A Chicken’s Food Call

A chicken’s food call is readily recognizable. The chicken usually makes this high-pitched, rapidly repeated sound while pecking at the ground. For instance, a mother hen makes the sound when she finds some tasty tidbit for her chicks.

What does the food call mean?

To an information behavioral scientist the chicken is conveying a specific meaning. In this case, the meaning is “I found something good to eat.” And, indeed, the chicks are attracted to food found by their mother.

Functional behaviorists, on the other hand, believe that chicken sounds have no intrinsic meaning. Rather, each individual listener interprets them differently. These scientists will tell you that the food call is mislabeled. Its true function is not to draw attention to food, but to something of interest that may or may not be edible.

Yes, it helps a mother hen efficiently nourish her chicks. But a cock makes a similar excited, rapid tuck-tuck-tuck sound. Because he does so while pecking on the ground, informationists say he is informing his hens that he has found something tasty to share with them. But sometimes a cock gives a somewhat less excited food call on encountering inedible debris in the yard.

To a functionalist this use of the so-called food call when no food is present reinforces the idea that its intent is to attract attention to something of interest. The purpose of the cock’s call is not to find food for the hens. Rather, its purpose is to attract them to come closer, thereby increasing his chances for reproductive success. Indeed, the cock’s food call sometimes segues into courtship sounds.

Are chickens deceitful?

Aha! says the informationist. The rooster is deliberately using the food call to deceive hens into believing he has found something good to eat.

Not so fast, says the functionalist. A growing cockerel, like all chicks, is merely conditioned by reinforcement with food when he responds to his mom’s food call.

Later, as a mature cock, he exploits this association between the food call and eating to keep his hens nearby. Then he can both readily mate the hens and keep them from mating his rivals.

The cock hasn’t expressed the message that he has found food. Rather, the hens (or some of them, anyway) assess from the call that he has found food. What appears to be deception — calling without a food find — works for the rooster. Why it works is because, on average, he actually does find some tasty food item for his ladies.

Some hens therefore come running, but others ignore the rooster’s call. This fact reinforces the idea that each listener extracts different information from the same sound. Therefore each listener responds in a different way. If the message were the same for each listener, as the information behaviorist believes, then all the hens would react the same way.

What about variations?

Most chicken sounds have variations. We’ve seen an example in the difference between a hen’s food call and a cock’s more excited, high pitched version.

Chicken sounds also gradate from one call to another. Examples are a hen’s transition from a cluck to a food call and a cock’s transition from a food call to a mating call.

Informationists, who consider the sounds chickens make to be similar to human words, tend to ignore these variations. Functionalists, on the other hand, embrace them as indications of changes in motivation as an interaction unfolds.

How many chicken “words”?

Because information behaviorists ascribe word-like meanings to chicken sounds, they try to count up the number of words in a chicken’s vocabulary. All those pesky variations and intergradations among and between sounds annoy these scientists, because they mess up the count. That’s why no two informationists can agree on exactly how many words are in a chicken’s vocabulary.

Scientists using a functional approach don’t have this problem. All those gradations mean something when interpreted by associating the caller’s motivation with the sound’s structure. These scientists recognize that the intergrading of various calls shows how finely tuned the signaler is to the situation at hand.

But is it a language?

No one can deny that every sound a chicken makes has meaning. And also that a chicken’s complex and sophisticated system of communication parallels human language in many ways. Like humans, chickens are able to:

• distinguish specific sounds
• use sounds to denote environmental events (such as the discovery of food or the approach of a predator)
• produce sounds for the benefit of an audience (other chickens)
• reveal, through the sound’s structure, the motive (or mood) of the one making the sound

However, chickens do not have a language comparable to ours. They do not use abstract symbolic sounds, like the word “chicken,” to refer to things. They do not use sounds to indicate something that exists apart from what is going on at the moment, like we humans know what a chicken is even when we’re not currently looking at one.

Chickens don’t, as far as we know, discuss abstract concepts, or past or future events. Rather, they use sounds to indicate things that are right here, now (food on the ground or the approach of a stranger). In other words, they limit their communications to the present.

What difference does all this make to you as a chicken keeper? Well, you can enjoy speaking to your chickens as you would a dog or a cat, and otherwise treat them as fellow humans and delight in their human-like responses.

Or you can dig deeper into their psyche. By attempting to understand what motivates your chickens, you can learn to communicate like they do.

This blog was written in collaboration with ornithologist Gene Morton, author of Animal Vocal Communication. Gene also co-blogged Do Chickens Mean What They Say?, among others.