“The early bird crows first. I call this Crow 1. This is heard by a small handful of neighbouring roosters, who then crow back in reply (Crow 2).
“Although this crow-reply response is intended solely as a territorial counter-challenge to the initiator early-bird’s First Crow, it is also heard by other roosters, slightly further afield, who, mistaking it for a Crow 1, crow back in reply (Crow 3), and in this way the to and fro crowing spreads rapidly outwards, like ripples on a pond, as more and more roosters join in.
“This pattern is repeated every morning, with the crow zone constantly expanding, until the point where it either reaches an auditory barrier, beyond which it cannot proceed, or it bangs into a different call-and-response crow, coming from another direction, from an adjacent crow zone community, at which point the pattern, and indeed the individual roosters all become confused.”
Shaun said that from start to finish it only takes a few minutes for the crowing to spread across an entire region.
“A typical crow lasts for slightly under two seconds, and the reply crow usually starts about a second later,” he said.
“That’s only three seconds between crows. They are audible at a distance of 300 metres, so within the first minute, the crowing has already spread 6kms from its epicentre.
“That’s almost faster than rural broadband!”
Months of painstaking recording and time-keeping work with the help of a team of volunteers from the Chicken & Rooster Owners of Waikato Society (CROWS) enabled Shaun to get an accurate assessment of the size and location of no fewer than 12 separate crow zones in the Waikato.
Most usefully, as it turned out, it also allowed him to identify and map the crow zone boundaries, and in particular, the auditory barriers where absolutely no crows were ever heard. This proved to be the breakthrough revelation for Shaun’s eventual research findings.
These barriers take several forms:
a) Areas of little or no human habitation (forests, mountain ranges, large waterways and remote back-country farms)
b) Urban areas where local body bylaws prohibit the keeping of roosters
c) Sources of extreme noise at dawn (eg motorways and busy highways). Three areas completely surrounded by quiet no-crow zones were discovered: Raglan, Te Pahū and Waikino, and in these regions Shaun was keen to ascertain if the rooster crows were significantly different, both from one another and from the general population.
The tens of thousands of field recordings that his team had made of the Waikato’s dawn rooster chorus were fed into the Glen Massey University super-computer, and using algorithmic modelling, statistical regression analysis (where data is compared and contrasted, looking for similarities and differences) indicated, as they had expected, that there are only minor differences between the vocalisations of roosters across most of the Waikato (i.e. in the nine non-isolated areas where, at their boundaries, crowing could be heard from two or more different crow-zones).
Typically the differences were greatest at the heart of each of these zones, lessening the further out one went, until at the borders they were more-or-less indiscernible.
Conversely, quite marked differences were found between the three acoustically-isolated areas, all of which were also significantly different from the rest of the Waikato.
“This is the strongest evidence to come to light so far”, Shaun was able to conclude, “that domesticated poultry not only has something closely resembling a language but also when geographically isolated for sufficient lengths of time, will develop different dialects.”
“It was striking how homophonous, right across each of the three isolated regions the crowing patterns were found to be, especially when compared to the other nine regions, whose dialects seem to blend into one another, especially around the edges.”
Shaun admitted that there was one troubling anomaly in his findings though.
“There is a spot where the Raglan and Te Pahu dialects seem to be rather diluted, and somewhat inter-mingled.
“This had us quite perplexed until we discovered the culprits - a colony of homeless roosters living wild in the pine forest adjoining Old Mountain Road.
“Clearly they’re passing messages across the border, in their own accents, and probably adding a few of their own idiomatic expressions as well.
“This is a great shame” Shaun believes, “and I wish people would stop abandoning their roosters in these sensitive areas, as it’s destroying a unique piece of poultry culture”.
For his doctoral thesis, Shaun plans to study the feral chicken population of Matawatāwhi/Tree Kings Islands, with the hope of identifying elevated elements of early European Low-countries crow and cluck proto-language, thus showing that their ancestors were most likely released by Abel Janszoon Tasman when he stopped to collect drinking water in 1643, which would make them the first European chickens to set foot on Aotearoa/New Zealand.
