This is my first post about chickens so I thought I would tell you about the early days on our tiny farm. Things are pretty calm around here now, but they haven't always been this way.
I bought my first chickens on a whim, which is never a good idea. Many years ago at a Bayleaf, NC, Volunteer Fire Department auction, I saw a man pull two roosters out of a box and lay them bound and struggling on the block. The auctioneer said something clever, a few people laughed, and then somebody shouted, "$2.00!" and the auctioneer replied, "Hep!” “Two and a quarter… Hep!” “$2.50 for the pair….” and that is how, without forethought or consideration, I got chickens. "Congratulations, young lady."
I don’t know how we kept them alive that first month, but we did. Our county Cooperative Extension agent sent us a floor plan for the coop and he may have been the person who suggested we go to a factory farm for hens. If he was, he did us a big favor because the farm gave us six white Leghorns for free.
Our birds settled in quickly, and the first few weeks were tranquil -- attentive roosters following gentle hens -- scratching, dust bathing, communing, laying. But then, as abruptly as if someone had flicked the lights off, the curtain went up and the play began. It was an Agatha Christie mystery without clues; there were no suspicious sounds, no stray feathers, no bodies – but every few nights one more hen failed to show up for dinner. Newbies, we were in a fog well into the third act. By the time we finally spotted the culprit, our dog Danny, who had never once even been called in for questioning, had finished off most of the hens and driven the roosters stark raving mad. Ace and Big Time became so fierce that after we got new hens we had to lock the whole flock away for our safety as well as theirs. And they stayed locked up until the next summer, when we gave them to our neighbors and moved away.
It was almost two decades later, after we had moved back to the country and our big dog Buffalo had died, that we bought chickens again. With Buffalo on the property, chickens had been out of the question, as had cats, children, and other small animals. But, afterwards, things changed.
First, we adopted our cat Claymore and then we brought home two Rhode Island Red pullets and two Barred Rocks. Apparently, I hadn't learned anything the first time I had chickens, because we left the new birds on their own the first weekend we had them and by the time we got home on Sunday, only one was left.
By 2002, we had had 20 chickens, 15 of which had been killed by predators. We had caught a hawk and later a raccoon red-handed. I had sicced my dog, much to her delight, on an opossum in the hen house. I am pretty sure an owl got three of our birds and a fox took another. And I had watched a hawk swoop and miss twice in one afternoon, as our birds darted under bushes and huddled against the foundation of our house. I don’t care what the National Pork Board says, chicken is still America’s favorite white meat. And that's a situation you need to take seriously if you are thinking about having chickens of your own.
The final straw came when a weasel squeezed through the 2" X 4" wire of our coop, pulled our little chick Peep off the roost, and ate her right there on the chicken house floor in front of the others. Peep was the only bird our hens had managed to hatch and raise on their own, and her loss brought us to enough is enough. We tore down the coop and replaced it with a lean off our garden shed -- "Fort Knox," my husband calls it. The new coop is made of wood but the floor and every vent are covered with 1/2-inch wire cloth, and since building it eight years ago, we have lost only two hens to predators.
Our first bird to live a full life was Sue Ellen. She was a big Rhode Island Red with a weakness for ice cream and grapes; she liked to sit on the arm of my rocking chair, and I believe she would have moved into our house if we had let her. She laid duck-sized eggs that we gave as gifts to our friends. And since we didn’t have a rooster in those years, she ruled the roost.
We have 10 birds now, including Roy and the two remaining new girls. The Mean Girls have settled down since Roy came of age, and even Arabella, our beloved Andalusian Blue hen who has always been an outsider seems to be hanging out with the others more often. I caught her the other day having sex with Roy, which was a big surprise, but maybe it has made a difference.
1 Nobby, on the CD Born in the Country, by Mike Cross
I bought my first chickens on a whim, which is never a good idea. Many years ago at a Bayleaf, NC, Volunteer Fire Department auction, I saw a man pull two roosters out of a box and lay them bound and struggling on the block. The auctioneer said something clever, a few people laughed, and then somebody shouted, "$2.00!" and the auctioneer replied, "Hep!” “Two and a quarter… Hep!” “$2.50 for the pair….” and that is how, without forethought or consideration, I got chickens. "Congratulations, young lady."
I don’t know how we kept them alive that first month, but we did. Our county Cooperative Extension agent sent us a floor plan for the coop and he may have been the person who suggested we go to a factory farm for hens. If he was, he did us a big favor because the farm gave us six white Leghorns for free.
Our birds settled in quickly, and the first few weeks were tranquil -- attentive roosters following gentle hens -- scratching, dust bathing, communing, laying. But then, as abruptly as if someone had flicked the lights off, the curtain went up and the play began. It was an Agatha Christie mystery without clues; there were no suspicious sounds, no stray feathers, no bodies – but every few nights one more hen failed to show up for dinner. Newbies, we were in a fog well into the third act. By the time we finally spotted the culprit, our dog Danny, who had never once even been called in for questioning, had finished off most of the hens and driven the roosters stark raving mad. Ace and Big Time became so fierce that after we got new hens we had to lock the whole flock away for our safety as well as theirs. And they stayed locked up until the next summer, when we gave them to our neighbors and moved away.
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| Buffalo loved the boys. |
First, we adopted our cat Claymore and then we brought home two Rhode Island Red pullets and two Barred Rocks. Apparently, I hadn't learned anything the first time I had chickens, because we left the new birds on their own the first weekend we had them and by the time we got home on Sunday, only one was left.
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| Claymore loves baskets. |
By 2002, we had had 20 chickens, 15 of which had been killed by predators. We had caught a hawk and later a raccoon red-handed. I had sicced my dog, much to her delight, on an opossum in the hen house. I am pretty sure an owl got three of our birds and a fox took another. And I had watched a hawk swoop and miss twice in one afternoon, as our birds darted under bushes and huddled against the foundation of our house. I don’t care what the National Pork Board says, chicken is still America’s favorite white meat. And that's a situation you need to take seriously if you are thinking about having chickens of your own.
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| Peep was just a baby. |
Chickens are prone to cancer of the spine and its effects are unmistakable. When Sue Ellen was six years old, she fell into a persistent malaise. Shewandered the yard for awhile, then came into the house and settled into a box top behind a chair, and finally, still uncomforted, she moved back to the coop, where she soon lost the use of her wings and then of her legs. Natural death comes slowly to chickens, and I am not sure it is preferable to what predators impose. But because Sue Ellen looked afraid, I watched over her. Every morning for two weeks I lifted her failing body off the floor of the coop and set her outside with food and water, and every evening I put her back in, until finally one morning she was gone.
These days, life in our chicken house is settled and routine. I don’t know, really, what we do differently now, but we don’t have the problems we used to. We still have a big black snake living under the garden shed next door, and he takes a few eggs now and then, but we live with it. And we lost a young hen to a raccoon last week while I was struggling with my new automatic chicken door, but she was only the second in 8 years. For the most part, things are peaceable.
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| Black Snake at lunch |
We have 10 birds now, including Roy and the two remaining new girls. The Mean Girls have settled down since Roy came of age, and even Arabella, our beloved Andalusian Blue hen who has always been an outsider seems to be hanging out with the others more often. I caught her the other day having sex with Roy, which was a big surprise, but maybe it has made a difference.
Roy, as it turns out, is quite the sex maniac. His favorite hens are bald from having their head feathers used as a saddle horn, and they have little divots on their shoulders, which we refer to as toe holds. His Number One hen, who has been his special girlfriend since they were little yellow chicks, has a bald back,
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| Beulah's toe holds identify her as a favorite. |
the price of high status. Roy sleeps beside her every night, and when she goes over the gate to browse in the flower beds, he paces back and forth at the fence. But neither she nor the other hens seem to mind the attention. If Number One comes to bed late, she has to fight for her place on the roost next to Roy because the Mean Girls want him, too.
For his part, Roy is a tireless, democratic, and devoted protector. "Midnight cruiser in his Continental, Diamond ring, silk shirt, and spats; Checking out the chicks on every corner, there are feathers in his hat."1 Who's your daddy, girl? You are, Roy. You're my daddy.
Even with Roy on the job, our chickens live under a rule of law, a pecking order based on age and friendship. Old biddies take choice places on the roost and allow their friends, usually other old biddies, to sit beside them. They chase young girls off the nest and in the yard and bully them at the feeders and the water bowl. They enforce order by bonking each other on the head. In our flock, the Mean Girls, our two 5-year-old Rhode Island Reds, are the enforcers. They tolerate Dorothy, an elderly Dominique, and Number One, but they hate Arabella and the two young Black Sex-Linked girls. And there is no dissuading them. Nothing we do will change their behavior, so we just let them run their show. After so many years with our birds, this is what we have learned: as long as they have a safe, clean place to live, enough to eat and drink, and a nice sunny grassy place to lounge, they will be fine. Like Chauncy the gardener, we just like to watch.
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Rhode Island Roy |
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| Fort Knox. Tool shed on the left; chickens on the right; black snake underneath. |
1 Nobby, on the CD Born in the Country, by Mike Cross
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