I've been collecting news about chickens thanks to various RSS feeds, but now that I'm back with my own chickens, I'd rather write about what's happening right here in my chicken pen.
The White Wyandottes are much bigger than they were the last time I saw them (about two weeks ago). They also seem to be in a moult, no doubt a result of the very unseasonably hot weather. When they fluff up their feathers, which they do after dust-bathing to get the mites off, their small inside feathers drift to the ground. Yesterday one hen shook herself and a small feather fell into the water pan, where it sailed about like a fairy boat, until the same hen stopped by later for a drink and gobbled the feather right up. People are always so appalled to think that hens will eat anything, but here's an instance. (And of their cannibalistic tendency, too. . .)
The four bantam chickens have now come into maturity, and they are three lovely roosters, with black bodies and golden brown mantles and tails, and one modest golden little hen. The emotionally-tinged language just seems to fit them: the roosters are all display, the hen all inobtrusive speed as she gleans our garden. One of the roosters has started crowing--the lovely one with the black spangled feather-headdress spiking out from his red comb--and it's been so funny to listen to him try to find his particular song. At first it was just like a teenage boy whose voice was breaking, but now he has his riff down, with its distinctive quaver and semi slide down several notes toward the end. I'll see if I can listen and find a way to annotate it. The other day, he was practicing so loudly that he woke me up, about 5:30. I went outside, sure that he was in the garden shed annex to our hen-house because it sounded so loud I thought it was echoing. But no sign of him there. . . Instead, he startled me by flying out of a tree behind our garage just as I was passing beneath it. I looked up, and the other two roosters and the hen were all up there, teetering on a thin maple branch. I'm trying to get them to come into the garden shed so that once winter comes they can find water and food there, but so far they're reluctant to get anywhere near the other chickens (with their large turf-protective Barred Rock-Bantam Crossrooster). So the chicken flock stays in the hen house, to be let out in the morning & closed in at night, while the four bantams range at their pleasure across our lawn, fields, and even garden.
They do visit the chicken coop for food and water occasionally, though. I was sitting out there the other morning, communing with the chickens in my own form of meditation, when the four bantams came in to drink from the red dog bowl of fresh water I'd put down. I'd just seen The 3:10 to Yuma, and it reminded me of the scene in which Ben Wade's gang come into town. The White Wyandottes clucked and clustered, but they along with all of the rest of the 'town' chickens stayed away, while the little Bantam rooster had a dust-up first with the Big Barred Rock/Bantam, and then the tough mama Barred Rock who has seniority in the chicken-yard. After the gang of Bantams, so obviously built for speed and independence, took what they needed from the chicken yard, they cleared right out.
In fact, the chicken community reminds me of what I missed in the film: strong older women. It's not to fill a category that I want this, but because the chicken community shows so clearly that the foundation of a community requires not only male elders and legislators but fearless older women as well. I think of how our old Barred Rock hen patrols the food and water, keeping chipmunks away, and of how the elderly beared Bantam mama who has chosen to stay in the chicken yard vehemently keeps the other intruder Bantams away from food, water, even scattered vegetables that I bring in from the garden. There is a tight sense of belonging each group has, as well as a clear sense of the other's outsider status. The only thing that challenges this is, predictably, the exogamy mandate. Though of course the chickens don't know it as such--they just manifest it as the little Bantam tries to mate not with his mother in the alien foursome, but with the much larger White Wyandottes from the other cohort. However, he can't accomplish that, because she really is a good four inches taller than he. So in the end he turns to his indignant, squawking mama. (And so, of course, seniority only goes so far in the chicken-yard.)
I think these chickens are about three to four weeks shy of their slaughter date, a phrase I somehow hesitate to write here. Why: because the admission that I will kill them puts me in a camp that to many readers may make me the outsider? Not a vegetarian. Not dedicated to the life-long welfare of my hens and roosters. Not the wonderful chicken rescuer I read about in a Minnesota newspaper. . .
I'm interested in this: somehow it has felt important to me to work out a relationship with my chickens that acknowledges the fact that they're going to feed us. They've been well cared for, with affection and good food, water and roaming room, and pretty soon it'll be their time to go. I'll be taking them to Eli, the Mennonite Butcher in the next valley who does the butchering for all of the small farmers in the area. He's careful, gentle, quick, and the most interesting talker I've come across in a long time. When I first met him I decided that he was actually a life form in need of protection, since the small-scale butchers have pretty well vanished from central Pennsylvania. I stand with the chickens as he butchers them, having brought them to him following his careful instructions: no stress, crates covered with a blanket if the air is cold or the wind is harsh. But I'm still wondering how I'll feel after knowing these birds since May 31: we've planned on them as our dinner for the winter & spring, but I'm sorely tempted to keep at least one hen out, as a layer and friend. There's the curious one with the dark red comb and wattles . . .
Mortality: my chickens face it as my friends are facing it, and my mother (who's just fallen, and is increasingly frail), and I all face it. Autumn brings it all right out in the open: the warm, soft, mellow approach to the killing frost.
