Hen Chronicles: a few thoughts on peacocks . . . and chickens

I haven’t posted anything on this blog in close to four years, since November 2019. That’s when we lost the last members of our small flock of hens.

We haven’t acquired any chickens since then, and although I’d never say never, it’s unlikely that we will. There was joy and pleasure aplenty back then, but too much heartache and anxiety as well. In fact, our coop and pen are long gone now; the ground remains bare where they once stood. 

Yet all these years later, I still miss “the girls” very much, and have many heartwarming memories of them. That’s why I so enjoyed a quote from a book by Sean Flynn called “Why Peacocks?” I haven’t read Flynn’s book about his experience owning peacocks and I have no personal experience with those glorious creatures. But the following passage captures my attitude toward hens, based on our time with them during more than seven years of chicken keeping, from April 2012 through most of 2019.

“There is always the potential when dabbling with birds — and this no one tells you beforehand — of becoming enchanted,” Flynn writes, “and it is impossible to understand this until it happens.” Peacocks “have personalities and intelligence and foibles and charms and souls,” he writes, ‘and it all sounds ridiculous but it’s true.”

Flynn may be doing himself a disservice by describing his observations as ridiculous-sounding. If you apply his comments to chickens, for example, he’s certainly correct about the truth of them. In that case, at least, I speak from experience.

 

Hen Chronicles: A difference between chickens and other pets

Chickens are unlike other, more typical pets in many ways. They have feathers and beaks and wattles and combs. They live in their own house, not ours. They have their own unique anatomy, physiology, quirks and traits.

And then there’s a far more troublesome difference. Chickens are tasty, which makes them attractive to all sorts of critters who have only one thing in mind: a nighttime snack.

I hesitate to write this for fear of jinxing myself, but in the five years that we’ve kept chickens, we have not lost any to predators. Still, I’m not foolish enough to believe that means there’s no cause for concern. I know people who've suffered such attacks.

We live in a densely populated neighborhood in a relatively small Maine city. I’ve never seen that most dastardly of chicken predators —a fox — since we bought our house 29 years ago. I’d like to believe our neighborhood is too built up to attract them, but that’s probably wishful thinking.

In any case, we have had our share of skunks and raccoons over the years. I once spotted a skunk right outside the pen at dawn, peering inside. I waited until the morning brightened and the skunk disappeared for the day, before releasing our three hens from the coop. Last week, I saw yet another predator, not only for the first time in our yard but for the first time in my life: a possum. When I went out to lock “the girls” in their coop one night, it was sitting about eight feet away, eyeing me quietly.

I’m not a churchgoing person, but every morning, when “the girls” race down the ramp into the pen, I thank the powers that be for watching over them. There are no guarantees in life, though, whether you're a human or a chicken. We take precautions, and hope for the best.

Hen Chronicles: Keeping up with changes in the lingo

Releasing our hens from their coop first thing in the morning is my job, as is putting them to bed at night. My wife Liz gives them snacks during the day when she’s home, but the early-morning routine has been my responsibility ever since we started keeping chickens back in 2012.

Of course, Liz always wants a progress report when I return to the house after I feed Snow, Nellie and Hope at dawn. For years, she greeted me with the same question as soon as I entered the kitchen, day after day after day.

“How are the girls?”

Lately, though, for no obvious reason, she’s come up with a new way of posing the same query.

“How are things in Henlandia?”

Henlandia? Yesterday, I requested some clarification. What does the name Henlandia suggest? It sounds so grandiose. Does it imply that the henhouse is a state unto itself, à la Pennsylvania? Or a country whose name pays homage to Finland and Albania? Or perhaps even a continent? (Antarctica?) Liz gave me the condescending look I have come to recognize as an indication that I have asked a foolish question, or made an idiotic statement.

"Henlandia," she said with great patience, as if explaining the obvious to an addled soul, "is a village."

For some reason, the notion that “the girls” live in their own ostentatiously named hamlet strikes both of us as quite comical. Obviously, we’re easily amused.

Hen Chronicles: Chicken therapy after a painful election

It would be an understatement to say Wednesday morning was a tough one for many of us who awoke to the news that Donald Trump, narcissist and ignoramus extraordinaire, is the president-elect of the United States. I never was a fan of Hillary Clinton, but I saw her as far and away the lesser of the two evils from whom we had to choose.

When I headed out to the coop at dawn Wednesday, I was preoccupied with this frightening turn of events. But my thoughts were quickly diverted from the debacle of Trump’s win to the needs of our three hens: Snow, Nellie and Hope.

“The girls” had no knowledge of, or interest in, who will lead the country in the years ahead. Instead, their preoccupations were the same Wednesday as they had been on Election Day and the day before that: getting out of the coop as quickly as possible, digging into their breakfast, strutting around a bit in the pen, flapping their wings to greet the new day, and maybe taking a sip or two from the water bowl.

No matter what happens in the world at large, for better or for ill, our hens provide a daily reminder that the animal world is a universe unto itself, oblivious to the obsessions of mere humans. Its rhythms and cycles are predictable and unchanging, even when the headlines are terrifying and madness prevails on social media, cable television and the front pages of our newspapers. The country, and the world, may be in turmoil, but there's a welcome stability to be found in the henhouse.

Hen Chronicles: Chickens, chickens, everywhere!

Chickens, both real and inanimate, seem to have taken up residence from one end of our home to the other.

Our three hens -- Snow, Nellie and Hope -- hang out in a coop and pen at the back end of our city lot. Decorative tea towels and assorted poultry-related knickknacks are on display in a room above the garage, which sports a chicken-themed clock. Reference books take up a shelf in the house, where eggs laid by "the girls" fill plastic cartons in the fridge.

Then there's Oyster Cracker, the name we have given to a figurine that "lives" on the front porch during the warm-weather months. (She moves to my desk in the winter.) In this photo, taken on the evening of May 6, Oyster Cracker sits atop her table, facing the setting sun. She is surrounded by seedlings from the farmers' market that are waiting to be planted.

Hen Chronicles: The Boston Globe interviews Terry Golson

The Boston Globe interviewed author, blogger and veteran chicken keeper Terry Golson recently, following the publication of her new book, The Farmstead Egg Guide & Cookbook. One of Golson's claims to fame is that she has installed live-streaming cameras at her Massachusetts home so fans can watch her critters online in real time at hencam.com.

In the interview, Golson offered some interesting observations about our feathered friends. For one thing, the article quoted Golson as saying that raising backyard chickens has surged in popularity for good reason.

“There’s nothing more wonderful than an egg that’s fresh from a chicken you know,” Golson told the newspaper. And she explained that hens can be great company. “They are very gratifying animals to have. They’re endlessly curious; they’re very optimistic: They think that anybody they get to know is going to bring them something to eat.”

(My take on that: These are all good points, especially that last one about how chickens view treats. Our four hens deeply resent the very idea of anyone approaching their pen without a snack in hand. They squawk and strut and sometimes flap their wings in frustration when it happens. They seem to think it's very bad form, because humans obviously exist to keep them happy. You've heard of someone being madder than a wet hen? Try a snack-deprived hen if you want to see real anger.)

Golson warned against getting chickens to lower your grocery bill, because that won’t happen. And she explained to readers who may be unfamiliar with the ways of chickens that they don’t lay consistently all year long.

(My take on that: Our "girls" - Snow, Nala, Hope and Nellie - lay fewer eggs in the cold-weather months, but that's still better than no eggs at all in the winter, as some owners have experienced. In addition, our hens generally stop laying while they're molting, which happens roughly every year or so, at least in theory, as new feathers replace old ones. A molt can drag on for more than a month, so a hen can be out of commission, in the egg-laying department, for quite a while.)

“Because these are living animals that need to be related to and cared for daily, if you don’t care about the animals, just support a local farmer” instead of getting your own chickens, Golson said in the Globe interview. “You can get eggs other places. The reason to go into backyard chickens is because you want to have chickens.”

(My take on that: Amen.)

Hen Chronicles: They call it the Chicken From Hell

Our four hens are not remotely aggressive. Sure, Hope, one of our Rhode Island Reds, can get a little carried away while pecking food from someone’s hand. (“Ouch!”) And “the girls” do become positively peevish if disturbed while laying.
 

But they are, at heart, docile creatures. I’m not sure the same could be said for what has been dubbed the Chicken From Hell.

It’s well-established, if hard to believe, that chickens and dinosaurs are related. In fact the chicken is believed to be the closest living relative of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex. (Really! You can look it up.) Now comes news that researchers have discovered a toothless dinosaur that had a beak, a head crest and, presumably, feathered legs.

This Chicken From Hell, unveiled by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, University of Utah and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, was 11 feet long and weighed 500 pounds, according to The Washington Post. It belonged to a group of dinosaurs called oviraptorosaurs.

The birdlike species, which lived at the end of the Cretaceous period, had “murderous claws, prize-fighter arms, spindly legs, a thin tail and feathers sprouting all over the place,” the newspaper reports. The fossils of three specimens were found in three locations in North and South Dakota.

“It would have been a cross between a chicken and a lizard,” Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, told the newspaper.

The Post said this “unsettling beast,” formally known as Anzu wyliei, looks like it could “stomp you, rip you to pieces or simply peck you to death. Chances are, once you have the image of the Chicken From Hell in your head, you will never think of it as anything other than the Chicken From Hell.”

The Anzu wyliei “reminds everyone of the birdiness of dinosaurs, and the dinosaur-ness of birds,” the Post notes. “Paleontologists can become dyspeptic when they hear that dinosaurs are extinct. Not so: Birds are dinosaurs.”

Okay, so I’m willing to suspend disbelief long enough to concede that our Hope, Nellie, Snow and Nala may well be evolved, miniaturized, domesticated versions of dinosaurs. But be that as it may, if I run into a living, breathing Anzu wyliei, I sure as hell won’t try to hand-feed it.

Artist's rendition of the Chicken From Hell

Hen Chronicles: After weeks of planning, finally, it begins

The adventure is underway. The chicken coop and pen that my wife Liz and I ordered last week were delivered yesterday. They’re tucked in at the back of our city lot, between the compost bins and the barberry bushes.

Today we’re heading out to stock up on supplies - bedding for the coop, feed, food and water containers, etc. Come Saturday morning, we’ll be making a two-hour drive from our home in central Maine to the southern part of the state, where we plan to buy three or four laying hens from a flock that includes Plymouth Rocks and Rhode Island Reds. (No roosters, thank you!)

The goal here is eggs, not meat. From what I’ve read, both breeds are “dual-purpose,” as they say in the poultry biz, but we’re not planning to slaughter our hens. I still remember when my brother David and I got chicks as an Easter gift one year as kids, only to see them grow into pet chickens that became the main course at dinner. We had no appetite then, and I’m sure that would be equally true now. 

I eat chicken, and even the occasional hamburger. Animals must be killed and processed if we are going to satisfy such tastes, and no meet eater can claim otherwise without being amazingly hypocritical. But I’m too sentimental to contemplate eating an animal once I’ve looked it in the eye. Which is one of the many reasons why I’d make a lousy farmer!