Pointing It Out To You!!! Boss Hen

I’d like to think that I’m a fairly passive person and not prone to random acts of violence. Make no mistake, I have fought in my past. I’ve fought with words, and I’ve fought with actions. Some I’ve won, and some I’ve lost, in either case I’ve stood my ground and even in defeat, never bowed my head to anyone. These battles have made me strong and secure in my place. Make no mistake, I am the “Boss Hen” on this yard.

Boss Hen’s are every cocker’s best friend. A Boss Hen defends her domain but still squats for the Cock that is best suited to her nature. It’s pure instinct. It’s survival. Like most Boss Hens, I have fought for my family and our right for survival in this sport. I have battled school boards for my kids. I’ve fought city, state, and federal statutes for my business. I have battled younger and flashier hens that have dared to come on my yard and usurp my place. I have battled in the arenas where we show our birds for the rights to be there. I have battled with male cockers that thought that as a woman my voice was somehow less than theirs. I have battled crooked pit owners, bad referees and slick-ass handlers. Somehow, I have done all these things without ever throwing a punch. Gameness comes in all sizes and colors.

Gamebirds are amazing creatures, they immediately identify a boss hen in their hierarchy, and I’ve never seen an uglier fight than when a new boss hen demands her rights. Allow me to set the stage here a bit…

When I break up my brood pens, I put all the roosters on cord and allow the hens to freshen up by giving them run of the yard. I like to breed off pullets, so to me, it mattered little if I lost a few from season to season among what I considered my purer stock. The ones I picked back up in the fall were healthy and ready for the breeding season.

I had a boss hen on my yard when I bought out Jim and Trudy Wilcox’s place “Buckwheat Gamefarm”. What I considered to be a pure “Diablo Whitehackle” based purely on her breeding records. I inherited her and she ruled the entire farm while allowed to run loose on the yard. It was not unusual to see her with 20 or more chicks following her around the yard. Everything steered clear of this hen, birds on cord, dogs, everything…and yes this included me. In a nutshell, she took no crap from anyone or anything.

The Short Knife was just gaining in popularity during this time, and I wanted to introduce some new blood to my yard, some with headhunting abilities. I spoke with a very well-known Natural Heel Cocker about his birds, and we traded one of my best hens for one of his little Spanish Hens. She was a pretty little thing and weighed a little over 3 lbs., I was planning to cross her in and then breed it down to about 1/8th for battle-crosses. I kept her in a pen in quarantine for about 30 days and released her on the yard when I turned out my other hens. She looked so tiny compared to my much larger stock, but I was willing to gamble for pure health reasons.

It took about 2 days for the two hens to meet on the yard. I’m lucky I was standing by the window in my office and witnessed the fight that ensued, or I would have probably lost both of them. It was a fight to make any breeder proud. These hens were vicious and it wasn’t too very long before I saw that the little Spanish Hen had my Boss Hen on the gound and was showing the very trait that I wanted to breed into my fowl, over and over she picked up the Boss Hen’s head and beat her to a pulp. The precision of her attack on this much larger hen was awe-inspiring from a breeder’s standpoint.

I got to the hens and scooped up my Boss Hen and headed in to try to save her and the little Spanish Bird walked away with all her chicks behind her. She survived. I later moved my Boss Hen into my outside brood pen in the back of the property upon her recovery and she kept complete order in her new domain. As for the little Spanish Hen, she was my new boss of the main yard.

Size matters, weights matter, cut matters, precision matters, timing matters, we all know these things when matching a fight, but sometimes it’s not that clear. Sometimes the norm just isn’t normal. There is a world in which a 3lb Spanish Hen can beat your 5lb Boss Hen.

We went on to do quite well with this cross in the upcoming seasons. We didn’t see too much at 1/2 crosses, as the birds were coming out a bit too small, but from 1/4th on we did quite well in this particular heel.

It’s not the size of the hen in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the hen - Momologic