome, cocky fellows.(Boy, I'm on a roll today...) One is a Road Island, dubbed "Red," one might be a Delaware, "White." And then there's "Earl," who might either be a Maran, or a Plymouth Rock. I am almost more clever than I can handle: Earl is actually a mixture of black and white feathers but from a distance, he appears gray. Get it? At any rate, I think they were supposed to eat the ticks in our yard, and maybe they do. But mostly, they strut their stuff around the yard, crow under our windows at ungodly hours, poop all over the patio, and steal the other animals' food. I have a love/hate relationship with these birds. I love to look at them, but most days, I find myself hoping they get run over by one of the speeding trucks that seem to overpopulate our road.

Since it is the eve of Halloween, I'll dedicate the rest of this post to the strange interaction between our roosters and our jack-o-lanterns. Kid number one and I went to Walmart last week, after three solid weeks of being pestered at every grocery store to buy pumpkins, and bought our carvers. There had to be a big "daddy" pumpkin, a fat "mommy" pumpkin, a little "kid-sized" pumpkin, and a "baby" pumpkin. We carved the first two on Monday and Tuesday nights this week. Kid wanted the daddy pumpkin to be a mad face and the mommy one to be a sad face. Psychology? So they were gutted, carved, lit, and set out in accordance with his wishes. The next morning, when I went out to set the garbage out by the road, I witnessed the carnage. The mommy pumpkin had been viciously pecked around it's forelock, teardrop, nose, mouth, and one eye. At first, I was inclined to be annoyed, but the more I looked at it, the more Halloween-appropriate it seemed. So I chalked it up to chicken art.

But why did the rooster peck the mommy pumpkin so badly, but only give the daddy pumpkin one good shot below one eye? Is even the spirit of daddy so intimidating?

Postscript: Since the writing of this post, Earl has gone to the great corn patch in the sky. And we still don't know exactly why the chicken crossed the road, but he did not get to the other side.