For about a week, residents of the University Cooperative Housing Association didn’t need an alarm clock – they were roused by a rooster’s crowing.

The rooster, who was deemed “Baraaack” – after former president Barack Obama – lived in a then-vacant lot near the co-op – a student-led, nonprofit housing space – from April 6 to April 14. Throughout that week, he survived hawk attacks, a visit from animal control and two separate kidnapping attempts by players on the UCLA club rugby team.

Marco Burdick, a fourth-year geography/environmental studies student, said they witnessed two people – who they thought were part of a fraternity – drop off the rooster April 6.

“They had this big cardboard box, they walked out to the middle of the field, and they flipped it over, and this rooster falls out,” they said. “I would just say I was completely awestruck. I was just like, what world do we live in?”

Burdick said Baraaack’s previous owners told them they thought the lot would be an oasis and a paradise for the rooster. The owners said the rooster was not getting along with the other chickens in their yard and that they would pick Baraaack up later, Burdick added.

“It didn’t really seem like they were actively aware that we’re witnessing them doing a very unethical thing,” Burdick said.

Burdick later reached out to other co-op residents on how they could better care for the rooster and find him a new home, they added.

During his time in the lot, the rooster was hunted by a hawk on two different occasions, said Charlotte Lindsay, a third-year student and co-op resident. Burdick attempted to scare the hawk by banging a stick against the fence, they added.

Lindsay said she grew up with chickens and was familiar with what the rooster’s diet should include. Baraaack’s favorite meal was bananas, but co-op residents also fed him oats, tomatoes and cucumbers, she added.

Lindsay’s efforts did not go unnoticed as she was coined “girl doing weird stuff” on a Reddit thread about the rooster, she added. Lindsay also regularly brought the rooster water and built a shelter to protect him, she said.

“It was very exciting because he started drinking water and started ruffling his feathers, so he seemed a lot happier after a bit,” Lindsay said.

She said the people who dropped the rooster off came back the next day to check on him, promising to pick him up later. But they never showed up again, Lindsay said.

Because of a misguided call from a co-op resident, a team from Animal Control & Shelter Services then came to take the rooster away April 10 under the impression that he died, but Burdick added that they defended Baraaack from being taken.

“I didn’t want everyone’s hard work, including my hard work, to waste from them taking this rooster and putting it down,” they said. “We didn’t want the rooster’s life to just go to waste.”

However, some of the residents at the co-op and its neighbors were not happy about the rooster residing in their neighborhood, Burdick added.

Just two days before the rooster was scheduled to be taken to a sanctuary, two men unaffiliated with the co-op – one in a banana costume and one shirtless – chased and attempted to capture the rooster around 5 p.m., Lindsay said. She added that she confirmed they were both UCLA club rugby team players.

Kaliya Javier, a student at Santa Monica College and a co-op resident, said she heard the two rugby players saying that they wanted to kill the chicken because its crowing had been waking them up in the mornings.

A few co-op residents later prevented the rugby players from capturing and harming the rooster, said Chloe Niebla – a fourth-year geography student who lives at the co-op. But at around 11:30 p.m., Niebla said the rugby players returned to the vacant lot with a larger group of around nine UCLA club rugby athletes – who she thought were under the influence of alcohol.

Niebla said the rugby team and co-op residents then engaged in a “yelling match,” which escalated into pushing and shoving among the rugby players and members of the co-op.

“We start calling them out by first name and everything because they got their first and last name on the roster. We’re like, ‘You know that your coach would love this,’” Niebla said. “They stuttered – you could tell it caught them off guard.”

Members of the team whom Lindsay said she was able to identify declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

During the incident, Niebla said a neighbor filed a noise complaint, adding that the police who responded to the call said this was not the first complaint they had received about the club rugby team.

“There was some evidence of the altercation, but the co-opers involved didn’t want to involve anybody else, so they didn’t show the cops,” she said. “There really wasn’t much the cops could do besides tell them to go inside.”

On April 14, Burdick said the co-op residents brought Baraaack to a no-kill shelter in Wilmington called Rescue Roos.

“We managed to get him through those nights of people trying to kill him, hawks trying to kill him, and we drove him the Monday of that weekend out to this nice lady’s place, and so he’s there now,” Lindsay said.

Javier said she is grateful that Baraaack brought members of the co-op closer together.

“A lot of people that I really haven’t talked to in that moment came and stood up for something that we thought was right,” she said. “Now, it’s a funny story to laugh at, but at the moment, it was nice to see how many people came out. … It was about us caring about each other and knowing that our friends cared so much about this whole situation.”