Listening to Magnetic Fields ("If there's such a thing as love.") and looking out at my chickens on a still-too-wintry morning, I realize that there are signs of spring even among the chickens. It just takes a certain perspective to identify them. Four of our hens now wear discrete green and grey camouflage saddles: we were forced to this by our three roosters, who have been taking their responsibilities so seriously that the hens were in danger of having their backs rubbed raw. (I leave it to the reader's imagination to figure out how that might happen). Once there is raw skin then there can be a wound, and where there is blood, the pecking order swings into action. Chickens can be pecked to death by their fellows, all because they are hardwired to be drawn to (and curious about) the color red. It was actually quite a simple procedure. We decided to draw the line at actually sewing the saddles, though my chicken health handbook does have a pattern for them. (I realize others might have drawn the line a good bit earlier than we did!) Instead, we ordered them from an online site, and once we had them, we went into the hen house after dark to slip them, one at a time, over the hen's wings until they rested comfortably on her --- shoulders? ---leaving the wings to move freely. Remarkably, the hens adjusted instantly to the saddle. It's less clear that the roosters have. While I haven't seen one saddle get lost, I also haven't (yet) seen one be used in its adapted equestrian function. But that's one somewhat exotic sign of spring.
Another sign is less exotic: we have an Aracauna hen sitting on five different colored eggs, in the garden shed that we divided up to create a brooding space. They are supposed to hatch tomorrow, when my graduate seminar in the Gender and Science: Reproduction class comes over, along with seven students from the Center for Reproductive Biology and Health (between the College of Agriculture and the Huck College of Biosciences) and their lab head, Professor Joy Pate. My students shadowed Joy's students in the lab, or in the barns, or in the field, and tomorrow they will present the results of their shadowing to those they shadowed. And then (I hope) there'll be the opportunity for conversation and feedback from the lab scientists. What a great thing it would be to celebrate the event by having a hatch of chicks!
The final sign of spring for the hens and roosters will arrive in two weeks or so, though I ordered it yesterday. They are getting a new hen house, made by our friends Stolzfus in Madisonburg. It's splendid: on stilts,with nesting boxes that open from the outside, a number of roosts, and windows for aeration. The plan is to shift the birds to this as their summer house, so that we can then clean and air out the winter house, and clean up (of all the scattered shavings from the hen house floor) and seed (with oats or some other edible cover crop) the land all around the winter house. So: clean new home, another spring sign.
As my friend said to me, "So the obsession with chickens doesn't end when the book is published." Absolutely, evidently, not.
