My Feral Rooster Friend

My most constant companion.

I first noticed the rooster on March 18. It was in my yard with the feral pigs. I’d seen chickens in my yard before—a pair had passed through around five times in three years—but no chicken had ever stayed more than an hour.

The rooster doesn’t seem to have left since arriving on March 18. He’s here all day and seemingly all night.

He was silent until March 27. At four p.m. that day, he crowed thirteen times. The 10th and 12th crows had a lower-pitched last note. After each crow, distant roosters crowed back. From then on, he crowed more than a hundred times per day. It was by far the loudest noise I heard each day, especially when he did it within five feet of me:

For two or three days, each crow broke my focus as I worked on finishing a draft of my essay collection Reasons to Live. I wondered how to get rid of the rooster. I imagined caging him, driving him away. I imagined “harvesting” him via bow-and-arrow, machete, and/or garden shears. (My cats and I eat an average of two chickens a week.)

But then I got used to it. The sound stopped bothering me. I was able to work through it. I felt good about this. I could apply this method—acclimating to bothersome phenomena instead of lamenting or bemoaning it—to other things too, I knew.

The rooster is a loner. He doesn’t pay attention to the cats or pigs, just me—the one with food. He doesn’t interact with other chickens in-person (in-chicken), but he has a limited kind of internet—covering a half-mile or so diameter circle—with three to ten other roosters. He and these roosters say “Hi” to each other a hundred-plus times per day. This sates his desire for social interaction, apparently. I can relate.

I saw him levitate in a dream on the night of March 29. While standing on one leg, he lifted it and didn’t fall, floating six or seven inches off the ground.

In early April, I began to notice the rooster looking at himself in the mirror. He did it multiple times per day, for minutes at a time. He liked being near the mirror.

He cleans himself as much as my cats do. Here’s Nini and the rooster cleaning themselves.

I’ve never seen him fly. Here he flaps his wings:

My mom wondered if the rooster was the reincarnation of Leo—my orange cat that ran away in February 2023. In August 2024 I heard a phantom meow that may have been Leo, saying “bye” to me after dying. (Cntrl+f “meow” here to read about this.) Like Leo, the rooster is loud, clingy, and a lover of food. Here’s a video of Nini watching Leo (after a time in 2022 when Leo was gone for 3.5 months):

I feed the rooster apple/pear peels/cores, beef, chicken, adzuki/pinto beans. It eats dried pig poop and other things from my yard, maybe tiny seeds or bugs.

He has three main kinds of poop—solid coiled cylinders, mushy watery splats, creamy ice-cream-like piles. All seem odorless (from a distance). He often poops on the concrete patio where I work. I cover the poop with soil, then sweep it into the yard.

Once, I saw Nini sniffing the creamy poop, moving his head near it, seeming like he wanted to rub against it. Days later, I saw Nini licking the creamy poop. I’m 98 percent sure this behavior benefitted Nini—improving his microbiome, providing needed minerals or compounds, or doing something else helpful.

Nini loves watching the rooster, as he loved watching Leo. Nini is unusually verbal while watching the rooster, repeatedly making the “chatter” sound that seems to mean “bird” or “non-threatening animal.” (He does it to all birds and has done it to pigs.) From my notes on April 15:

Nini can’t stop watching the rooster, watching with his neck extended even though the rooster is ~40 feet away in the yard.

From my notes on April 27:

Nini was sleeping, eyes closed. The rooster, around five feet away, began crowing. Nini turned his head toward the rooster, eyes still closed, and chattered at him around five times. The rooster stopped crowing.

Maybe a female chicken will come and mate with him and create babies. A low-stress farm is developing in my yard/garden naturally—nineteen pigs and one chicken, so far. I feed them irregularly, and they fertilize my yard and stimulate me and my cats.