Emergenc(e/y) of the First White Male

Well, the tall skinny white hen with the striking red comb and the Aracauna-like beard has finally come out of the closet, and she's a rooster. I had suspected as much: her stance was too upright, her tail held too high, her run too vigorous and direct, her profile narrow rather than beamy. And yet she never crowed, and she didn't seem to be interested in the other hens.

But this morning, when I went out in the high winds of this grey November to let the birds out of the hen house, he flared his wing like the flamenco dancer he clearly is, and immediately began to tred a willing hen. No crowing yet, but he is definitely rooster number 2 in my flock of only 22 birds. The other rooster is a year older: a beautiful cross between a Salmon Faverolle and an Australorpe that we acquired from a breeder in Belleville who swore she had sexed them all. Humph. I'd be happy to have two roosters, but they won't be happy to share the hens and the feed and the space in the hen house and yard. The last pair we had fought til they were bloodied, and then finally the younger dispatched the older. I don't want these birds to repeat that experience: it was too hard to watch. And yet I'm attached to both of them. We'll see what emerges. In any case, the emergence of this particular White Male marks a moment of closure, reminding me of Ruth Ozeki's story, "The Death of the Last White Male," which she wrote in dialogue with one of my earliest pieces for the book, "Chicken Auguries." Very fitting realization--of the existence of my First White Male--on the day I've just learned the first copy of PSCC is on its way to me. [The book title is too long: it'll have to be an acronym in this blog, but at least an acronym without the violent overtones of the defense intellectuals' acronyms in Carol Cohn's brilliant essay, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals." There, the acronym served to distance human beings from the material horrors of nuclear war: here, the acronym merely helps me get past texuality to the actual materiality of my living, maturing, changing birds.]

Violence does loom in my hen house, but I can't abstract it into an acronym.

Chick Sourcing and Hen Schlepping

First, an answer to Greta, who asked me where I find my chicks, but whose question didn't permit an individual answer.

We live in Boalsburg (small world) so we have gotten chicks from the poultry auction at Belleville. It happens on Wednesday mornings: you show up around 11:00 at the Belleville market, and look for the poultry building (around behind the livestock barn). The auction will start around noon, if I remember correctly. They auction off a wide range of birds there: not just chickens, but guinea fowl, ducks, geese, rabbits and guinea pigs (honorary birds because of their size and edibility), peacocks, and I have even seen a beautiful macaw. As far as chicks go, there are three kinds usually available: large numbers of standard hybrid meat birds, bantam hen and chick combinations, standard size farmyard hens of no particular type with a clutch of chicks, and (very occasionally) pullets. I was once lucky enough to find three beautiful Buff Wyandotte pullets that had been hand raised by the 4H daughter of the cashier at the auction house. They were wonderful: tame, friendly, smart, and they laid gorgeous brown eggs. Another time I found a pair of Silkies, that went on to lay beautifully, but not at my house because my other roosters had it in for the Silkie rooster, so I had to give them away to a more peaceful home.

They also sell roosters there, and beware, if you see a box of chicks that aren't hybrids, they will often be the result of a chick-sexing wizard who has figured out which the males are in a clutch of chicks and is off-loading them before the pose a problem. Too bad, but much better than just dumping the chicks in the landfill, which is what apparently many of the industrial producers do.
At least those roosters have the chance of life, and ideally not as fighting cocks (though I know some of them do go for that.)

Now, on to a very late report on my own chickens. Last spring, we bought fifty White Wyandotte female chicks from Murray McMurray: our second year of raising our own chickens and staying at least to some extent off the grid. (Or at least knowing exactly what kind of a life our birds had: roaming outside, eating grass and bugs as well as scratch corn, and learning about life.) There is a lot I could say about this experience--for example, the poignant discovery that incubator-raised chicks who come en masse to your brooder have no clue how to deal with the basics of life. At the same time in my chicken yard I had two bantam-hen-and-chick families, and it was actually painful to see the difference in the chicks who had mothers, and those who were raised in the circle of the corrugated cardboard brooder. I did my best--warm lights, clean shavings, food and water always fresh--but they were no more educated into the world than puppies are who are raised in a puppy mill. . . .

In any case, fast forward to this spring. Most of those chickens are in our freezer, though we have eaten a fair number, as coq au vin, or roasted, or stewed. They lived for 18-19 weeks, which is longer than standard, and it really hurt to take them to our Butcher, Eli Reiff. But as I have already written, he is a gem: kind, careful, quiet, and very fast. Only two of the White Wyandottes remain--there was a third, but a raccoon got into the hen house and killed one of them. And that's when the strange new era started for our last pair of hens.

The murderous raccoon had done the killing, but then had not left the hen house. Instead, it curled up in one of the nest boxes and fell asleep. This scared the remaining chickens so badly that when my husband opened the house in the morning they came tearing out--leaving the sluggish sleepy raccoon behind them.

Now, they won't spend any time in the hen house voluntarily. (Can you blame them? I can't!) Instead, they wander around our garden, fields, woods and driveway, happily eating whatever they find and scratching for bugs with absorption. When it begins to get dark, they head into the garage, where we find them settled in for the night on a bookcase. Because we don't trust the garage to be predator-free, we have to pick them up and carry them out to the chicken house, which we carefully check for raccoons etc., and then put them on their perch.

This has become a nightly ritual. And since I'm in New York City most of the time, writing my book, that means that when my husband gets back from a day of seeing clients (he is a psychotherapist), he has to go into the garage, pick up the two sleepy chickens (one under each arm) and deposit them in the chicken house for the night.

And to add insult to injury, we can't find where they are laying their eggs now!

Just a report from the trenches.