Cock-A-Doodle

I just finished reading a blog post about a population explosion of ducks in Phoenix that started with a couple of ducklings that a family had given their children at Easter and then dumped at the neighborhood pond when they grew too big.  Now there are wild ducks mixed among them and duck poop everywhere.
http://lifewithbeck.blogspot.com/2010/09/daffy-update.html.

That reminded me of the rooster that hung out in our shrubbery about ten years ago.  He was very handsome but very wary of us.  We started calling him Cock-A-Doodle.  We heard from the next door neighbor that a family a couple of blocks over had given their children chicks at Easter and either allowed Cock-A-Doodle to escape or dumped him when they moved.

He seemed to be pretty savvy and managed to survive in the canyon for about a year.  We worried about him because we occasionally have coyotes that sweep through the canyon and eat anything they can catch, including neighborhood cats, ground squirrels and other small critters, but Cock-A-Doodle was able to avoid them successfully.  He lived on seed from the next-door neighbor's bird feeder and we put out seed for him, too.  Every now and then he would strut through our back yard, scratching and eating insects.

Although he was very beautiful, he was, after all, a rooster.  That meant he started crowing when it started getting light, although he often didn't wait until the sun came up but started crowing when the lights from the traffic on the freeway at the bottom of the canyon started picking up, sometimes as early as 2 a.m.  And roosters have no snooze button.

One day we found the neighbors had had enough of the crowing and had asked a man to trap Cock-A-Doodle.  The man had hens but he wanted a rooster, too.  He brought a cage with a hen in it to trap Cock-A-Doodle, but the cage was evidently too small and they couldn't get him in the trap with the hen, so they gave it up for the day.  For the rest of that day Cock-A-Doodle strutted around the yard, crowing at the top of his lungs every few minutes.  We could imagine he was crowing, "There was a HEN here!  And I almost got together with her!"

The neighbors hadn't said anything to us ahead of time about trapping him and when we found out, they told us they were going to withhold bird seed so that he would be hungry when they tried again the next day.  We were determined that if he went into the trap, it wouldn't be for hunger, but because he wanted the companionship of the hens, so we put out seed and water for him as usual.

The next day when we got home, the neighbors told us that the guy brought a bigger trap, again with a hen in it, and that he had barely unloaded it from the truck and opened the trap door before Cock-A-Doodle raced in the door to be with the hen.  So that was O.K. with us--he went because he wanted to be with the hens, not because he was hungry.

We miss catching glimpses of him in the shrubbery, but we're hoping he lived a long and happy life with his harem of hens.