We have 8 chickens.

Five of those chickens are hens, and the rest are roosters.

Three roosters are too many by about a margin of 2.

We should get rid of two of our roosters.

There…that’s pretty straightforward.  We need to get rid of two of our roosters.

I think that we’ve decided that the ones that we want to get rid of are the ones that are currently down with the hens in the coop.

That’s not really the point of this story, though.

We have three roosters.  We decided that a bunch of roosters fighting each other in the coop was a bad mix…so we took two of the roosters out and let them “free range”.

I guess that “free range” means that they take up residence on the railing outside our bedroom window and take dumps on the porch all night so that they’re not bound up when they start crowing at five in the morning.

At least that’s my experience with the phrase “free range”.

One of the roosters on the porch has an extremely robust and masculine crow.  He is the alpha rooster and is very impressive.

The other rooster has a weak and wheezy crow.  It’s a rattly exhalation…a weird asterisk or something to the strong rooster’s crow…not even loud enough to be considered an exclamation point if it was only punctuation to a real rooster sound.

But lately the other rooster has found his way back into the coop and now roosts alongside the rooster that we’d let stay in the coop.  I don’t know if he’s growing up…or if it’s just a matter of not having the magnificent “alpha rooster” to draw comparisons to…but I think I heard him crow in a way that would invite comparisons to a “real man” rooster.

He sounded almost normal.

Maybe he got over his shyness when he didn’t feel so different…when he didn’t have the ultimate crow around to shame him.

I don’t really know.

I do know that the two roosters down in the coop don’t really fight each other all that much.  Maybe it’s a matter of the rooster that was in the coop continuously not being threatened by the “new rooster”.  I don’t think the returning rooster is really very macho.

I hear him down there, though.  I hear his new crow.  I think he’s “coming into his own”.

His new crow makes me believe in his potential again.  He’s not just a “wheezy joke” anymore.

My “boy” is becoming a “man”.

This whole rooster escapade is just another reminder to me that sometimes it’s just a slight change in venue that lets us “come into our power”.

The trip down to the coop is a long way from being “intercontinental” (or anything close).

The rooster didn’t have to run very far on his little dinosaur legs to get back in with the hens.

But what a difference it sounds like it’s made in his young rooster life.

I love travel, too.

Helps me get my crow on.