Nickname(s):

Ted, Teddy, Tedder, Big Ted

Breed:

Golden Laced Wyandotte

Gender:

Rooster

Bio:

Teddy is my goofball rooster, he’s always been a little bit odd. He’s a noisy guy and spends a good portion of his day “alarm calling” in a way that we’ve now dubbed as “Tedding”. Whenever something isn’t going exactly the way Ted likes, he protests VERY loudy and persistently. When he crows, it’s more an anguished scream than a cock-a-doodle-do.

Ted started out his life as Dorothy (we called him Dot) because he was a very late to mature rooster and we thought he was a hen. He was well past the age he should have been before he started growing saddle feathers. Regardless, we eventually figured out that he was a he and he was given a new name.

Ted hatched with my first chickens and he grew up with them until it was time to split some of the boys into a bachelor coop. Ted fit in great in the bachelor coop for a long time. His best buddy was another late to mature rooster we called Margaret. They hung out constantly and I’d often find them dustbathing together and grooming each other. It was a real bromance. Margaret, unfortunately, had a heart attack only about a month after the bachelor group formed. His death threw things for a loop and the pecking order needed to be renegotiated again after only just being settled a few weeks before.

One by one the roosters left the bachelor coop for one reason or another (the bachelor coop idea failed spectacularly) and, eventually, it was just Ted and Lucky left. Lucky took the role of leader and he took care of Ted. They probably could have carried on together forever that way if it weren’t for the fact that, one spring afternoon, Ted decided that he was tired of being second and challenged Lucky for the leadership role. Lucky is pretty chill so he conceded pretty quickly. That should have been the end of things but Teddy WOULD NOT STOP. If we hadn’t been home to intervene, he would have kept attacking until he killed Lucky. We tried several times to get them back together but it was not in the cards. After that fight, both roosters wanted to kill the other.

With that, we had another homeless rooster (it’s a trend around here, apparently). Ted temporarily slept in the garage at night and spent his days in a moveable pen made out of a trampoline while I built yet another coop so I could shuffle chickens around and give him a home of his own.

Eventually he moved next door to Ginger and Shiro, two hens who I was never able to successfully integrate into any other flock. One day, months later, Shiro snuck into Ted’s pen and made friends with him. Ginger begrudgingly joined them and they started working towards becoming a flock. Sadly, a couple of weeks later, Shiro died suddenly in the same manner that Margaret did a year before and, with her death, Ginger no longer wanted anything to do with Ted. Teddy has had horrible luck with losing friends. They both moved back to their own coops and lived alone next door to each other.

Not long after Shiro died, Lucky firmly rejected the four hens we were trying to add to his flock so we decided to move them down next to Ted and Ginger in the hopes that, eventually, this little band of misfits could form a flock. LOTS of hiccups and many weeks later I was finally successful at introducing them all. It took until poor Teddy was nearly 18 months old but now they all live together happily and Ted finally has a flock of his own after all of this time.

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