spring changes

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.

Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken

I was talking on the telephone with a friend in the comics community, and happened to mention I'd just finished a book on chickens. I've known Michael for a number of years, but somehow I'd never mentioned that I was working on this book. When he broke into loud laughter, I replied (with somewhat injured dignity) that E.B. White diagnosed it years ago: to work on chickens is to set yourself up to be laughed at. But then Michael said I simply had to watch "the best power point in the world," and he insisted on staying on the line while he emailed the link to me, and as I watched it. I now pause this blog for anyone reading it to return to the title, and click on it to play the youtube video. I'll be back later with some more words about it.

Tomorrow afternoon we are throwing a pre-Thanksgiving party tomorrow in honor of the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture, PASA. This local organization helps small farmers to learn to grow food more sustainably, and to market their produce and livestock via the Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign that they created. It also puts on a large conference every February that draws a national audience, remarkably right in the backyard of one of the major agricultural colleges in the Big Ten.

I've attended several of the "field days" that PASA puts on throughout the year. At one I met farmers who raise pastured chickens for eggs, and who came up with the great idea of "adoptiing out" newly hatched chicks to families over Easter, with the proviso that they must take good care of the birds, which go back to the farm after Easter. The adoptive families can then visit "their birds" at the farm, and while they are visiting, pick up some free-range eggs. At another field day, I joined a group of people interested in learning about a Mobile Poultry Processing Unit created by a local poultry processor. He explained how to do humane poultry processing, minimizing the stress and pain to the birds before their ultimate demise, and then he demonstrated. The group attending the field day ranged from other poultry farmers and would-be poultry farmers to a couple working to create terraced poultry farming in a tropical island which because of the unfavorable balance of trade has become a food desert, where all meat must be shipped in from the USA. PASA has been a real resource for all of us (farmers, foodies, and fellow travelers) in central PA, and it felt like time to do our bit in return.

But that brings me back to that youtube clip my friend Michael emailed to me. By now I hope I'm not spoiling the fun if I say Doug Zongker's "Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken" was presented at the AAAS--The American Association for the Advancement of Science--in the Humor panel. This parody of academic power point presentations comes complete with indecipherable graphs and insider-identity-confirming special language that to outsiders seems like gobbledegook. Little wonder that the audience received it with uproarious laughter.

Did I feel insulted by this email message, my husband asked me later that evening? Far from it: to me, the clip illustrates exactly the point E.B. White made years ago: people find chickens funny."Talking about chickens is a risky thing," he confided. To his city friends the chicken was "a comic prop straight out of vaudeville." What are the risks entailed in talking about chickens? Or, to turn the question around, what institutions and practices are at risk when we pay attention to the everyday, ordinary chicken? That's exactly the point I was exploring in Poultry Science, Chicken Culture, and the primer or alphabet that resulted is defiantly partial in both senses of the term: in the sense of being partial rather than epistemologically complete (one of the primary goals of academic research), and in the sense of being affectively connected, partial rather than objective (the other goal of academic research). Working on my book, I felt a mixture of absorption and a kind of joyous levity: risky pleasure indeed.