On a rainy summer day, Mainers gathered in parking lots from Doxer-Foxcroft to Yarmouth, carrying dozens of roosters in cat carriers, dog crates, boxes and children’s tents.
They were waiting for Robert Ginn, known to most as Slo Mainer, to pick up their unwanted birds for auction or resale. Some of those birds were so aggressive that they gave him the carriers and said not to open them.
Ginn and his friend Andrew Doiron, who started organizing these pickups together this year, see the free “rooster rodeos” or take-backs as a public service. With fewer livestock auctions and more people who can’t or don’t want to cull their birds themselves, the roundup is a way to help the state’s poultry community and provide more humane ends for unwanted birds.
“There is a need, and we tried to help that need,” said Doiron, who is a teacher by day and a chicken breeder on the side. “The amount of birds that are either unwanted or the wrong gender, a rooster compared to a hen, is enormous. If somebody doesn’t do something like this, what’s going to happen to them?”
It’s difficult to tell the difference between male and female chicks until they grow into their adult features, and people often end up with extra roosters after ordering their birds each year.
Having more than one rooster with a small flock is likely to result in fights, and they are noisy. Some take-back participants couldn’t keep the loud birds where they lived due to noise ordinances or struggled with the cost of feeding them. Other birds just had challenging personalities.
“They raised them as pets, and they don’t want to kill them,” Ginn said. “They’re trying to find a place to send them.”
The take-back accepts any problem birds, not just roosters, Doiron said, including extra hens or other poultry.
Some companies offer a similar service for chicks that grow into roosters, but only for birds purchased from them. People who ran more general take-back trips have largely stopped over the past decade, according to Doiron.
He reached out to Ginn to organize this year’s trips, which have been successful. People are grateful to have an option for their extra birds, and regularly comment on social media about how quiet and peaceful their yards are afterward.
Doiron sees the take-back as an alternative for people who might otherwise let unwanted chickens loose in the woods, on the side of the road or on another farmer’s property, which he said is crueler to the birds. He often saw people offering roosters for free on Facebook with no one to take them.
Ginn scheduled the trips on his route home from camp in Dover-Foxcroft. Doiron met him at a few stops, most of them at Tractor Supply Co. parking lots, one at a Marden’s and another in a visitor station. In about five to 10 minutes, the men had loaded the birds into his livestock trailer and hit the road again.
Between 50 and 250 birds return to Ginn’s Happy Hog Farm in Pownal for up to a month, where he cares for them until the next auction. Many come to him sick, with mites or lice, and are quarantined first.
Larger meat birds typically go to a Massachusetts auction, while smaller breeds head to Corinth and Palmyra for meat or breeding stock.
Some birds are also purchased directly by Facebook followers, who message him or stop by his house asking for birds of a particular breed.
The service might make back 30 percent of the cost of fuel, food and time, but the two men aren’t in it for the money.
“If we can get the word out and make someone’s fall or winter go easier, and it lowers their stress level and keeps peace in the barnyard, we’re happy to do it,” Doiron said.
A fourth rodeo might be scheduled this season, and the pair will likely offer the service again next year, Doiron said.
Information will be posted on Doiron’s WhyNot Farms page on Facebook, Ginn’s Happy Hog Farm pages, and in online groups for Maine homesteaders and chicken keepers.
