Kabob Rules the Roost

The time came to off our two young roosters, before things got ugly in the hen house. Normally, I hold the bird with its neck over an upended log, and Jordan swings the hatchet. However, a friend had told us about the value of a rooster's neck feathers (hackles) for fly-tying -- people pay $20-$60 per rooster for its hackles.

We called our fly-tying friend Dave and offered him two roosters worth of hackles if he could kill them without ruining the feathers. "No problem," he said. "When you hunt, you have to learn to wring a bird's neck in case you injure one without killing it." Perfect.

Dave came over one night, because it's more or less impossible to catch a chicken when they are awake -- you can do it, but you feel a perfect fool running around after them, grabbing and missing. At night, they are drowsing on their roosts (horizontal poles about 4 feet off the floor), and you just pick them up.

Jordan and Dave headed out to the hen house (former pool house) and did the deed. It took longer than we expected, because it turns out that a rooster's neck is a lot harder to wring than a pheasant's; Dave just kept twisting and twisting until the bird went limp. Red, and then Blue, were finally lying dead on our kitchen counter. We felt pretty bad about it, but Dave didn't.

The next step was to skin the birds; Dave's plan was to remove the entire skin, not just the neck skin, and we found out long ago that plucking a bird is way more effort than it's worth. Again, skinning a chicken, or a rooster anyway, turned out to be a lot harder than skinning a pheasant. "With a pheasant," Dave said, "you just cut open the skin, yank their legs, and the whole bird turns inside-out." The roosters refused to do so, and Dave had to cut a lot of skin to get it off. By the time it was over, both Dave and Jordan had band-aids on their fingers.

I'm not so sure how thrilled Dave's wife Diane was to receive an entire rooster, but both she and we made coq au vin the next night, since what else do you do with a coq? It wasn't bad, and the meat wasn't as chewy as I had feared. But raising chickens for meat rather than for eggs certainly isn't at the top of our list.

Kabob is once again the sole rooster, and the remaining chick, Curry (renamed from Yellow) has been accepted into the flock. Happy Ending, except from the point of view of Red and Blue.