How Do Your Cocks Crow

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By Krystal D'Costa on November 30, 2011
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Ed. Note: Long time readers are well aware that I have a quirk about Time. You can read my other discussions here.
Time is a measure of events, duration, and change. Thanks to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) we share a basis for discussing Time. It helps structure our expectations. I may be at my desk by 9:00 EST (UTC-05:00), but I understand that colleagues in California (UTC-08:00) are likely still in bed. Global clock time tells me that at 11:00 EST, I can reasonably expect them to be at their desks. However, our experiences with Time may differ in accordance with local observances even along the same latitude. While it may indeed be five o'clock somewhere, what people may choose to do at that Time may differ greatly from place to place. The meaning of five o'clock can vary greatly.
The example I often use when discussing these sorts of differences stems from an experience I had in South Florida when I found that my "meal clock" didn't align with local business practices. In New York City, diners might be sitting down to an early dinner at 6:00 pm, whereas in parts of South Florida, the dinner hour is winding down. We may share the same time zone, but our temporal tendencies differ.
Despite the standardization offered by the clock, Time is an intersubjective experience. Though we don't often consider it, local contexts can inform our temporal awareness in subtle ways. For example, consider the role roosters have played in keeping time:
While it's true that roosters can indeed crow at any time, in a recent paper anthropologist Kevin Birth discusses how avian chronobiology shapes a reliable relationship between cockcrow and the coming dawn that may help understand perceptions of time prior to the establishment of a standard global time.
Archaeological evidence reveals an abundance of domestic fowl in the Middle Ages, and for a sustainable community to have existed breeding would be have been necessary which would have required roosters—who appeared to have a prominent role in calling practitioners to predawn devotions. In the 6th-century, cockcrow constituted one of the four periods of nighttime devotion for monasteries that followed the precepts maintained by the Rule of the Master (Regula Magistri), which required psalms be said at nightfall, midnight, cockcrow, and in the morning. The period denoted by the rooster’s crow helped manage devotions in the face of seasonal changes: psalms were said prior to the cockcrow in the winter, and after the cockcrow in the summer to account for the shifting durations of darkness. Roosters also alerted those living beyond the immediate reach of religious orders to ready themselves for morning devotions with their noisy pronouncements.
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The connection between the rooster and the coming dawn offered fertile ground for associations with light and spirituality. Gregory the Great likened roosters to preachers:
The cockcrow was a temporal signifier in the Middle Ages, but is there any biological basis for these sorts of connections?
Sure they do! Chickens have a circadian cycle. They’re entrained to light-cycles—melatonin secretion, and regulation of the heart, brain, and liver change in response to light. For roosters, whose crows are driven by testosterone, light cycles which regulate endogenous cycles can also trigger crowing behavior.
Endogenous cycles in chickens can reset in response to incremental changes in light intensity. Gambian hens, for example, shift their roosting times in accordance with the seasons: since the days are relatively the same length, the chickens appear to negotiate roosting in relation to shifting light intensity. Chickens, then, are able to anticipate light cycles. Research done in North-Central India, where the sun only becomes visible after it has risen higher than surrounding mountains, documents the onset of crowing approximately two to three hours before sunrise with initial intervals of about 30 minutes that decrease to about seven minutes at the time of sunrise—even though the sun is not actually visible at the moment of sunrise.
But roosters also crow at other times and for different reasons. Birth acknowledges they’re only temporally relevant during the period of predawn for a specific location—but they are an excellent means of generating contextually-relevant information.
Here’s the thing: We’ve been trying to divide the day into equal hours since at least the 3rd-century BC by using candles and water clocks to mark the passage of Time. Clocks and universal time codes aren't a modern marvel. Birth states these attempts represent abstract, context-independent ways of managing time, whereas the rooster’s crow is an example of context-dependent ways of understanding time. The latter requires multiple temporal indicators—because cockcrow is only relevant during a specific period—requiring multiple experiences and measures of duration and change.
Time in the Middle Ages was not wrong, nor were predawn measurements by cockcrow without relevance. Birth traces an interesting shift in the relationship to Time held by medieval and moderns with regard to the senses. Namely, Time in the Middle Ages was linked to sound—roosters can be pretty noisy. Church bells, by the way, heralding the start of mass, were meant to be heard. Sound travels. It would find you. Whether you were in the field or on the road, you could not mistake the meaning of bells, whistles, or crowing. But that changed when Time shifted to visual cues: Clock towers required you to come to them. Clock towers represented a physical reminder of shared Time, minimizing an awareness of how the experience of 5 o’clock might differ along the same time zone.
Context-dependent time takes into account the local environment, whereas clock time creates an arbitrary relationship to the local experience. Birth proposes that the rise of clock time is tied to a preference for measuring Time in terms of “abstract durations of equal length”.[iii] As Time became commoditized with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, it was far more appealing (and arguably important) to control Time than it was to indexically define Time. And how better to control Time than to divide it up and put it in the hands of people? Who here is wearing a watch or has checked the display of their phone for the time today? Time is within your reach! And it is probably easier to manage than a belligerent rooster. Imagine putting that in your pocket.
Birth, K. (2011). The Regular Sound of the Cock: Context-Dependent Time Reckoning in the Middle Ages KronoScope, 11 (1), 125-144 DOI: 10.1163/156852411X595305
Citations: [i]p 127 | [ii]p 134 | [iii] P138
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Krystal D'Costa is an anthropologist working in digital media in New York City. You can follow AiP on Facebook.
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All You Need To Know About Rooster Crowing
Cock-a-doodle-do, is a universally known sound that just about everyone knows.
Roosters are loud and proud and like to let everyone know they are in the neighborhood! But seriously, why do they crow?
There are several reasons why a rooster may crow, and we will run through those here, but maybe a rooster crows just because he likes to!
This article will explain the various reasons why roosters crow, crowing etiquette, and much more.
Until relatively recently, it was assumed by many that roosters crew in response to the daybreak.
In fact, many roosters will crow a couple of hours before daybreak, and no one had really done any research into the matter.
In March of 2013, a paper was published by Takashi Yoshimura and Tsuyoshi Shimmura that was able to ‘shed some light on those assumptions.
They found that roosters actually have a mean internal circadian rhythm clock of 23.8 hours and start to crow at the appointed time. This helps to explain why roosters start to crow slightly before sunrise.
The head rooster will lead off in the crowing, followed by his subordinates. As you can imagine, it can get quite noisy if you have more than one rooster.
The rooster does also crows in response to the daylight, and humans tend to notice this particular time of crowing because we, too, are just starting to emerge from a deep sleep.
We probably find it annoying because we want to go back to sleep for a few hours!
Those who may not know the ancestry of our beautiful chickens, their forbears came from Far Eastern countries such as Myanmar, Thailand, India, East Indies, and China.
They found most of these birds in the jungle and dense areas of vegetation where they would be difficult to see – even by other birds.
Crowing can be used to announce to neighboring fowl that a rooster is in residence, which is his territory and hens. They likely called back and forth to let the other flocks know where they were.
Oftentimes you will hear them crowing back and forth to each other. Chickens have a superb sense of hearing, so the frequent crowing will give a rooster an idea if the rival flock and rooster are moving away or moving nearer.
Their hearing is so acute that they can determine where a noise comes from with almost pinpoint accuracy!
Making other potential rivals aware of his presence probably avoided a few fights between rival roosters. Although they will fight, they don’t really like to. The potential for injury, death, or defeat is great.
Anyone who has roosters knows that they will crow at night too! Why is that?
No one knows for sure, but likely reasons are hearing something outside the coop and alerting everyone to possible danger nearby.
Another theory is that perhaps a car headlight or other strong light beam disturbed them, alerting everyone of something unusual.
Some roosters will crow at certain noises such as a car or tractor starting up – they could perhaps be issuing a warning to the potential rival (car/tractor) to keep away from their area.
Some roosters like to crow after mating; no one likes a tell-all kind of guy, right? It is possibly a crow that means something like “I’m the greatest.”
It has been theorized that the morning crowing ritual is initiated by a morning surge of testosterone in the rooster.
Although just a theory at present, this idea may be a good one. A rooster is at his most sexually potent in the morning and early evening.
Both times is when crowing is usually heard more frequently.
Some roosters will crow after the hen has laid an egg. While we can’t be sure, perhaps this is a way of letting the competition know his hens’ are fertile, and so is he!
Another idea that has floated around for a while is that it’s a competition between roosters.
This is another idea that has some merit.
I have a total of 9 roosters here on the farm. Several are penned away from the main group, so they do not recognize the main rooster as their ‘boss.’
They will start crowing, and each rooster will take it up until they all crow. The head rooster in the yard will always be the last to crow – it’s like he has to have the last word!
He also makes his rounds of the rooster pens to try to goad the penned rooster into a fight. It is somewhat unfair since they can’t hurt him in any way.
They respond with the right moves for settling a score. Whether or not this is common is not really known, so that it could be an individual roosters’ personality trait.
If there is more than one rooster in the flock, there is a set order in which the crowing should go.
The head rooster must crow first. After that, the rooster pecking order dictates who will crow next and so on down the line until they are all done announcing their presence.
Any bird that crows out of turn will be firmly put in his place by the head rooster. If the lead rooster is old, sick, or weak, a younger rooster will issue a challenge, and a fight will ensue.
The winner takes all. The loser may stay with the flock but maybe so shamed that he will go off independently.
In the wild, flocks of roosters can live together harmoniously as long as the pecking order is observed. These bachelor groups will eventually split up and change as roosters start their own flocks.
Anyone who has more than one rooster will tell you that each rooster’s crow is different. Each bird has a subtle variation on the crow, and you can pick out which bird is crowing.
There are definitely times when a rooster crows for a particular reason. There are other times when he will crow for no particular reason – at least, not that humans know about anyway.
Perhaps it’s boredom or just checking the neighborhood for stray roosters, or just because he wants to. After all, it is his yard!
The crow of a rooster really isn’t that loud. In decibels, it’s on a par with a barking dog – around 90 decibels. I know which I prefer and it’s not the dog!
Roosters will crow, no doubt about it, there is no such thing as a ‘crow-less’ rooster, but they really do get a bad deal when folks say how noisy they are. It just isn’t so.
The source of irritation is probably the fact that they like to crow early in the morning, and if you aren’t a morning person, it cannot be enjoyable.
I’m lucky to live in the country, so my boys can be as noisy as they like, but the town or village life is a bit different.
For more details on the rooster crows, please read our article.
So there you have it, lots of thoughts on why roosters crow; some are proven, others are good, and some need further investigation.
The thread running through this article is communication. A rooster cannot sing like a bird, so the crow is his form of communication to a large audience.
Crowing sounds can be slightly different in the morning from the afternoon to and evening. He uses it as a tool to do many things. He announces the day, guards his territory, gathers the flock, and reacting to a threat.
Why do you think roosters crow? Let us know in the comments section below…
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My backyard rooster crows whenever we return home or when someone pulls into the driveway. (He’s more of a watchdog than my bulldog.) He also crows and comes to the back door for a treat if he hears my voice inside.
When my rooster wants a treat, he comes to the kitchen door and crows. I think he’s quite spoiled!
Normally I don’t mind our rooster’s crowing, but there are some mornings when I would like for Roger (the rooster) to just put a sock in it!! When the neighbour had a rooster (which mysteriously disappeared), the two would crow back and forth throughout the day…it was pretty humorous, but not to everyone’s liking I think and that might have lead to the neighbour rooster’s demise. As for loudness, I feel for the girls when Roger begins his crowing in the early morning while they are all still in the hen house (which is not very big)…it but be deafening!! Lastly, I have noticed that Roger is usually the first one out of the hen house in the AM (once the automatic door opens) and he seems to crow as if telling the girls to get a move on…and when they finally do, he puts the moves on them. Randy Roger.
Great article! Enjoyed it!
Cat
My chickens all go to the highest point, each night to roost and the rooster is always the last one to go up. Kind of like he’s supervising all the hens.
My little rooster crows if I walk away, around the house where he can’t see me. His little I-I-Looove-You usually gets a response from me, so he knows he isn’t alone. He likes companionship. I think he crows hoping to establish contact, just like a person starting up a conversation.
My crazy lil rooster sounds like one of those rubber chicken squeaky toys. Sooo annoying to hear his froggy voice for hours on end! Seriously… HOURS. He’s been at it for 7 hours so far, about every 2-3 minutes. That may explain his really raspy voice, now that I think about it. I sure hope he grows out of this annoying little feature. (He’s only 4 months old right now.) His lady companion doesn’t seem to like it, as I find her outside while he’s in the coop, crowing away.
He’s probably just practicing his voice! In a few months, it should sound like a normal crow.
I have a neighbor that has somewhere in the ballpark of 6 roosters and about 20 hens. He has one large coop that has one rooster and his ladies in it. Then each of the other roosters are in small pens with a lady of their own. I often wonder why he did this. They are all so noisy and it’s like the rooster in the bigger coop with more ladies is telling all the other guys about his harem. The other guys must be telling him they have quality, not quantity. You know how guys are! They never shut up. And every time one of them is screwing it gets worse. I like to hear a rooster crow but this is a little much.
Usually this set up is by those breeding specific breeds or qualities in their birds…
We’ve often checked when our rooster is crowing in the middle of the night and discovered that it was a rat disturbing him. We live next to a creek with many wild animals–raccoons, possums, skunks, otters, rats, so I’m sure he hears these as well when they are rummaging around the outside of the coop in the night.
We had a stray rooster show up in our front yard. He starts crowing at 4:30am. He roosts in our large magnolia tree…its higher than our single story house and half as wide. He gets way up there and jumps out in the morning to get a treat. He crows all day. He does take a break in the afternoon when he sleeps. My hubby says he can hear a far off rooster. I can’t hear it. We live in a suburban city.
My roo Blue, likes a nice lazy boy rocking neck scratch. Well we had tornado warnings today so after taking him out of the safet
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