Another augury

This morning, waiting for our friends to come over for meditation, suddenly we heard a racket in the front yard.  The older of our two roosters was standing out there, crowing his danger crow, alert and tall and alone. The hens were hidden in the foliage, except one hen who ran frantically to hide herself in response to his warning.  I ran out, in my socks, onto the wet grass, as a small hawk flew right across my view to perch in front of me in our tall pine tree. Hence the rooster's crowing.

This is why we have roosters, we said to each other: to keep the hens safe. And this, just before the weekend when we had decided both roosters had to go . . . .  They've ridden our hens so hard that several have no back feathers, and one has a bald head.

Pharmakon: that which cures but also kills; that which benefits but also harms.  Kill the rooster and cure the hens; kill the rooster, and cure the hens only to have the hawk kill them.  Practical ethics in the poultry yard.

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.

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.