POULTRY
Chickens & their amazing social order
O
bserve your flock of
poultry and you will
see that there are
various activities that the birds
perform during their day,
some of which serve a
functional purpose, some of
which are purely for pleasure.
There are also social activities
in a flock. Chickens are
gregarious, ie, friendly and
communal. So they have
developed a wide range of
sounds for communication.
Studies have classified twelve
chick calls and as many as 22
calls by adults. These range
from clucks, cackles, chirps
and cries to keep in contact
with mates.
Calls heard most often and
recognised by humans are
food calls, predator alarms,
pre- and post-laying calls and
roosters crowing. Others are
more specific which humans
find hard to identify.
There is some evidence of
pre-hatching interactions
between hens and chicks.
Embryos and hens begin to
make sounds the day before
hatching and do so more and
more often as hatching
approaches. If an embryo
begins to give a distress call,
the hen vocalizes or moves
on the nest and the embryo
becomes silent or begins to
emit pleasure calls. The
clucking sound of the hen has
also been shown to reduce
distress calls.
Another classification
describes the sounds that
chickens make that are
related to fear and predators.
They make calls to do with
brooding, feeding, contact
and pleasure, but there are
also signals expressing pain,
frustration, fighting and
crowing.
As any poultry owner soon
learns, there's a wellrecognised daily pattern of
crowing near dawn followed
by feeding calls, egg-laying
calls and finally roosting calls.
Chicken distress calls
immediately get the attention
of their broody mother, and
the regular "cluck -cluck" is a
reassuring call from the
mother to the chicks.
Large groups of hens can
create very high noise levels.
They are around 72-87dB at
normal times, 73-100 dB at
feeding and 75-85 dB during
egg laying.
Chickens also communicate
through body language.
When hens can see each
other, they communicate by
body postures eg, head up or
down, tail up or down,
feathers spread or not.
The tail is especially important
and studies of feral birds
showed that they stood
upright with tail erect with
wings diamond-pointed
almost vertically down. This
is called "wing-down alert".
Body postures are particularly
important to dominant males
to send messages to his
harem and possible competitors for his job.
Studies have shown that birds
recognise each other using a
combination of comb, head
and wattle. Single elements
were more difficult for hens
to recognise, but the comb
43
www.sasmallholder.co.za
was the simplest.
When a hen has been
removed from a group for
treatment, she is usually
welcomed back when she
returns. She moves easily
back into the flock, which
accepts her as if she had
never been away. She will
probably be greeted by her
own flock members led by
the rooster walking over and
gathering around her
conversably.
In large groups kept together
for some months, subgroups
form and become restricted
to an area. This means that
birds can recognise their own
group members and those of
an overlapping territory.
Many social animals work out
a hierarchy, and chickens are
no exception. The hierarchy
created is a means of
attaining and keeping order.
Continued on page 45