The cockerel may be an icon, but it’s a very noisy one
SUMMER inches towards us and the days grow longer. I know this because in the past week I have inherited a cockerel – unwanted from a chicken rescue centre in Rotherham – which at the break of dawn commences its morning articulations.
Vigor, as was named by the previous owners due to the fact that it hatched in the time it took to make a cup of tea, has quite a voice.
Try as we might, pulling the covers over our heads while noticing it is not yet 6am, we are drawn inadvertently into its circadian rhythms.
My wife and I worry what the neighbours must think. We are dreading the next Christmas gathering.
Still, any self-respecting weather watcher should have a cockerel, either in the back garden or on a weather vane on the roof. It was in the ninth century that Pope Nicholas decreed every church in Europe required a cockerel on its steeple or dome as a symbol of Peter’s denial of Jesus – most added the chook to an existing weather vane for ease. The oldest remaining example of this is the Gallo di Ramperto in Brescia, commissioned around the year 820.
Of course, it is not wind but the light to which cockerels are supposed to alert us.
In a past era, when we didn’t sleep next to mobile phones, they would rouse us from our slumbers and the long-held presumption was that cockerels crowed the loudest when the days were longest.
However, in 2013 a study by scientists at Nagoya University in Japan found they were far more likely to be dictated to by their internal clocks than by the light of a new day.
So our plans to install makeshift blinds over Vigor’s coop to keep out the glorious Bank holiday weather heading our way have been scrapped.
The cockerel will crow regardless.