Location, Location, Location

In a chicken coop, location is everything.  Our coop has three roosts that define the neighborhoods like railroad tracks. The front roost, where Roy sleeps, is high-priced real estate indeed.  Admission is by invitation only, which admit just three lucky hens a night.  The other six birds sleep on the back roost, perhaps a little close to the wall and consequently streaked white with chicken poop.  The chickens don't seem to mind.  It's comfortable there and safe, though unexceptional -- a sort of avian suburb, you might say, with hens warehoused shoulder to shoulder in a row along the branch.  Between those two perches and with one end right against the glass door, hangs the dreaded lower roost.  The low roost is where a young hen was pulled from the house and killed last spring, while I was installing my automatic chicken door.  An animal bent back the temporary wire barrier I had tacked up and pulled the little chicken partially through the hole, just far enough to bite off her head and leave the rest stuck there for the petsitter to find.   Even now that the chicken door is up and working, birds who sleep on the low roost must occasionally come eye to eye with a raccoon peering inside.  It's the kind of place a young girl dreams of leaving.

And leave they do, because in our coop the birds rotate.  Roy sees to that.  He moves the girls from neighborhood to neighborhood by issuing exclusive invitations to the high roost. 

I should tell you that although Roy shares his roost with three hens each night, there are only two invitations because Roy has had a special girlfriend since he was a little yellow chick, we call her the Number One hen, and in addition to other perqs of high status, she always sleeps on his left.  Roy sleeps in the center of his roost, and Number One sleeps on his left.  Dorothy, our eldest, sleeps two places down on his other side, and a guest bird sleeps between.  It's the guest who rotates.  I don't know the rules, but I do know that Roy enforces them.  I have seen him peck and crowd an interloper until she falls off the roost or moves to the back, so that someone else, the right bird, the invited guest, can fill the slot.  Four birds, no more, no less, sleep on Roy's roost.

Roy sleeps in the middle of the front roost and Number One sleeps beside him.

For a long while this winter, the guest bird was Arabella, with Ginger and Beulah taking turns from time to time, too, all mature hens.  Young girls start out on the lower roost, and eventually graduate to the back one.  All of ours have moved up -- nobody has used the lower roost since the incident -- but they still don't come uptown.  Their day will come, but for now they mature in suburban safety.

The odd thing is that Roy doesn't seem to like Arabella much, or Ginger either, for that matter, but he lets them sleep next to him.  Maybe the reason has something to do with fence mending or deference to age.  Or maybe the hens draw straws or have another way of awarding time.  For having lived with chickens for so many millennia, humans know little about their social systems.  Except, of course, that they exist.

Holiday Eggs

I do most of my baking in the two weeks before Christmas, mostly sugar cookies and shortbread, but sometimes pecan chewies or a pie and once in a while a cake.  I clear out the kitchen and haul in a storehouse of sugar and flour, nuts, dyes, spices --everything but the eggs.  I don't buy eggs because we raise those here.  


Just look at this bird! If I had a hair day as

bad as hers, I might skip work, too.

I say we raise them here, but this time of year our supply can be a little iffy because our hens stop showing up for work. They are molting right now -- visibly shedding -- and there is a deep wind row of feathers beneath their roost in the chicken house. It's odd that they start just as the weather turns cold, being half-naked for most of it, but they do. In our climate, they start in mid-November and shed right through the holidays. They won't lay again until they have a bright new coat of feathers sometime in January.

Fortunately, it's just the A-Team, the mature hens, who molt.  The Junior Varsity, born last spring and still sporting brand new feathers from the summer, are on the sideline, and we call them in.  They have only been laying for a few months, so their eggs are smallish, but they pull us through. 

We have just two youngsters on the job this year and they are laying a single egg a day.  So this time of the year, we are strategizing all the time.  Shall we eat it or save it?  Shall we go ahead and make sugar cookies or save up for a coconut cake?  Can we afford to give this egg away or should we hoard it with the others?  Ah Lordy, the holidays.  I hope Santa can't see this.

And we strategize over the hens, too, buying a couple of chicks each spring just for the holiday eggs. We figure that if most of them live for seven years, as they tend to do, our flock will top out at around a dozen. And for us that's a pretty good number.
Twelve hens should give us a thriving egg business next summer. We'll have two or three dozen a week to sell, plenty for grits and eggs on the weekends, and a few left over to bake with. The new girls will keep the flock young. Their eggs will help pay for chicken feed, endow the chicken retirement fund, and give my husband a little walking around money for the Starbucks coffee he craves. That way, everybody gets what they need, and nobody gets edgy.

And, of course, the baked goods are tasty, too. Pecan chewies this year and a couple of caramel cakes -- all made with fresh, home-grown, not jumbo but big enough eggs. You have to love the holidays. Nothing says lovin' like somethin' in the oven.

Rhode Island Reds and Dominiques

Georgie Moss Lewis and my sisters Betty and Barbara.

The first thing I do every morning is go down to the kitchen and look out the window for my chickens.  There should be three black hens, three red ones, three grey striped ones, and Roy.  The Black Sex-Linked hens came to me by accident.  My usual breeds are Rhode Island Reds and Dominiques.  I like them because they are the breeds my grandmother raised. 


My grandparents have been gone for more than 40 years now, but when I was a child they had a farm in Tennessee.  Their white frame house stood on a piece of high ground with cotton fields in front and pasture behind.  It had a fireplace in the living room and a hand pump just outside the back door.  It had a concrete front porch, a single bedroom, and a kitchen with cold running water.  When my sisters and I were infants, our parents used to bath us in the sink.  When we grew too big for that, they heated water on the stove to fill a tin basin on the floor.  I can remember sitting in that tub surrounded by family going about their business.  My baths were public and drafty, but to their credit, they were better than running to the outhouse in rain.

The house was surrounded by cotton fields.

The chicken house stood behind the house, near the storage shed and the milking barn.  Other than the space for these buildings and their yards, and for the garden and pasture, my grandparents planted every foot of their land in cotton.  Growing crops occupied their lives; it bound them to the soil and the seasons.  My grandparents' farm was not like mine.  It did not have tractors or pet sitters.  It did not have  hay delivered.  My grandparents did not name their chickens or give their roosters away. 

In the year when my father was dying of lung cancer, we talked about his upbringing.  "We didn't have nothing," he said.  "We never had nothing."  But as I remember it, my grandparents had quite a bit.  For one thing, they were healthy and, I couldn't help noticing even as a seven-year-old, inordinately handsome.  For another, they liked each other.  They smiled a lot and their eyes crinkled, and they had four doting sons who visited often and sent money when they couldn't.

My father Jim Lewis and his father Noel.

But good looks and good cheer don't necessarily put food on the table and the money must not have gone far.  In a climate that ranges from 10 inches of snow to 100+ degrees, my grandparents never lived in a house with insulation, they never had an indoor toilet or a telephone, never owned a car or a home.  Until they moved to my father's farm, they had been tenent farmers.  Their last house, in Mississippi, had only a deep well on the back porch -- that's right, the kind you dip water out of with a bucket, and the porch was built right over it -- and when it went dry, my grandfather hauled water on foot from the neighborhood store, a mile up the road, on the highway.  That was in 1966, and he was almost 80 years old.

It's no wonder their lifestyle has passed away.  And no wonder chickens are not always welcome these days, reminders as they are of such times.  I'm glad for the comforts I have and for the ease my animals share.  But I am also glad for the people and places I loved as a child and grateful for the memories.  And for my Rhode Island Reds and Dominiques who keep them alive.

The Automatic Chicken Door -- How To

My automatic chicken door has been up and running for four months now, and so far, knock on wood, it has been as faithful as a postman.  It is built of scrap wood and Lucite and runs on the little Add-A-Motor D20 Chicken Coop Motor from Smarthome.com.  In case you are contemplating a new door for your chicks, here's how I built it.

I used:

(2) 2x4 boards, 36 inches long
(2) 2x4 boards, 12 inches long
(1) sheet of PGLA .220 Lucite (a competitor of Plexiglas), 12"x18"
(1) strip of aluminum slatwall insert, 3' long
(1) screw hook, to attach the string to the door
(1) handful of nails
(1) Add-A-Motor D20 Chicken Coop Motor
(1) lamp timer

All that cost about $120, which was more than I wanted to spend, but after letting my birds in and out every day for 12 years, I decided it was worth the money.  Of the total, about $20 went for construction materials, and the rest paid for the motor.  In the time since I bought them, the materials have gone up in price and the motor has come down, but the bottom line is about the same.  

 Some doors are at ground level. Mine is elevated, with a ramp for access, and my chickens love it. I put rungs on the ramp at chicken footstep intervals, about 3 inches apart. The rungs are closer together than I expected them to be; I just kept adding until my birds stopped sliding.
 

My door was complicated by being framed inside an existing screen door. Your door, started from scratch, would be simpler to install. In either case, the design consists of three parts: the framed doorway, the sliding door itself, and the motor.

The doorway is 12" wide and 18" high, just big enough for my Rhode Island Red rooster Roy to get through if he ducks his head a little. You can check the best fit for your birds by putting ruler marks on a post or wall of your coop or leaning a yardstick against it and measuring your birds as they walk by. 


Roy stands 24" from comb to claw.  You can see the black mark on the post behind him.

A string attaches the motor to the Plexiglas.

The door is a Lucite panel that runs up and down in aluminum tracks.  Lucite, Plexiglas, Masonite, and tin (not wood) are ideal materials because they are strong, lightweight, and waterproof and will slide without sticking.  Up-and-down doors are more common than models that open from side to side and smaller doors are preferable to larger ones.  Four pounds seems to be all a little motor can lift, and doors with shorter sides have less opportunity to bind against the frame. 

The motor sits inside the coop and above the door frame.  It works like a fishing reel, spinning first one way and then the other to raise and lower the door on a string.  The lamp timer controls the schedule.

Aluminum slatwall inserts hold the Lucite in place and guide it up and down.  They are tacked to the insides of the door frame and they look like this:



           

Aluminum Slatwall Inserts guide the Plexiglas.


I used scrap wood to frame my doorway and bought the rest of my materials from Lowe’s Home Improvement Store.  Lowe's sells the Lucite in 18” X 24” sheets and the aluminum slatwall inserts in 6’ strips.  I had the store cut both in half for me, so what I took home was two 18” X12” panels of Lucite and two 3' strips of slatwall.  If I had bought the wood there, I suppose they would have cut that, too.  My timer is just a standard $4 lamp timer, also from Lowe's.



All I had to do when I got home was (using an existing entry into the chicken house):

1. Nail the aluminum slatwall to a wide edge of the longer 2x4s.  The nail will go right through the metal; just be sure it is flush and straight and that you don't bend the metal; 
2. Nail one side board into place;
3. Insert a Plexiglas panel into the track and the other side board, slide it up and down to make sure the fit is secure but not binding, and nail the second side board into place.  Then, with the Plexiglas inserted, nail the bottom sill into place to hold it.  And finally, nail the top board in place.  It was very, very easy.

The closed door sits in a groove for added security.

I am particularly pleased with the bottom sill of the doorway.  I grooved it to deter raccoons from poking their little claws underneath the closed door and trying to lift it.

I used the remaining half of my Lucite sheet to cover the top of the opening in my door. I tacked it tightly against the tracks as a permanent cover, but that was necessary only because I started with an opening that was twice as tall as I wanted in the first place. If you are starting from scratch, cut an opening exactly the size you need and be done with it.  Share the extra Lucite with a friend.

Although the framing went well, the motor is a different story.  I started with a motor that was too complicated for me and wasted quite a bit of time before I finally gave up on it and found a simpler one that I could install, adjust, and maintain by myself.

The first motor was the DIY model described on Chris and Keri's Blog.  I liked it because it was inexpensive and hand-made and clever, but in retrospect, Oh My God, What was I thinking?!  Chris and Keri's motor is a mass of electrical wiring and limit switches and a jerry-rigged screwdriver with a soldered circuit board that I don't even begin to understand.  Look at Chris and Keri's material list carefully.  If you don't recognize the parts or know what they're for or how they work, possibly this motor is not the best choice for you either, Grasshopper.

                            Master Po: Close your eyes. What do you hear?
                            Young Caine: I hear the water, I hear the birds.
                            Master Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat?
                            Caine: No.
                            Master Po: Do you hear the grasshopper which is at your feet?
                            Caine: Old man, how is it that you hear these things?
                            Master Po: Young man, how is it that you do not?
                                                                              Pilot episode of Kung Fu (1972)

My friend Keith built Chris and Keri's motor for me; all I had to do was make it work.  But I had immediate problems with the limit switches, which I never got the hang of, and after I had fiddled with the screwdriver for a while, it stopped working, too.  The underlying problem was that I could not hear the grasshopper of the assembly which was at my feet.  Although Chris and Keri's design is a boon to those with better ears, my destiny lay with a factory-built model and a warranty.

Add-a-Motor Chicken Coop Motor Model D20

 I got on the internet and bought the Add-a-Motor Chicken Coop Motor Model D20.  On the negative side, it's made in China, it cost me almost $100 (although another company sells it cheaper now), and it’s not the hand-made gift my friend Keith made for me.   On the positive, it arrived in 2 days, it’s small and manageable (it looks like a big white thermostat, with all the parts inside where I don't even have to see them), it has a warranty, and its optional accessories include attachments for battery and solar backup. What’s more, it came with simple, thorough, idiot-proof instructions that make me feel not actually competent, but still very warm and fuzzy indeed.

It took me the better part of a day to wire and install an electrical receptacle in the chicken house and it took all of the following morning for me to digest the instructions and install the motor, scrounge up a timer, set it, plug it in, and test it.  But that night at 8:30 sharp, a gentle whir announced the door was closing, and the next morning my birds were outside and on the job before I was.  The machine is a Godsend.

Setting Hen

Our chickens seem to set any time they accumulate enough eggs to make it worth their while.  Sometimes a pet sitter forgets to gather the eggs while we are on vacation; sometimes, for some reason, the hens decide to lay under a building somewhere, and it takes us a while to find them.  But whenever the eggs have a chance to mound up in a nest, eventually a hen will settle in on them.
 

Arabella had two nests.

Our favorite hen Arabella decided last June to set under our front porch. By the time we found her, she had two big nests there, each with two dozen or so eggs, and she had settled in on the back one. The wall to her back and lattice around the porch perimeter made her look secure, but any motivated predator could have taken her, given the 21 days she would be confined.  So we decided Arabella had to be moved. 

Moving a setting hen can be disruptive.  Our bird Toodie collected over 40 eggs before we found her under the garden shed and moved her into the coop.  She refused the new nest and a few weeks later, although she was only two years old, she died.  Make of it what you will, but I move my hens reluctantly now.

Arabella refused the new nest, too.  I had just finished framing a new double-wide brood nest on the floor beneath our the laying boxes, and we put her and her eggs inside.  She got off, then back on, then off, then on, and finally off for good.  The eggs cooled, of course, but we left them in the nest.  And, sure enough, a few days later another hen, Number Two, climbed on. 

It didn't matter that the eggs were no longer viable because the rest of the flock would help her rebuild the clutch.  When a hen sets, the others climb right in with her to lay their eggs.  She rocks a little to the side and the eggs roll down under her.  Raising babies becomes a group effort.  When they hatch, the setting hen raises them all as her own.  So, you see, birds of a feather do flock together.

Little Number Two wanted those babies.  She sat on that nest for 30 days, nine more than normal. She had started with about 20 eggs; the old ones rotted and cracked over time, new ones were added, and I am pretty sure the black snake ate more than his share.  She got up only for food and water and to stretch her legs in the chicken yard.  Sometimes other hens stood watch while she was away, but they never got into the nest.  By the time she gave up and walked away, there were only four eggs left, and none was viable. 

As always, we just stayed out of the way.  Number Two made it clear that we were not welcome, and we try not interfere unless there's danger.  So we got no babies this time, but the brood nest is ready now and we are hopeful for spring.

The Automatic Chicken Door

I am so grateful for my automatic chicken door. Every day, all by itself, it lets my chickens out of their house an hour after daybreak and locks them safely back inside just after dark. That means we don't have to be here anymore to do it and, more importantly, neither do our pet sitters. I probably can't describe what that means to me, but let me try.

Having so many animals, and at the same time loving to get away on weekends and for Christmas and Thanksgiving and summer vacation and sometimes just for an evening, we depend with the helplessness of new-born babies on pet sitters. In the early years, we relied on my husband's smart, young workmates, but then our dog Buffalo threw up some tampons on somebody's foot, and I guess word got out.

Beauregard III

Later, we lost two pet sitters because of our rooster Beauregard. As one explained, it wasn't because the donkey had slammed a stall door on her arm and raised a lump the size of Mt. Everest -- donkeys will do that, she said -- or because the dog went missing for an afternoon. It wasn't even because the chair she bought with her earnings blew off the truck and smashed to pieces on the interstate. No, she said, it was just because of the rooster. Awash in testosterone and dedicated to barnyard security, he saw the world through Blackwater eyes. He caught the pet sitter inside the perimeter one afternoon and, although I don’t think there was any real harm done, she was very upset that no one came when she screamed. She swore she would never pet sit for us again, and so far she has been good to her word.

I'm not proud of that episode, but things do happen sometimes when folks work around farm animals they are unaccustomed to. Not everybody knows how to maneuver through a crowd of donkeys or give a Rottweiler a pill or spot a rooster who’s ready to attack; and even if someone can manage part of that, she may not know the others. Our pet sitter, for example, is an expert horsewoman with big dogs of her own. Alas, however, she does not have chickens.

So we were thrilled when our 12-year-old neighbor Nathaniel came to work for us. Already a frequent and welcome visitor to our barnyard, he had a knack for animals and a cautious outlook overall. When he took on our farm as his after-school job, we fell through a wormhole into a parallel universe.  Four years without incident; four years of freedom. Thank you, Nathaniel, for that Golden Age.

There are no teens in our neighborhood now. Our grown-up neighbors help out when they can and we appreciate it; but when nobody here can do it, someone drives out from town, three miles each way. Our pet sitters make two trips a day to feed everybody, and until recently, because chickens don't come home to roost until dark, they made one more trip after sundown just to lock up the birds.

The Door

And that’s why our automatic chicken door is so wonderful. Its little plexiglass door opens and closes on an electric timer, replacing the late-night commute.  That means no more icy roads, no more stumbling around in the dark, no more watching out for copperheads, no more interrupted evenings, and maybe most important, no more encounters with the rooster.

As this small convenience settles into place, making life here on our farm a little bit easier for everyone and bringing us a little closer to a manageable retirement, my grateful heart, as always, fills with Southern song.

"Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,

While we all sup sorrow with the poor;

There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;

Oh Hard times come again no more."

“Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,

Hard Times, hard times, come again no more

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;

Oh hard times come again no more." 

Hard Times                                     

Stephen Foster, 1856                                     

Memorable Chickens

He likes his Starbucks.

There are really only two reasons why we have chickens.  My husband likes them because they lay eggs he can sell to support his Starbucks habit; I like them for the company.  Since we threw out our tv a year ago, the birds have been my entertainment.  They kibitz like tiny Bundys and lounge about like Sugarbaker sisters.  They hunt down their prey like small, feathered, merciless Jack Bauers.  But at the same time, occasionally, they are unexpectedly kind, and over the years, some have been truly memorable.

Our first chicken was Henrietta, a small Barred Rock who had been raised as a pet by a four-year-old.  We bought her from the little girl’s grandfather at his house beside the railroad track on Eubanks Road.  He told us how his granddaughter had cared for the little hen and asked us if we would mind taking a runt.  Kind old man.  But then, without so much as a faretheewell, he snared Henrietta with a crab net and tossed her into our box.  At home, we called her Henry.  Gentle bird, she slept on the porch rail outside our door and, always thin, she came inside on winter evenings to eat baked potatoes with sour cream on the kitchen sink.  We don't know what killed her, but it left nothing more than a perfect ring of feathers and her craw, still filled with corn.   Our Rottweiller Roxanne slept 20 feet away.  It was mid-afternoon



Henrietta

Then there was Frankie, who came over the fence to join our flock after hers was massacred by a teenaged raccoon.  Our neighbors Richard and Betsy had called her Francoise when she lived with them, but after she walked through the woods and across all that open country by herself, to a flock she had only heard in the distance, she became just plain Frankie.


Miss Janie Mangum gave us the singing hen.  Miss Janie had sold the rest of her flock earlier, and in the process the singing hen had wound up on the truck by mistake.  She had sung out to let Miss Janie know and Miss Janie had rescued her and brought her to us.  Miss Janie loved that bird and knew her voice, but I could never distinguish it. I was never quite sure Miss Janie had gotten the right bird off the truck that day, and I only hope we actually had the singing hen and that she lived a good life.

Mom Chick hatched and raised little Peep, the only chicken to live her entire life on our property. Because of Mom Chick, Peep was born free and grew up without ever knowing a cage. Thank you, Mom Chick.

Sue Ellen was a contemporary of Henrietta. She used to stand by and watch the little bird get special attention, and after Henrietta died, she worked hard to take her place. Sue Ellen liked to sit on the arm of my rocking chair to eat green grapes and ice cream. When I worked in my garden, she crowded under me to get the worms I dug up, and when I mowed the lawn she walked along beside me, picking off the crickets and grasshoppers that escaped the blade. She laid eggs that were too big to fit even into extra-large cartons but made great gifts for our friends. And with no rooster on the property, she led her flock for 5 years without event. That may not sound like much, but if a hen's skills are not up to the job, she can be a heavy-handed leader whose tenure is marked by cruelty and dissension. We didn’t learn that until after Sue Ellen had died, because during her reign we had peace.



Sue Ellen

Since Sue Ellen, we have had two dynasties of roosters, the Barred Rock Beauregards and Rhode Island Roy.  Beauregard I was a breeding loaner, with us for only a short time.  He was a very tall rooster who, for some anomaly of genetics or habit, goose stepped with straight legs like a Wehrmacht soldier.


Beauregard II died young.  He was murdered by a hawk while crowing the alarm from a fallen log. The hawk, no bigger than Beauregard himself, landed with one foot on the rooster's head, a talon in each temple, and killed him on the spot.



Beauregard III

 Beauregard III stayed with us for seven years, god help us. He was a cautious, neurotic, and aggressive bird, unsafe for small children, hated and feared by pet sitters, visitors, and my husband alike.  But he was devoted to his hens, and to his credit, he never lost one.  His hens loved him and his chicken yard was peaceful and orderly.  In return, I admired and appreciated him.  Sure, he was scary, but Good Grief, he was only two feet tall -- how much damage could he really do?

After Beuaregard died, we retired the name and the breed and call our new rooster Rhode Island Roy.  I hand raised Roy almost from a chick, hoping someday he would ride on my shoulder like a macaw or pull a wagon like a rooster I've seen in photos.  But instead, Roy followed in Beauregard's path.  When he reached puberty, his outlook soured, and by the time his spurs matured, he had become a danger to us all.  But this time I took matters in hand.  If you have an aggressive rooster, you may be interested in this.

Whenever I saw Roy coming at me, I turned to face him and stuck out my foot, sole up (don't try this without good stout shoes), as a target, and he bounced off it, no harm done.  Being repelled seemed to confuse him.  He would stagger to his feet, regain his composure, and come at me again, until eventually he wore himself out.  Then, if I could manage it, I would catch him by the tail feathers and hold him down for a few minutes, which he hated.  The key was to block his assault without hurting him.  Chickens are delicate; one good kick can be fatal.  You have to hold your foot still.

Surprisingly, Roy was a fast learner.  I think within a week or so, I became top rooster and he stopped attacking me.  For awhile, he occasionally looked askance at me or even started toward me, but he never followed through.  I just turned to face him, which made him stop, think, and then go on to something else.  These days, he is trusting enough to turn his back on me, and he passes under my arm to come and go from his yard.  In the past couple of weeks, he has been eating figs out of my hand and it's been more than a year since our last encounter.

The payoff for having Roy on the property is huge. After a period of anarchy when the Mean Girls tried and failed to lead the flock, Roy has returned peace to our chicken yard.  By sheer force of personality, he manages for the most part to keep his women out of my flower beds, and for that I am wholeheartedly in his debt.

I hope Roy will be with us for a long time.  Already, he is memorable.

First Posting About Chickens

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. 


Buffalo loved the boys.

 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.  

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.



Peep was just a baby.

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.



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. 



Black Snake at lunch

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.

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.



Beulah's toe holds identify her as a favorite.

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,

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.



Rhode Island Roy

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.

.

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