Why the World Is Not Overrun By Chickens

We never really set out to have chickens, but when Earl's brother, Berry, was ready to disband his chicken operation, we couldn't bring ourselves to buy eggs, so we brought a handful of the chickens over here. They didn't really lay all that well over here, like a dozen eggs a month if we were lucky, so last spring I bought some chicks.


Nancy, the organizational genius who runs the office and basically holds the creamery world together, and I went in on a chick order together. We split a box of 25 chicks and my twelve were looking pretty good for a while. They lived in a big cardboard box with a water thing and a grain thing and a heat light and they all slept in a cozy heap at night. Then they started to kill each other. It was late June and warm and we thought we'd try them in the coop with the big chickens. There can sometimes be issues with older chickens pushing younger ones around--that whole pecking order thing--but the big chickens hardly noticed the remaining ten little ones for the two days they shared the coop. Then the little ones escaped out of a space between the boards and spent the rest of the summer roaming about the heifer barn and hayloft. We'd catch glimpses of them here or there and they seemed to be growing and we were sort of busy and they weren't costing us anything, so we figured we'd let them be and worry about how to get them back in the coop in the fall.

As it turned out, it wasn't that hard. One November night, after the kids were in bed and the old chickens were in the coop, I went out with a headlamp and picked up the seven remaining pullets (that's what teenage chickens are called) and brought them into the coop one at a time. I wore thick gloves and ski goggles and Earl's coat to protect me from my irrational freakoutedness that comes with touching birds. I walked right up to where they were roosting (on a dividing gate in the heifer barn) and picked them up with my hands over their wings, chicken heads and all their prehistoric scariness facing away from me. The pullets weren't all comfortable and happy with the process either, but after about five seconds of being handled they figured the world had ended and that they must be dead. That's how it is with chickens--no continued struggles, no looking for their chance to escape--they freak out and then all the fight goes away. It's sort of spooky.

The first time I handled chickens was when I went to get the older birds from Berry's barn the week he gave all his chickens away. There were thirty birds left and Nancy and I were splitting them. Nancy is a chicken whisperer and could move slowly toward them, talking softly, and pick them right up. I, on the other hand, used a net. I was seven months pregnant and not at my most agile, but I eventually managed to catch some chickens. Once they were in the net, I reached under and grabbed hold of their legs, holding them upside down the way I'd seen Kathy, Berry's caregiver and another animal genius, do it. When Kathy carried the chicken and it was still, I thought it was because she was handling the chicken with such confidence that the bird couldn't help but be okay with the situation. When I carried the chicken and the fight went out of it, I thought it had had a heart attack. And because I'm me and think the only thing worse that a live chicken is a dead one (until it's ready to cook, anyway) I stuffed it in the box anyway, hoping Earl would help me when I got the box back to our place. I kept filling the box with chickens in cardiac arrest and then it was full and I could get out of the chicken coop. Kathy and Nancy wouldn't let me carry the boxes of chickens and although it wasn't that heavy and I generally resist the coddling I'm offered when pregnant, I accepted this help gratefully. Thirty pounds doesn't worry me. A box of dead chickens that started to make noise when it was picked up, on the other hand, is fuel for a week of nightmares.

I know. I know. Chickens freak me out and yet I was undertaking their care. What's more, the make-shift coop that Earl had put together in the middle of this colder-than-living-memory February was in this garage-like space off the kitchen. Not exactly in the house, but not exactly not in the house either. And my plan to deal with a box of dead chickens, which of course weren't dead at all, was to bring it to Earl. Fortunately, my marriage can take this sort of thing, occasionally anyway. My paranoia amused Earl and he said he stood at the ready to deal with boxes of dead chickens, real or imaginary. It happens sort of regularly that Earl gets to rescue me from some peril that was only in my head, and he's rather patient about it. So it's not exactly a recipe for success, but you know, it's working.

All winter and spring, the chickens have lived in their coop in the heifer barn. I let them out most afternoons and Harley helps me chase them off the lawn. The boys help me collect the eggs and fill their feeder and keep the water bucket fresh. It's not hard work and it yields the most amazing eggs. There are the seven pullets, eight of Berry's old Rhode Island Reds, and Buster, the rooster. We get about eight eggs a day, which probably means that the pullets lay six eggs a week each. That's how often my Aracana lays her blue eggs, anyway. I have no idea about the old birds; they all look alike to me and they lay brown eggs, just like the Buff Orpingtons, the Silver Lace Wynadotts, and the Black Australorps. We sell a few eggs. We make a lot of homemade pasta and challah bread and crepes. I bake cakes and cookies. Sometimes Cliffy and Earl have fried egg sandwiches for breakfast.

But the old chickens are really old and the new chickens will be old soon and this spring it was time to think of a contingency plan. I was thinking of ordering chicks with my friend, Kate, but we missed the ordering deadlines and then it was going to be the end of June before there were birds available. June seemed so far away, so I bought an incubator instead.

Jackson's preschool hatches a batch of chicks every year and they seem to have great success and the kids like to watch them hatch and it didn't look that hard. Well, it wasn't that hard, except that the incubator just has a turny knob with no settings and I didn't really read the directions about getting the incubator temperature stable before putting any eggs in and I sort of baked the would-be chickens at 120 degrees for an hour or so. I put some more eggs in after that, and we hoped for the best. We candled them (holding them in front of a hole cut in a beer box set over a trouble light) to see if anything was growing. Some of them were uniformly light--no chicken. Some of them had dark masses--maybe chicken. And some of them had dark masses and veiny-looking blood vessel things visible along the sides of the egg--definitely chicken. You'd think I'd be excited for those last ones, but instead, it freaked me out. Then the eggs started to move a little, and that freaked me out. Then there were holes in them and the chicks were hatching and that freaked me out too. I was, of course, holding it together for the sake of the children, but inwardly I was having a hard time being so close to life emerging from an egg.

Maybe it was because of the 120 degrees, but these chicks weren't looking so good. One had a messed up leg and couldn't stand up. Another managed to get out of the shell fully formed but completely dead. Another one seemed to still be attached to the yolk of the egg. They all died, except for the one that was already dead, and the count was four live chicks and three dead ones. There were two yellowish birds and two blackish birds and then the strongest one of the lot turned up dead in the waterer. The waterer is a little plastic circular tray that fits under an inverted mason jar and refills itself to keep about a 1/2 inch of water available. The trough is only about an inch wide at the top, tapering at the bottom. It's not something a chicken can fall into. It's not possible to get stuck in it. The only explanation is that the chick fell asleep while drinking, or suffered cardiac arrest, or just decided not to be alive anymore. Really, there's only so much even a non-freaked out chicken caretaker can do with creatures with so little life force.

The three remaining chicks are looking fine, but they're probably all roosters. I'm not sure what I'll do when it's time to whack them, or even how it will go when we introduce them to the big birds in the coop. I guess I won't do anything but be grateful to Earl and the boys for taking care of that end of the deal.

For now, there are three little chickens living in a cardboard box in my furnace room. The second set of eggs is in the incubator and I check on them constantly. Part of me wants them all to hatch and be hens and keep me supplied in lovely bright yellow-yolked eggs. The other part of me wants the experiment to be over. I suppose it's not up to me either way. For better or for worse, I've got little chickens. Until they decide to be dead.