The Peace that Passeth Roosters

Well, we now have a peaceful home. No roosters, and just the sixteen hens pecking their way across the lawn, running under the big tree every time a leaf falls and scares them, and (we hope) going back to their routine of laying eggs. Sleep isn't disrupted any more (ahhhh--we needed that after the disruption of the Obama election, wonderful as that was).

My Buddhist thought for the day seems to apply: "The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve." - Buddha.

I do believe hens think, after their own fashion, and they are thinking now about grain, leaves, bugs, high winds (what IS that buffeting feeling?), but not any longer about roosters. Dominance and sex no longer serve as the sieve to their thoughts--just the need for food and perhaps the pleasure of each other's company.

And yet I miss the roosters. Darwin brought them back to me, as I was reading The Descent of Man this morning: "Male birds . . . possess special weapons for fighting with each other. They charm the female by vocal or instrumental music of the most varied kinds. They are ornamented by all sorts of combs, wattles, protuberances, horns, air-distended sacks, topknots, naked shafts, plumes and lengthened feathers gracefully springing from all parts of the body. The beak and naked skin about the head, and the feathers, are often gorgeously colored. . . . On the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have. . . . In man, however, when cultivated, the sense of beauty is manifestly a far more complex feeling, and is associated with various intellectual ideas." (Darwin, The Descent of Man, XIII)

Chicken Soup for the Chicken Soup Maker's Soul

What is chicken soup to the soup-maker's soul?

We took the splendidly beautiful little bantam roosters to Eli Reiff's Poultry Processing Plant on Friday, because six roosters crowing all the time, and jumping the hens, was simply too much.

The hens are happier for it, and I imagine we will both be happier for it, but right now I'm more unsettled and jumpy than happy. As I told G. when we were out putting the door back on the chicken shed after giving them a new small trapdoor (to hold the heat in the house during the winter winds), I feel "like someone lit a fire under me."

Ahh--thank you unconscious.

In the kitchen, a big pot of my chicken soup is bubbling on the gas flame, with three of my roosters in it. G. says it tastes delicious already.

Chicken soup is . . . anything but the bromide those stupid books make it out to be. I hate those titles.