Another notion about bird calls

 Peter Tate, the English ornithologist, begins his entry on cockerels with this: 

As urban society has spread and farming practices have changed, the waking of the whole community by a farmyard cockerel who crows at first light has all but ceased to exist.

 

That was true at one point. But backyard chickens have come and gone and come again. I hear Gallus gallus at several places in the neighborhood.

The Slow Living Movement has not come to the metropolitan Atlanta, judging by the frantic freeways. But our neighborhood has several backyard henhouses, attesting to the taste for homegrown eggs and poultry.

I hear — rather than see — them. The crowing is comforting. It seemed half the houses in the old barrio in San Antonio kept a rooster and some hens.

Several notes in this collection are about birds of the Georgia Piedmont, and the fact that I’ve failed to mention Gallus gallus says something about my skewed sense of what’s “natural.” Tate says these birds were domesticated in Southeast Asia and were in Greece by 700 B.C.

They’ve long served as alarm clocks. Tate says that the Coptic Church used cockerels to call the villagers to worship.

• Source: Peter Tate, Flights of Fancy: Birds in Myth, Legend, and Superstition; New York: Delacorte Press, 2007, p. 4.