Category Archives: Chickens

I am a little worried about Dumpling II.  She’s listless and it seems like she just isn’t growing up as fast as the other chicks.  I know better than to think she is gonna get a little bigger each time I look into their brooding box, since I look about every 15 minutes.  But with a whole seven days experience in chick raising under my belt, I feel confident enough with my powers of deduction to think there’s something run afowl with this one.

Dumpling II suffers from pasty butt, which is apparently pretty common.  But it doesn’t make it less stressful to discover and deal with.  Actually dealing with it isn’t really the hard part — just soak her bottom half in a coffee cup of warm water.  What is hard is the emotions that go along with a sick chick.

For one: Guilt. Chicks don’t much like people picking them up, let alone soaking them in warm water.  So, I know the daily routine must really freak her the hell out every morning.  For two: Helplessness.  There doesn’t seem much I can do to — she has to eat chick food, I can’t just serve her rice like I do a dog.  For three: Chronic Worry. The chicks sit in a homemade brooder next to my desk, so I never seem too far from the reminder that someone isn’t feeling well and might have keeled over and died in the 15 minutes since the last time I looked.

So, I look again.

Well, they arrive Wednesday, but I don’t know enough French to attempt some future tense fussiness. But it is true, it is true!  I have new baby chicks arriving soon and really, I don’t think I have been this excited about anything since last week! (It was my birthday.)

Getting adult chickens was certainly the way to introduce myself to chicken ownership but really, who doesn’t want to raise their own.  Firstly, while chickens can cost ya a pretty penny, chicks are like two bucks, which mean that they are cheaper than a bottle of Charles Shaw wine.  But more importantly, one gets more variety with chicks.

So, arriving at the homestead on Wednesday are:

A while we all Wait. Patiently. I shall introduce the breeds:

Mrs. Leghorn will be a White Plymouth Rock.  I am not super excited about having a white chicken but how can one not want a Mrs. Leghorn?  Seems too good to be true.

Gallantine, a Polish Silverlace.  These chickens aren’t great layers (not many eggs, but really, who can pass up a chicken that looks so kooky?  I mean, that hat is hilarious and I am sure will offer up hours of entertainment if not hundreds of eggs.

Finally, we’ll be joined by two heritage breed chickens, which will be adopted and named by Marc & Laurel (they are naming theirs Couch) and Grant (whose neices are going to name his).

From My Pet Chicken: Dominiques are considered a “heritage” breed of chicken in that they’ve been around for hundreds of years and are now critically endangered. Some people can’t tell the difference between a Dominique and a Barred Rock, but the trained eye will notice that Dominiques have a rose comb versus the Barred Rock’s single comb. Dominiques are a wonderfully cold-hardy dual-purpose bird, and hens make very caring, nurturing mothers.

I’m pretty excited to be bringing in two endangered birds. Not that I think saving two chickens is going to do much good in the long run but who knows, maybe every little bit counts.

I pretty much have no idea what I am doing in the area of chick raising.  At this point, I am mostly just hoping that they actually get to the house alive.

A couple times a day, I walk out to the chicken coop to bust up the ice that’s formed on the top of the waterer.  Each time, the chickens seem to be sitting around, staring into the middle distance.

One gets used to cats sitting in a trance, staring at a wall for hours on end.  Surely they are plotting their revenge.  Dogs of course, will really only stare at treats just out of reach with that kind of intensity. They are just thinking about eating.

I can’t really imagine what it is chickens are thinking.

All I can think is that I hate having them all cooped up (no pun intended) in the little world of the Eglu Cube. Since Chicken #1 & #2 were unceremoniously slaughtered by the dog escaping the hillbilly dog run, the chickens have been relegated to the little world of the Cube and it’s attached chicken run.  It’s big enough for six, I only have four.

But still.

The coop was built by engineering students, or something, and has revolutionized urban chicken keeping, or something.

But still.

All I can think is:  the chickens seemed much jollier and curiouser when they were pecking through the yard.  Now, though they are safe and in no way of being picked up by the hawk, bothered by the skeevey gray cat or taken down by the dog, they just perch on the little plastic ladder that leads to the hen house and stare into the middle distance.

You see, that can’t be good.  And though I never imagined chicken ownership would hurtle me into cycles of grief and guilt, it seems to have done just that. They’re just chickens, I know.

But still.

Everyone who knows chickens, generally, gets around to calling them stupid at some point or another.  It’s hard not to, watching these fussy butts for any length of time.  But there is one thing for certain:  Chickens know for stress.

Change a chicken’s surroundings and habits, change the dynamics of the group, change it seems anything, and the chickens get stressed. And when the chickens are stressed, they stop laying.  For a good long while.

Last Sunday, or maybe it was the Sunday before, I am not sure, I got two new chickens who I have named Miss Louise and Miss Mabel.  These are some mighty fancy Araucanas from a bootlegger chicken connection I have. They are beautiful and some day I will learn to take pictures decent enough to share. But for now, just take my word for it that the variegated feathers in browns, whites, blacks and grays is enough to make one rethink chickens as stupid urban barnyard animals.  And if that isn’t enough, Araucanas lay eggs in colors of gentle sky blues and maybe even sea foam green.

Really, they are mighty fancy.  But completely stressed out.

If you are wondering, the easiest way to tell if a chicken is stressed out is whether your frying pan is put away.  Four chickens, normally, lay enough eggs for a family of one that, frankly, I just leave the frying pan on the stove.  I use cast iron, and since it has to go back on the stove after it is cleaned anyway, set to dry over a hot flame, and because I will likey be eating another egg before I know it, I just leave the pan on the stove.

But if the pan is put away, well, it seems the best indicator of trouble. Because an eggless day is one thing, but if your frying pan has gone unused long enough for it to be put away, it means days and days, weeks, months, have gone by in deprivation.  Because a  stressed out chicken takes a long time to recover.

The first time this happened to me, I didn’t really understand what was going on and I thought I had chickens with some manufacturer’s defect as the chickens went a month or two without laying.  Now, of course, I know to wait until they are ready.  It is a wait.

By bringing in Miss Louise and Miss Mabel, I’ve upset the pecking order (really, these phrases do come from somewhere).  And by disrupting the politics in the hen house by bringing in two new tenants, so soon after the loss of Chicken #1 and #2, it seems everyone is too freaked out to lay.  The Araucanas from the move from whatever farm they lived on into my coop, surely, and possibly also from the fact that Nugget and Pot Pie are rather grungy rescue chickens rather than fancy breed chickens.  Nugget and Pot Pie from the revolving door of room mates they have had to endure, I am certain and Nugget possibly also still mourning the loss of her beloved Kung Pao.

There’s a lesson in this, of course.  Because a lot of us humans tend to not give ourselves enough time to recover from anything.  We push ourselves to adapt to whatever changes or upheaval happen in our lives, forgoing the spaces in between to readjust adequately before we launch forward. I have a friend who calls this time putting a hyphen in one’s life.  The life hyphen best described as taking a few spa days and some rest, sanatorium-style, before leaping back in.  It’s important to do but often overlooked.  And often rushed.

Chickens don’t rush their hyphens.  They take their time, figuring there’s always time for laying later. Maybe the chickens aren’t such dumb animals after all.

Everyone knows that parents have favorites.  My dad’s favorite, I have always known, is my sister Brenda.  He thinks of me as a Necessary Evil.  At the best moments, he might move the needle to just Necessary, maybe not Evil.  I won’t comment on my mom’s favorite but if you were thinking that is just because I am being modest, I would say, go to Vegas and bet on it.  You’ll thank me later.

When it comes to my pets, sure, I have favorites.  If I liked cats, surely Buddha would be my most favorite pet of all.  As far as cats go, he is all that — to the extent that someone just yesterday said, “That cat is so perfect I am convinced he doesn’t have any dander.”  The thing is, I don’t really like cats so I guess that really means Chloe is my favorite, and not just because Scout is one chicken away from being a serial killer. I don’t know why and in fact it flies in the face of all that is rational because Chloe is a beast.  But she has an abundance of emotional intelligence and uses it to her advantage. I am apparently a sucker for that.

Of the chickens, I’ll admit that Nugget has always been my favorite. Chicken #1 and #2 were really friendly chickens so they wiggling their way into my heart before their untimely deaths.  But it was going to take a lot to unseat my little Chicken Little.

Nugget is the one who hurtles herself around the yard, screaming her chicken scream, when The Hawk comes by to wait, watch and study.  She is the one who turned into Kung Pao’s First Wife when his roosterness emerged.  She takes spontaneous sprints through the yard, possibly to keep herself fit in case she has to run away from The Hawk.  And Nugget is the chicken who figured out you could get to the primo perch of the neighbor’s fence if you first jumped on the chair, then then hen house, then took a Hail Mary leap onto the rail-thin fence top.

Nugget is the most animated of all, more Disney character than farm animal, and like all good Disney characters, she has won over her audience.

But let me back up a bit.  Last night, after searching through the neighborhood and a good deal of peering through my neighbor’s fencing to see if I could find Nugget, I came to the conclusion that, no matter her fate, Nugget, surely, was gone.  It was dark enough that, if she could have, she would have returned to the hen house for the night.

So, shut Pot Pie up, alone, in the hen house for the night.  I swear she was scared, her eyes were wide open, fixed on me to read what the hell was going to happen next in the living hell that had become my backyard.  Or maybe she was just looking at me with the same Stink Eye she levels my way when I interrupt her egg-laying, which is really just the way she looks anyway.

A lot of the night, I will admit, was spent tossing and turning.  Or probably more accurately, listening. Once, Buddha stealthily slipped out the back door when I was letting the dogs in.  I didn’t even know he was gone until I was awakened in the dead of morning to his plaintive wailing.  Maybe, I thought as I laid in bed, maybe Nugget would do the same.

But the night marched on silently.  And so this morning, when it was time to get out of bed and open the henhouse back up so Pot Pie could stretch her wings, have a little breakfast and a drink of water, I crunched through the yard.  It was frozen for the first real time this year and so lent its own sad chords to the melancholy morning.

Pot Pie was in the henhouse, in the same place I left her last night, with the same expression of horror on her chicken face.

The cold, the lonely chicken, the silence of the night before.  And me, a fowlure.  I was starting to think that the thing to do was to donate Pot Pie to a nice responsible family, take the winter off from chicken raising, and start with some fresh ideas and perspective next spring.

And off in the corner of the yard, behind the coop, was little Nugget.  My instinct was to rush toward her, gather her up in my arms and squeeze the living daylights out of her. Of course, that is a dog-style homecoming greeting and Nugget is a chicken.  A scaredy chicken at that, who has consistently run away from me as if I am wearing a black cloak and carrying a sickle whenever I walk through the yard in her direction.

A simple smile was all she was gonna accept.  That and a treat of some sort (I chose leftover risotto) which I was to fetch while she found her way back inside the coop, safe again.

Of course, the Eglu Cube I have is built to be secure and safe from predators.  They’ve got a cartoon picture of a fox with a circle and a line through it on the website to prove it.  I guess foxes are a problem in England, where the Eglu was invented.  My problem seems to be my dogs, The Hawk, Racoons and, as of yesterday, a skeevy gray cat. I doubt any of those animals would be able to breech the coop. But the thing is, you have to keep the chickens in the pen for that particular feature to be realized.

And therein lies the rub.

I bought the regular 6-foot run rather than the deluxe 10-foot run because well, I was going to have the requisite number of chickens for the 6-foot run and it was a lot cheaper.  I was able to overcome my fear of industrial chicken husbandry when it came to saving $300+ dollars.  Which, I guess, means that my values can be bought for a mere $300.  Good to know.

Though after the coop made its way to the States three months later, I found, that the chickens really couldn’t run in the run.  It seemed, though award-winning, that the Eglu just wasn’t going to be big enough for my three then five then two chickens.

So I, or rather the stereotype version of me, decided that my chickens should free range in my yard. The thing is, you live in a city and you worry about crime in general but not so much does one think about chicken carnage.  And the idea of chickens clucking and scratching around my yard seemed a bit too bucolic to give up.

Though it should be noted that when I first saw The Hawk, I did shoot an email to Omlet to ask if I could buy the add on fencing for the run.  They never wrote back, I realized this morning when the idea flared up again.  Yes, I wrote again and left a message to boot.

Eglu, it should be said, is an award-winning design and allows people like me (homestead-minded if not abled) to start a backyard flock with nothing but a bunch of money.  Of course, us city folk don’t know much for chickens so, inevitably, mistakes will be made.  Mine, of course, led to chickens to an untimely death and a third to my dinner plate — though it should be noted that Kung Pao was actually billed as a chicken from the farmer who sold him to me.  So, really, the farmer, who should know a chicken from a rooster, was also duped.

For now, Nugget and Pot Pie are locked up tight.  And likely, they’ll stay that way for the winter.  There’s nothing in the barren yard for them to eat, no foliage to peck at or worms to unearth.  So even if my stereotype self worries that keeping the chickens inside the coop is mean, my pet-owning self realizes that they are safe, fed, watered, treat-ed and appreciated.

Which is better than some people get, if you think about it.

Apparently, my German Shepard can perform an Olympic-qualifying Standing Broad Jump.  That is, she can go from a standing position to jumping over a 4 1/2 foot fence, clearing what we thought was a high enough barrier between fowl and canine. It wasn’t.  And Chicken #2 went down today, following Chicken #1 in, what, a week.  I feel like a a fowlure.

If you are a counter, you are likely thinking: wait, there’s TWO, not one?  Two — because Pot Pie and Nugget are still around. And you’d be wrong because Nugget went missing when I was in the shower.

It could be the Hawk who stands guard, waiting patiently, found the right moment.  It could be the skeevy gray cat who I caught stalking the chickens earlier today.  It could be that in the melee that must have ensued when Scout got out that Nugget overcame her clipped wings and took flight over the neighbor’s fence.

I am, actually, most worried about that outcome of all of them because it means she is stuck somewhere, and its dark, so she’d normally be safe in her coop and likely doesn’t know where she is supposed to sleep.  I of course follow to assume she would be sad and I guess I also figure she’d be a sitting duck for raccoons, possum, cats, hell, maybe even rats.  Chickens, I read somewhere but can not find right now, sleep really soundly so they are easy to catch and eat at night.  Hence, the hen house.

Chickens are also social animals, so too, I worry about Pot Pie, alone in the coop and awaiting a long winter.

I’ll need to figure out what to do with her. What to do with the freaking Hillbilly Dog Run.  What to do about making a more secure outer coop for the chickens, so they can roam around a bit but not be so vulnerable. What to do about becoming a slightly less unfortunate chicken owner.

I am pretty sad, more sad than I was when Chicken #1 went.  Maybe because, for all intents in purposes, I lost two chickens in the time it took for me to shower.  Mostly I feel like I let the chickens down somehow.  And I am really frustrated with myself because I feel like I should have been smart enough not to let them down.

And I am frustrated because I am going to need to figure this all out in the next day or so because I am convinced Pot Pie, if left alone in her grief, is going to decide to join her friends. And then there will be none.