Zoology: Chicken Talk

Nationality seems to make no difference at all. "Ga-ga-GAAK, ga-ga-GAAK" means the same thing to a Russian Orloff rooster, an Italian Leghorn, a Cornish cock or a New Hampshire Red. At the sound of the excited cackling, prudent poultry the world over get the same message: "Watch out! Danger!"

Dr. Erich Baeumer, the country physician from Wiedenau, Germany, who translated the warning into people talk, insists that all chickens speak an international language made up of 30 basic sentences. And as a fowl linguist, the portly G.P. speaks with considerable authority. He has been studying the birds for nearly 60 years.

Young Erich was eight when his mother made him play in the chicken yard to keep him out of the road. "It was an intuitive understanding," he remembers with surprise. "I could actually tell what they were saying. I began to spend hours with them; they became brothers and sisters to me." He learned to imitate their sounds so well that he was accepted as a full-fledged member of the flock. Only when his voice changed did the chickens realize that he was not really one of them.

My Son the Rooster. All through his student years, Baeumer kept chummy with chickens; when he started medical practice in rural Wiedenau, he turned his garden into a chicken yard. He spent all his spare moments there, communing with the inmates, observing their language and customs. Sometimes he incubated a clutch of eggs and kept the chicks isolated so that they accepted him as their mother and apparently thought other humans were just big chickens. He listened carefully while their baby peeps changed to adult chicken language, and found that it came from instinct and never varied appreciably. Roosters raised in isolation from other chickens always crow correctly without learning how; isolated hens make correct clucking noises as soon as they feel ready to brood.

In 1954 the absorbing hobby became scientific research. The late Professor Erich von Hoist was experimenting with chickens at the Institute of Behavior Physiology near Munich, and he needed an associate who knew chickens intimately. Von Hoist was so impressed with the country doctor's chicken lore that he started him on an orgy of photography and tape recording.

After recording hours of chicken talk, Dr. Baeumer would play the tapes back, selecting examples of clear-cut chicken "sentences" that could be related to records or photographs of specific actions. Collecting prime examples of all the basic sentences took about four years. Best performers were breeds with strains of gamecock in them. "Chickens with fighting blood," says Dr. Baeumer, "are better because they have more temperament."