As per every rural, and most urban Haitian yards, chickens have the free run at this nice hotel deep in the brousse on this off-the-path, Haitian island.

The chicken folks occasionally surround me as I sit writing each morning in the cool air, though I don’t feed them as I once did–Elie discourages them running on his shaded white stone and marble patio which is also the hotel dining room.

Chickens shit rather prolifically, as you may know.

Nonetheless, I’m distracted everyday by mini-dramas of their male dominance, pecking order and brutal sexuality. (As any writer will tell you: idle distractions are where we often live. Here, there’s no refrigerator to stare into, so, among other things, I watch the chickens).

A few minutes ago, one of the large, fancy-feathered roosters bolted across the yard, beelining for a youngish, black hen. He jumped on her for a few seconds, then dismounted; she ran off, he stood around pecking disinterestedly, then cocked his gorgeous head and crowed mightily, adding to the din of his roosterial brothers around the property and beyond.

This mighty fine rooster-beast has a small harem–I suppose she’s one of them, though I haven’t watched closely enough to name-tag them… yet. This may come if this writing business doesn’t pan out.

Dawn’s early light in Haiti is marked by these prideful calls. The cockadoodle-doings are never done until God turns the lights off promptly at 6, as He do at these latitudes. (Our president-elect has managed to crow when he tweets, that’s quite a feat, perhaps one inspired by chicken feats, though roosters are disdainful of tweeting. I doubt roosters crow much around Trump Tower).

But I know that it’s not just the third world who suffers this morning insult–at a tasteful, luxurious little coffee ranch where I stayed at Kailua, the roosters started at 1 am.

In my own sleek/chic neighborhood in Seattle, roosters also greet the day by flapping their wings and crying out their awesomeness. This machismo and male modeling has become accepted by folks who’d never accept it in any other species, humanoid in particular.

Chicken husbandry has become de rigueur in my middle class ‘hood where children are learning–as farm kids do–that it’s ok to eat someone you’ve put a name to. And like farm kids, many are revulsed at seeing Mighty Rudolfo’s stewed leg sitting on their plate in a puddle of gravy. The hard lesson is, of course: don’t name your food when it’s still on the hoof.

But I digress.

How do chickens fuck? In case you’ve forgotten as I have, I just looked it up: “When a rooster mates with a hen, he mounts her and, standing on her back, lowers his cloaca (vent) as the hen inverts her own cloaca to meet with his. There is no penetration, but the sperm packet released by the male is taken into the hen’s cloaca or vent. From there the sperm makes its way to the infundibulum where it awaits the release of an ovum. Sperm can live in the infundibulum for more than 2 weeks.”

(Gotta say it: all this cloaca/infundibulum talk is getting me randy)

Sex aside, and interesting to me at this moment, in this here and now, (and perchance to you, dear reader) is the persecution of the cockerels by the mighty, full-grown chicken men.

The roosters jump on the young males when they show a little salt, pecking off their neck feathers. Their bare-necked lizard-skin heads and beady eyes remind me of the miniature dinosaurs that they are. I thought they’d caught some dread chicken disease, but then I saw that all the young males sporting bare necks, and the big guys attacking them relentlessly.

But the constant fisticuffs inflicted by their own tribesmen with weightier bodies never seem to tamp down their persistent pluck (so to speak). As I sit writing, I must shoo them out of the open door of my living quarters. The potential of bedside chicken poop takes this white-man-in-the-3rd-world a bridge too far.

I can always hear the hens and chicks coming, peeping, peeping. They peck around making a hurrying perimeter around the mother who fussily herds-in the one or two who constantly dart outside what she considers her zone of protection. This doesn’t always work, obviously. The chick-herds diminish day by day–seems always by ones– today there’s four, yesterday five, the day before, there were six.

I must report the cutest chicken behavior I’ve observed (mustn’t I?). Wish i coulda photographed it. Twas the chick that kept jumping up to ride on her mother’s back. Henry Penny would put up with it for awhile, then shake her off, then she’d jump up again.

This heartwarming scene warmed my very cockles as I toothpicked her uncle from between my teeth, and sighed a tropical sigh in the midday heat. Nap time!