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.

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.