Baby Roosters

Years ago my husband and I were busy working on our land deep in the Appalachian mountains and I heard the strangest sound. I stopped hoeing for a moment and there it was again! Then again and again and each time it sounded different. I finally asked my husband if he heard it. He listened and then laughed and said:  "Those are our baby roosters trying to learn how to crow." What strange sounds they made each trying to "get it right."  Most people have baby hens, but we ended up with 19 baby roosters. There was an ad in the local farmers paper advertising baby Silver Laced Wyandotte chickens in the next county. Thinking this could be a good surprise for my husband who had built a "state of the art" chicken coup, I found a large box and drove off filled with excitement. Naturally, I did not know the next county very well and drove around the mountain curves, looking for the farm. I kept going past stores that "were no more" and old tobacco barns still being used. Living deep in the Appalachians you will go back a little bit in time as you will still see men plowing with mules and drinking pure spring water. Ripping around those snake back curves I was determined to find my baby chicks. More hills, more curves, much pasture, old cars, plenty gardens with every kind of flower imaginable and yellow squash that continued to propagate in the ditches. I finally turned into the farm. A long legged teenaged boy came out to see if he could help and we walked to the barn as he started putting the babies into the box. When I asked him how you can tell the roosters from the hens, his reply was simply, "you won't know until they get older." "Oh, is that right?" I ended up with 19 super healthy, powerful, beautiful, pet roosters. They would come out of their coop every morning and march around our cabin announcing it was time for us to get up. Songs filled with baritones, altos, sopranoes, tenors; you name it, we had it all! Then, off they'd go to have their morning breakfast filled with protein of fresh grasshoppers, beetles and other bugs. They never bothered my garden, but went in to clean up the bugs. When I walked up the mountain I always had plenty of company, with my 2 dogs, 4 cats, 4 goats and the 19 roosters always came along. We drank fresh spring water and planted all our seeds in clay soil and had year around crops to eat, this included looking under the snow and picking red oak leaf lettuce for salads. Looking up, I could see the roosters walking around, happy as larks; even in the snow.