ALPHA Hens

With or without a flock rooster, one lady always steps up to be the queen.

-  BRUCE INGRAM

The alpha hen gets first access to food, water, and prime nesting and roosting spots.

From her earliest days as a chick, Joan was different and just a tad well, more than a tad — bossy and aggressive. When my wife Elaine and I would place feed in the brooder where we kept our heritage Rhode Island Red chicks, Joan would charge forward with the little cockerels to eat first.

As Joan grew older, she took to rushing her female flock mates, much in the same way the little cockerels would charge at each other and engage in mock battles. By the time she was 12 weeks old, Joan was the undisputed female leader of the flock. It was around that time that this pullet received her name.

We name all our chickens, and Elaine is in charge of giving appellations to the hens, usually picking some sort of television or movie theme. In the television series Mad Men, which is set at an advertising agency in 1960s New York City, Joan is the undisputed head of the secretaries.

Tall, busty and red-headed, no female in the firm dares to mess with her or question her regal demeanor... and the males walk lightly around her, too.

Like the fictional Joan, our Joan is towering, buxom and mahogany-colored, flaunting the reddish brown feathers that purebred Reds do. The two subordinate hens, Peggy and Trudy - also named after Mad Men females - long ago gave up challenging Joan's alpha status. Even the flock rooster Don, named after the notorious lothario Don Draper in Mad Men, shows proper deference to her and has done so since he and the rest of these birds were chicks together.

In other words, Don doesn't intervene when Joan hands out alpha-style justice to her subordinates.

And by no means is Don a wimp. Twice Don has stood his ground against a redtailed hawk, and he has vanquished every rooster that has entered his 3-year-old life.

ALL ATTITUDE