Another well known phrase or saying.

What's this I hear from the hen-house-on-wheels, home to my small and motley flock of poultry? It's a rousing 'cock-a-doodle-doo'. As I open the door the birds come spilling out - and here they are at my feet milling expectantly for pellets and grain. The cockerel struts about in that macho way beloved of the male of the species everywhere. I'm glad he's crowing - it's what cockerels do and it's a real sound of the countryside.

But from the interior of the hen-house-on-wheels his crow is answered by another. What? What's this? I only have one cockerel and he's here, outside.

I investigate. Up on the perch, with head thrown back and throat stretched to the heavens sits the Cuckoo Maran - crowing her heart out. 'Tis flying in the face of nature - a crowing hen - and there I was expecting an egg from her any day now....

'Limp wristed - moi?'

I Google. It's a good place isn't it, the t'internet, for everyman and his dog to put their 'two penneth' in? The wild and wacky, the sane, the scientist and the slap-happy amateur all rub shoulders in a glorious melting pot of idea and opinion. Who knows what my search criteria: 'crowing hen' will throw up.

I'd rather hoped to have found a more rational explanation than 'it's the Devil's work...'

A crowing hen is apparently not an unheard of phenomena - Google throws up over 50,000 references. (Sadly none of them suggest that 'Crowing Hen' was big chief of an obscure Native American tribe.) There are not many scientific explanations either - I'm thinking hormonal here - which might account for 'her' behaviour. (I have already begun to think of her as male.) She's well developed and quite assertive - but that's probably a characteristic of her breed. I'm none the wiser.

It seems that 'A whistling woman and a crowing hen are neither fit for God nor men'. I read with foreboding that a crowing hen might portend misfortune, or worse still, a death in the house. Oooh er....Folk tales are pretty strong magic and on a cold dark evening with long shadows in the corner of the room I feel a little spooked by this. It seems to be a global belief too. I tell myself, bearing in mind there is probably a grain of truth in most maxims, that eons of experience have shown that a hen showing this male characteristic is unlikely to be a good layer and will not be worth her keep. How sensible is that?

I'm going to keep an eye on her. Her vocal outburst may amount to nothing and a deep brown egg will prove she was just a 'tomboy' at heart and this to be a passing phase. In the meantime I've winged an email to my brother ('poultry keeper extraordinaire'), a guru in hen-world, because if he doesn't know the answer I don't know who will. And there's not much point in having an expert in the family if you can't make use of their talents is there?