Tale as Old as Time

“Chicken no dey cry for night.

Eyo! Eyo!

If in cry for night, they no kill am chop!”

If you just sang the above lyrics rolling your eyes and acting like Squidward from SpongeBob Squarepants, I can see you had your fair share of childhood joy.

When was the last time you heard a rooster crow? Well, it depends on what part of the world you live in. But it used to be a major time machine back in the day.

Roosters crow at the crack of the dawn because they know how to tell time. Imagine the pain of hearing your Nigerian mom telling you that a common chicken could do what you couldn’t when you had difficulty telling the time accurately.

According to the tiny research I carried out, I found out that different races have trusted the roosters to tell the time before civilization started. In the Middle Ages, there was an abundance of chickens all over the different settlings and people back then used to gather for predawn devotions as soon as the cock crowed. So, it started to serve as a religious call.

Roosters crow at dawn because they have a circadian cycle — the breakdown is they dig light cycles and it’s ingrained in how their hormones work. These crows are driven by testosterone.

Study even stated that if a rooster is kept under constant light conditions, they would still crow at dawn or their crows would be more intense in the morning.

Science has proven once again to know stuff — chickens crow because of some internal biological clock ticking within their nervous system.

Oh, there’s an elephant in the room we should discuss too. That crow, that sound these chickens make, isn’t ‘kukuruku’. Science says it’s “cock-a-doodle-doo.”