The last of the flock block

This was supposed to be a flock block update. And it was supposed to be written yesterday, when the flock block was down to the size of a baseball.

But yesterday got away from me, and today is too late for an update. The flock block, which was the size of a golf ball by the time we put the chickens to bed last night, is now officially gone. They went straight for it this morning, and it had disappeared in a matter of an hour or so.

Which means … drumroll please … the winner is Jen, who guessed March 11. Jen, please send your mailing address so I can send you a jar of genuine, hand-crafted, Cape Cod sea salt. Better than Christmas!

Thanks to everyone who participated. Blogs are so much better when people play along.

Freedom!

The last three days have been sunny and warm, with highs pushing 60. The chickens, who don’t seem inclined to want to leave their run when it’s snowy and cold, start a full-court press for freedom when the sun’s out and the ground begins to warm. They take up their little signs and pace back and forth along the side of the run. “Free range! Free range!” they squawk.

We want to let them out, but the risk-reward calculation is the same as it was a month ago. There’s still not much good foraging, and there’s no protective leaf cover under which they can hide from passing hawks.

What there is, though, is a garden full of the winter rye we planted as a cover crop. If we put them out in that, we can stay close enough to discourage hawks, and they can have a beautiful afternoon’s outing, eating some much-needed greens and taking dust baths on the perimeter. The grass is surrounded by a chicken-wire fence, so they can’t go rogue, and we can put them back in the run when play-time’s over.

I suppose there’s no real way to determine if a chicken is happy. They don’t smile or laugh, and they certainly can’t tell you. But, roaming around the grass field, eating their fill with the sun on their backs, they certainly looked happy. I know I was happy.

Chickens dustbathing from Tamar Haspel on Vimeo.

Since the Egg Pool was such a smashing success, I’m going to run another contest. Like the last one, this one involves chickens, and anyone with a thoroughgoing knowledge of them will probably have a leg up.

It all started at Agway.

In general, I’m not much of a spender. While I certainly appreciate the charms of jewelry, and clothes, and electronics, I don’t often feel the need to own anything beyond the bare minimum. I don’t believe this is an admirable trait, and I don’t take any credit for being this way. I’m simply hard-wired not to care.

Until I go to Agway.

You can send me into Tiffany’s, or Barney’s, or Takashimaya and I’ll look around for a while, admire the beautiful things, and then start thinking about lunch. Agway, though, gets me every time.

Agway, as its name implies, caters to the agricultural crowd. It sells everything from utility trailers to lettuce seeds, and has sections for composting, fence-building, bird-feeding, gardening, and horses (horse owners, that is – I’ve never seen a horse at Agway, but I don’t think they turn them away).

Any chickens on your block?

Naturally, they have a chicken section. By the time we got to it, I’d already passed up the gardening clogs, rain collection barrel, and fatwood bundles, and my resolution was wearing thin. Once the Flock Block caught my eye, I was doomed.

A Flock Block is a 25-pound cube of compressed seeds, grains, and grit. It’s designed to supplement chickens’ diets during the winter, when they can’t range free. It also seems to provide entertainment. It’s so densely packed – it crams twenty-five pounds of feed into a cube about ten inches square – that the chickens have to work at it to get the food.

It was $10.99, about twice the per-pound price of their regular feed.

We’ve been feeling a little sorry for our chickens since they’ve been cooped up for the winter, and we decided they deserved a treat. We bought it.

On the way home, Kevin said, “Make me a market on how long the Flock Block lasts.”

Because Kevin is a commodity trader, trade-speak has become the patois of our marriage. When he asks for a market, he wants to know at what price (i.e. date) I would sell and at what price I would buy.

Say, for example, we’re meeting a friend who’s chronically late. We’re supposed to be at the restaurant at 7:00, but we don’t really expect our friend until some time later. “Make me a market on Joe,” I’ll say. “I’m 7:15 bid at 7:25,” Kevin might answer, meaning that he’d buy 7:15, expecting Joe to be later than that, but sell 7:25, expecting Joe to be there by then.

“Sold!” I might say, if I expected Joe to be earlier than 7:15. I’d buy if I expected him to be later than 7:25. Or, I might decline the trade altogether, if I thought it was a good market.

I did some quick calculations on the Flock Block. It’s half the weight of a bag of feed, and it takes them a month to go through that. That means that two weeks is the dead minimum. But they still have the feed, and they might not even like the Flock Block. But they’re probably bored with the feed, and anything new would be preferable.

“I’m 22 days bid at 27,” I said.

“Sold!” said Kevin.

Now you have all the relevant information about the Flock Block, and you even know that I think it’ll last longer than 22 days, and Kevin thinks it won’t last that long. I can also tell you that, when we gave it to them, they first eyed it suspiciously, then pecked it tentatively, and finally went at it with a will. They seem to enjoy it, but it does look difficult to dislodge the seeds and grains.

To participate in the Flock Block pool, all you have to do is pick the date the chickens will eat the last of it.

Today is February 20th, so if you think it’ll last four weeks, you pick March 20th. If you think the chickens will turn up their beaks at it, you might even pick a day in April, or even later. Leave your guess in the comments, and I will list them in the Flock Block Pool calendar on the left sidebar. Please don’t pick a date someone else has picked.

The prize — there’s a prize! – is a jar of our very own handcrafted Cape Cod sea salt.

And you thought Publishers Clearing House was exciting!

They don't seem to mind guests

I’m pretty sure that none of my New York City friends can to do a chicken autopsy. It’s a pretty arcane skill but, if you need to do one, it’s very helpful to have a friend who knows how.

Enter Jen, from Milkweed & Teasel, who, with her husband, Mike, walked me through it.

The chicken (borrowed from freerangeeggs.co.uk)

Any of you who are serious about doing some of the things we’re doing (like raising chickens and gardening) or are trying to do (like keeping livestock and hunting), shouldn’t bother reading Starving off the Land. Just go to Milkweed & Teasel, and actually learn something. Anything I can do, Jen can do better, and Jen and Mike do things I’ll probably never learn to do at all, like raise flocks of sheep and train hunting dogs.

When she read about Baldie’s death, Jen volunteered assistance in doing an autopsy, which I took her up on. By the end of the day, she’d sent me an e-mail with detailed instructions, which I’m going to include here, along with an account of our attempt to follow them.

I should warn that this post is rated F, for explicit farm material. If you’re squeamish about the insides of dead animals, you probably shouldn’t scroll down much farther.

I’m a little squeamish about the insides of dead animals myself. The last time I opened a dead animal in order to examine its constituent parts was in seventh grade, under the tutelage of the estimable Mrs. Weiss. It was a frog, and I didn’t like it one little bit. But squeamishness about animals is something I’m trying to get over, and so I spread the newspaper on the table on the porch and steeled myself to the task.

Of course, somebody needed to take notes and pictures, and it doesn’t make sense for both of us to get our hands covered with potentially contaminating dead chicken guts, so Kevin ended up doing most of the actual handling. I was right there with him, though.

Most of that was pretty straightforward. The ribs were firm, there was no discoloration or swelling. I don’t think smelling the expired breath of a dead chicken isn’t anybody’s favorite task, but Kevin sucked it up and pried open Baldie’s beak. Nothing.

The first cut

STEP 2) “Unzip” the skin from the top of the breastbone to her bottom and peel it back each side. You should be able to see breastmeat. You will also see if there are any eggs blocking or burst in her cavity (egg peritonitis)

So far, so good. No burst eggs.

STEP 3) Pull out the crop and check it – has she been eating? Are there any blockages. Any blockages in her trachea or esophagus?

She should have started this instruction with, “Find the crop.” I’d pulled up a diagram of chicken innards from the Internet, so I had some idea where to look. Somehow, though, the stylized chicken diagram didn’t seem to precisely match the actual chicken carcass. Still, we found the crop and opened it. It was full of recognizable food – pellets and corn. We did inspect her trachea and esophagus, or maybe it was her esophagus and trachea – I’m not quite sure which was which. In any case, she didn’t seem to have choked to death.

STEP 4) Snip the flesh at the bottom of the breastbone. Cut the lower ribs towards the wings. This should allow you to lift up the breast like a lid or trapdoor. Reveals the innards, in layers. You should be able to see the liver, lungs and heart at this point. (n.b. at any point if you find a pool of congealed blood, look for trauma in that area like broken bones. It will have pooled on the side where she was lying.)

 - liver: should be a healthy liver color, no staining (ignore any bile staining that’s on the back). Check for lesions, growth, spots or unusual shape or hardening.

 - lungs – should be healthy “clean” pink, not too much blood.

- heart should be rounded, pinkish, & red at top with a good yellow fat line. Too much blood=heart attack. Grey= secondary infection. Any oedema=infection. No fat line=starvation.

The Blob -- there on the right

Even with the diagram, and culinary experience with chicken organs, it was hard to figure out which was which. There was a big, dark, blobby thing on the right side of her chest cavity. Lungs? Liver? In either case, something was seriously wrong. It wasn’t until Kevin just picked it up out of her chest that we realized it was that “pool of congealed blood” Jen referred to. I never realized blood pooled in a solid mass.

Once we got that out, the organs seemed to fall into place. Only the lungs seemed abnormal, with a large dark spot.

STEP 5) Remove liver. Be careful not to split the gall bladder behind it. Tucked up behind the liver adjacent to the GB is the spleen. Make sure it’s not got any yellow marbling. It should be liver colored.

We removed the liver, and promptly split the gall bladder behind it. I’m not sure we positively identified the spleen. We’ll do better next time.

STEP 6) Start unravelling the intestines gently to look for any blockages or parasites.

That, we managed to do. The intestines looked healthy, unblocked and uninfested.
 

Everything in its place

STEP 7) Remove gizzard. Check the outside of the gizzard is intact, no worms. Split open gizzard, check there is food & grit inside, no foreign objects. 

The gizzard was much larger than I thought it would be, and jam-packed with food, grit, and oyster shell fragments. It’s all muscle, and was so tough that Kevin had trouble getting the knife into it. No worms, no foreign objects.

STEP 8) Check kidneys (stuck inside, either side of the backbone at hip level). Should be pinkish, with a white line through them. Look for discoloration or growths.

We couldn’t find the kidneys, I’m sorry to say. By this time all the innards were in disarray. Nothing was where it was supposed to be, and we could no longer trust the landmarks that should have led us to the kidneys. Besides, Jen told me later that kidneys aren’t kidney-shaped.  Who knew?  Anyway, if there were discoloration or a growth, we missed it.

The only real clue was the congealed blood, and that didn’t tell us much except that her circulatory system had been ruptured. Jen, after seeing the pictures, speculated that she may have been carrying too much fat (we’re going to cut down on chicken treats) and her heart gave out. We’ll never know exactly what it was, but we were able to rule out some of the things, like infection and worms, that would have posed a threat to the rest of the flock.

It also seems unlikely that I killed her by locking her out of the coop. In all probability, she didn’t go in that night because she was either already dead or seriously ill. If she had still been alive, and I had put her in the coop, she simply would have died there instead.

I don’t think it was that, though, that made me feel better about Baldie’s death. Doing the post mortem made me feel like we were responsible chicken owners. We did a job that wasn’t particularly pleasant because we thought it was our obligation to the rest of the birds. There was nothing we could do about Baldie, but there was something we could do about the other seven, and we did it. Or Kevin did it, and I watched.

I also found it much more interesting than I thought it would be, or than Mrs. Weiss’ frog had been. That hour was a more densely packed learning experience than almost any I’d had since beginning this venture. Not only did I get a graphic illustration of chicken anatomy, I got a better understanding of how each part works. I saw the mixture of food and grit in the gizzard, the progress of waste through the intestines, the eggs in development. Next time – and I’m sure there’ll be one, despite our best efforts – I’ll do the cutting and Kevin will do the note-taking.

There’s a danger, though, in my acquiring actual skills. If I acquire too many, I’ll have to re-name the blog. I’m thinking “Milkweed & Teasel” sounds good.

We had a snowstorm last night, and I had to shovel five inches of heavy, icy snow out from in front of the run door before I could go in and let the chickens out of the coop. I heard them squawking as I shoveled.

When the door swung free, I went inside and hung their waterer on its hook. I put a scoop of feed in the feeder, and tried to shake some of the hard snow off it so the birds could get at the feed. The wind had blown so fiercely that the run and everything in it had an icy white coating.

I opened the coop door and put the ladder in place. A few of the chickens stuck their heads out. One took a few steps down the ladder, and then tried to turn back. They don’t like snow, our chickens. At least not until they get used to it.

It was only when I lifted one of them bodily off the ladder and put her down on the run floor that I saw the dead bird. What had been a chicken yesterday was a crumpled heap of feathers against the back wall of the run. It was Baldie, the bird who’d been attacked by the hawk back in the fall.

I went back to the house. Stupidly, I ran. Like it was some kind of emergency. I told Kevin, and we went out together to collect the corpse.

We don’t know what killed her. It wasn’t a predator; there was no sign either of forced entry or of bodily injury. She was just dead.

Last night, I was the one who closed them up in the coop. It’s dusk, or sometimes downright dark, when we put them in for the night, and I had gotten out of the habit of bringing the flashlight and making sure they were all inside. Night after night, they’ve all gone up together. We’ve never had a holdout, so I just assumed all eight were in.

Baldie might have been dead last night when I closed them in. She might have been sick, and that might have prevented her from going in the coop with the rest of the chickens. Or she might have been fine, just tardy, and I might have locked her out.

It didn’t get very cold last night. The temperature hovered around freezing and, although it was very windy, there’s a sheltered area under the coop. I don’t think the conditions themselves could have killed her. But what if she panicked? What if she exhausted herself trying to get into the locked coop?

I’m not such a sissy that I can’t cope with a dead chicken. It’s sad to lose a bird, but if it’s too much to bear then you shouldn’t have chickens in the first place. What’s not so easy is coping with the possibility that I killed her out of carelessness.

I'm sorry, Baldie

Many years ago, I interviewed a nutrition scientist who gave me the most cogent explanation I ever heard – before or since – for our obesity epidemic.

He’d done some work at a zoo, and he had a problem with overweight orangutans. They’d gotten used to eating foods other than the fruits and greens that are their native diet, in part because well-meaning people wanted to donate food to the zoo rather than let it go to waste. Give orangutans papayas and tree bark, and they regulate their own diet. Give them donuts, and they get fat.

Like us, the apes recognize that donuts taste better than what the rainforest has on offer, and the genes that evolved to give them a preference for fruit go into overdrive when presented with a chocolate cruller. Not only that, when you try and get them to go back to tree bark, they throw tantrums and start winging poop around.

Humans evolved to eat a diet not dissimilar from that of our closest cousins, and Krispy Kreme has been our undoing just as surely as it ruined the girlish figures of apes in captivity.

We’re orangutans with donuts, and the ready availability of high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar (read: delicious) food seems to throw all our self-regulatory mechanisms out of whack.

Small children have been shown to regulate their own intake, and can effectively keep their energy intake and output in balance. Once they hit the ripe old age of three, though, all bets are off. From toddlerhood on, food palatability (and its partner in crime, portion size) strongly influences how much we eat.

Animals, by contrast, are pretty good at self-regulation. Fat chickens are a product of science, not gluttony. The birds had to be genetically manipulated to eat a lot and grow quickly. Even so, the only way to grow meat birds economically is to keep them confined and feed them high-protein, high-calorie food. If you let them out, they’ll revert to their calorie-burning, grass-eating selves and self-regulate you right out of economic feasibility.

All cooped up

I’m worried about precisely the reverse. Our chickens free-ranged all summer and fall and, although they always had pellets, I trusted their chicken instincts to eat what they needed. I didn’t have to pay attention to their diet because they did.

Because it’s winter now, we keep our chickens locked in their run almost all the time. The smorgasbord that is our property is barren – no bugs, no greens – so there’s no point in exposing them to do the danger of predators. That means it’s up to us to make sure they have everything they need.

In theory, the layer pellets we feed them provide the full nutritional complement. In practice, I worry. I’m sure they’re getting plenty of protein and calories, but I’m concerned about calcium.

Humans need calcium for (among other things) strong bones. While chickens also need strong bones, they also need strong eggshells. Kevin thought that our chickens’ shells seemed to be getting a little fragile, so we decided to give them a calcium supplement.

Our shell pile

The calcium supplement of choice is crushed oyster shells, and it runs about $8. for a small bag at our local feed store. Uncrushed oyster shells, by contrast, are free for the taking in the giant shell pile that we’re amassing behind the compost.

Kevin dug through the pile to pick some oyster shells out from among the clam shells. Although I don’t know why people don’t use clam shells for calcium supplementation (Lower calcium content? Difficulty in processing?) we went for oyster shells because that’s what everyone uses. There must be a reason.

Kevin, having long anticipated the day we’d want to crush oyster shells for our chickens, had been keeping his eye out for items that would function as a giant mortar and pestle. When the window-treatment store downstairs in his office building closed, he appropriated a steep-sided concrete planter that was left behind.

Here’s where it gets embarrassing. All my life, I’ve been under the impression that the bowl was the pestle and the stick was the mortar. I even told Kevin, and he came up with an easy way to remember it: “The pestle is the vessel.” Turns out, though, that the pestle isn’t the vessel. The mortar is the vessel. The pestle is the stick. Sigh.

Anyway, we had a mortar, but we needed a pestle. Ideally, it would be a foot-long stick with a hard, rounded, heavy end. Kevin couldn’t find one of those, though, so he went the Paleolithic route and used a rock.

A crushing blow

We put a handful of shells in the mortar and took turns pounding them with the pestle. Before long, they were a mix of crumbs, pebbles, and shards. Some of the particles were very small. Others were still quite large.

I was in favor of more pounding. “Some of those pieces look too big for them,” I said.

“They can swallow pretty big stuff,” Kevin answered.

I was still concerned. “I don’t know,” I ventured, “I think some of them could be a choking hazard.”

“A choking hazard?” My husband looked at me incredulously.

“Like with babies,” I said.

“You realize that they free-range all summer,” he said, clearly referring not to babies but to chickens. “And they encounter particles of all sizes, yet manage not to peck at things that will choke them.”

Oh yeah. I’d forgotten about that.

A chicken treat. No donuts.

We mixed the shell with corn and some cooking oil we’d used to fry shrimp fritters, and brought it up to the coop. The chickens wolfed it down, big pieces and small. I subsequently learned that larger shell particles are better for eggshells, apparently because they spend more time in the chickens’ digestive tract, giving the birds more opportunity for calcium absorption.

All in all, I’ve been struck by the chickens’ ability to figure things out for themselves. They know what to eat, and eat the right amount. Once we configured the nestboxes correctly (our bad), our flock laid almost all their eggs in them. They know enough to come into their coop at night and roost up high, where they’d be safe from predation. As long as they’ve got an appropriate habitat – lots of space, the right kind of food, plenty of water – they know what to do.

I, by contrast, am an orangutan with donuts. I’m still trying to ditch the ten extra pounds I’ve acquired over the last year or so, but it’s very hard to do in a world full of things like the chicken liver mousse Kevin made for the Super Bowl party we went to. Any day now, I’ll hit the poop-winging stage.

When the cold weather set in a couple months back, we knew what to expect. Our chickens would need more calories to be able to keep themselves warm, so we gave them corn and seeds mixed with fat. They’d need water that wasn’t frozen, so we brought their two waterers indoors in shifts. They’d need air flow in the coop, so we cleared the snow away from the vent. Although we knew they’d be prone to frostbite on their combs, we didn’t cover them with Vaseline because we’d read that this strategy, while widely deployed, didn’t help at all.

An egg-laying machine, and dignified to boot

And we knew we’d get fewer eggs. There might even be stretches when we’d get none at all. Chickens cut back on their production in the winter, in part because there’s less light, which plays a key role in governing their laying cycle, and in part because they often molt in the colder months, and that’s a drain on the resources otherwise devoted to egg manufacture.

Some chicken owners put lights in the coop to prevent the downturn in the cycle, but we figured we’d let nature take its course, and let chickens do what comes naturally in winter. I don’t know for sure that keeping lights on all year stresses the birds, but I know I certainly wouldn’t like it. Besides, there’s no electricity.

It has been one of the surprises of this enterprise that our chickens haven’t slacked off the pace at all. We have gotten at least five eggs from our eight chickens every single day, and six or seven is the norm. I’m sure we can attribute this, at least in part, to the fact that they’re nine months old and at the beginning of their peak laying age. But still.

“Why do you suppose our chickens are still laying all those eggs?” I asked my husband. “Is it because it hasn’t been that cold? Is there something in the food?”

“Nope,” he said, with perfect confidence, almost swaggering. “It’s all about the husbandry.”

Sheesh. He takes credit for everything.

It was an accident that we ended up with two different breeds of chicken. We’d planned on eight buff Orpingtons because we’d read that they were friendly, docile, and cold-hardy. When we showed up to pick up our chicks at Cape Cod Feed and Supply, though, there was a run on Orpingtons. This had the two-fold consequence of making me act like a jerk and forcing us to integrate our flock, which is four buff Orpingtons and four Rhode Island reds.

Everyone should have an integrated flock. Having more than one kind of chicken has a couple of advantages that we, as first time chicken owners, hadn’t foreseen. For starters, they’re easier to count. You can also compare breed personalities. The Rhodies are more outgoing and, we think, smarter than their Orpington cousins, but the Orps seem a little less greedy and demanding.

We had read that the Orps were easy-going to the point of being a target for bullies, and we were afraid that the Rhodies would pick on them, but we’ve never seen it. At feeding time, on the roosts, at the waterer, there has never seemed to be any tribal animosity between the buff chickens and the red chickens.

It is, of course, ridiculous that we take pleasure in the fact that our chickens seem blissfully unaware of their feather color. When we watch them pecking at a pile of corn – red next to buff next to red – we have a sense that all’s right with our peaceful, colorblind barnyard community.

On Martin Luther King Day, though, when Kevin went up to close the chickens in for the night, for the first time he found a segregated coop. Buffs to the right, reds to the left. We figure, though, that as long as we stick to one drinking fountain, they’ll get over it.

Calling Rosa Parks!

It was our first agricultural business transaction. The last time we bought chicken feed, the nice people at Cape Feed and Supply told us they happily sell their customers’ eggs to other customers, who happily buy them. For every dozen we bring in, we get a $2. store credit. They sell the eggs for $3.99, and everybody wins.

Yesterday, we brought in four dozen eggs. A fifty-pound bag of layer pellets was $11.42, including tax. Although we had to subsidize to the tune of $3.42 (and do the heavy lifting) the chickens just about paid for their own food. Kevin said we were pimping them out, but I thought it was perfectly wholesome. Birds, supporting themselves and keeping us in eggs!

I’m going to have a word with the cat.

The 1889 Henry Justice Ford version of Rumpelstiltskin

Rumpelstiltskin got a bad rap. Remember the story? An ordinary miller has aspirations for his daughter, so he tells the king she can spin straw into gold. The king, understandably curious about a girl with such a skill, takes the rather radical step of locking her in a turret for three days with some straw and a spinning wheel, promising to kill her if she doesn’t deliver.

She can’t, of course, and she’s on the brink of despair when a dwarfish little guy shows up and shows her that he can. Day one, he trades for her necklace. Day two, for her ring. Day three, she’s out of jewelry. Knowing that he’s got her over a barrel, he bargains for her first-born.

The king sees the gold and immediately marries the girl. Soon enough, the first-born is born and Rumpelstiltskin shows up with his claim check. But the girl doesn’t want to hand over the child. Rumpelstiltskin, out of the goodness of his heart, gives her an out. If she can guess his name in three days, she can keep the child.

The girl, now the queen, sends out a spy to try and learn the name. Rumpelstiltskin, fool that he is, dances around singing a little ditty – out loud! – about how he’s going to get the baby because nobody will ever guess that his name is Rumpelstiltskin. The spy hears him, the girl gets the name, and Rumpelstiltskin loses.

In some versions, he just disappears. In others, he meets a gruesome death. In all versions, the king, the girl, and the miller live happily ever after.

I ask you, is this fair? The miller is a lying striver. The girl is a foolish welcher. The king is a greedy pig. Rumpelstiltskin, while not a savory character, is at least on the up-and-up.

What really bothers me about the story, though, is that Rumpelstiltskin got so upset. Okay, he lost the child, but he could still spin straw into gold! Seems to me that a genuine alchemist can write his own ticket.

Which brings me to the chickens. They’re in full-out laying mode, and we get at least a half-dozen eggs a day. The input into this system is mostly dross. They do eat pellets, which are manufactured by Poulin Grain and purchased by us with hard, cold cash, but actual chicken feed seems to be less than half their diet. The rest is plants, bugs, and kitchen scraps – things that, were it not for the chickens, would have gone uneaten.

When we first got the chickens, I’d save the best of what I’d ordinarily put in the compost – apple cores, salmon skin, collard stems – and bring them out to the run. It took some time (and some advice from Jen at Milkweed & Teasel) for me to fully understand the wide range of garbage that can be turned into eggs by a flock of chickens.

For starters, there’s the fat you skim off your stock. I never throw away a bone or a meat scrap, and I make stock several times a month. When it solidifies in the refrigerator, I get a thick layer of fat on the top, which I used to throw away. Given that we have a bird feeder devoted to slabs of suet, which we buy, you’d think I could have figured out that birds thrive on animal fat, but Jen had to point it out to me.

The pie crust, I figured out all by myself. I knew they like grain, and I knew they like fat, so the little scraps that are left over after I shape a crust should go over well, I reasoned, as they are made almost exclusively of grain and fat. “Well” is an understatement. The chickens fought over them.

Chicken feed from Tamar Haspel on Vimeo.

If they like pie crust, perhaps they like all baked goods. There were a few slices of bread with some moldy spots and, sure enough, the chickens devoured them, pecking carefully around the mold.

If they like baked goods, maybe they like unbaked goods. Circumstances landed us with a box of apple cake mix which I was not inclined to turn into apple cake (if I’m going to make an apple cake, it’s going to be the best apple cake I can make, which won’t be the apple cake that was in that box). Kevin stirred the raw mix together with some stock fat, and the chickens went wild.

It’s gotten to the point where, if we walk outside carrying something, some of the chickens will actually fly up and peck at our fingers. That we find this more endearing than annoying indicates that we’re not keeping our emotional distance.

Another indication that at least one of us is crossing the livestock/pet border is the propensity of one of us – let’s not name names – to let the chickens into the house. No, not really let … more like bring. For Thanksgiving, we’d turned our porch into a dining room by taking out the couch, putting in a large oak table we’d bought at a rummage sale, and running the wood stove full-blast with the door to the porch open. Several days after the meal, we still had a crumb-filled table. I was about to sweep the crumbs into a dish to bring to the chickens when one of us decided we could skip that step by bringing the chickens to the crumbs.

The chickens clean up as the cat feigns ennui

“I thought you liked it when the chickens ate the garbage,” one of us said, seeing the disapproving look on the other of us.

“I do,” the other of us replied. “But I prefer that they do it on their turf.”

I do like it that the chickens eat the garbage. I love the barnyard alchemy that turns scraps and grass and insects into eggs or pork or beef. When the feed is something humans raise for the purpose, like hay or grain, it’s not so magical. After all, if we’re raising crops, we might as well raise something we can eat ourselves, and skip the middlebeast. But if it’s a byproduct, or something humans can’t (or won’t) eat, or just plain trash, it’s like getting something for nothing, like spinning straw into gold.

“The chickens are like Rumpelstiltskin,” I told Kevin as we watched them eat up a plate of corn that had begun to ferment in the refrigerator.

“How do you know?” he asked.

I looked at him funny. “What do you mean, how do I know? Garbage goes in, eggs come out.”

“How do you know?” he repeated. “I mean, have you ever actually seen a chicken lay an egg? Maybe the chickens aren’t Rumpelstiltskin at all, maybe they’re the girl, and Rumpelstiltskin sneaks in at night.”

I snorted. Everybody knows chickens lay eggs.

“Think about it,” he said. “We’re the king because we lock them in the coop, and if they don’t lay eggs we kill them, right?”

Well … yes. “Who’s the miller?”

“All those people who tell you that chickens lay eggs.”

This is what chickens have done to the level of discourse in our house.

What are the easiest animals to take care of? There’s a whole pantheon of childhood pets, from gerbils to goldfish, that require a minimum of care and live mercifully short lives. You probably had one, or more than one. But I can guarantee that my childhood pets were less work than yours. If there were a prize for lowest-maintenance animal, it would undoubtedly go to … drumroll please … the hermit crab.

Easiest pet ever

Although we had them for years, I couldn’t tell you exactly what their minimal care consists of. My mother, naturally, took care of that. I couldn’t tell you anything about their habits or their diet. I can’t remember what we named them. (Inexplicably, given that her one daughter was grown up, my grandmother also had hermit crabs, and I do know that she named hers Damon and Pythias.) I remember being excited to get them, but I don’t think I was sad when they died.

When I was eight or nine, we graduated to a dog, a gray miniature poodle. Because my mother, like parents of small children everywhere, thought kids should get to name the family pet, the poor thing was saddled with “Tevye.” Until now, the sum total of my animal care experience was limited to taking a cagy, cantankerous poodle for the occasional walk. (“You get the pet you deserve,” my mother always says.)

Now Kevin and I have a cat and eight chickens. In the adult division of the lowest-maintenance animal competition (that’s animals for adults, not animals who are adults), cats and chickens may tie for top honors. They’ve been easy enough that I’ve been almost sanguine about getting more labor-intensive animals, like pigs or goats or Highland cows. Until today.

Today my image of myself as animal caretaker was dealt a blow. It started with the cat.

The cat has been itching for three months. She scratches her chin, ears, and shoulders so often and so vehemently that she’s developed raw, hairless patches. I have assumed this is an allergy, since she did the same thing last year, starting in September and ending in November.

Last year, I assumed she was allergic to flea and tick medicine, which we gave her, prophylactically, early in the fall. It was the kind you apply topically at the back of the neck, and it made her miserable. But, whatever was making her scratch, at least I knew it couldn’t be fleas or ticks.

The cat, not feeling grateful for anti-flea ministrations

This year, at about the same time, she started scratching again, so it wasn’t the flea stuff. A plant that comes up in the fall? A kind of food that we just happened to give her this time last year? I changed her dry food. Kevin applied topical lotion to the itchy spots. Nothing changed. I had started to think we’d have to take her to the vet when the problem didn’t go away in November, the way it did last year. But I put it off.

Meanwhile, the poor cat was clearly unhappy. She scratched all the time, and groomed when she wasn’t scratching. She started vomiting more than she usually does, and her weight dropped. She lost her joie de vivre. And then, this morning, when she was sitting on my lap trying to get warm, I found a flea. I was horrified. I had let my cat wander around with fleas for three months without doing a bloody thing about it.

We combed her thoroughly with a flea comb and we gave her a bath with baby shampoo (oh and didn’t she love that). We’ll comb her again tomorrow, and if things don’t improve in a day or two we’ll call the vet and get industrial-strength flea meds.

Three months!

Hawk was here

So I wasn’t feeling like a particularly caring or careful caretaker when I heard the chickens sound the alarm.

We were outside, doing stony things. I was working on the stone base of the wood-fired oven and Kevin was laying a stone path to our outdoor shower. All of a sudden there was a huge kerfuffle and the chickens went running for shelter, crowing for all they were worth. We looked up in time to see the hawk – a big one – flying low next to the rhododendrons.

We went up to investigate, and found an alarmingly large pile of buff Orpington feathers, but no buff Orpingtons. My heart was in my mouth as we peered under bushes, trying to find all eight birds.

Baldie

We did find all eight, seven completely intact and one with a big bald spot on her back. There was no blood, so I assume our hen wasn’t injured, but it made me think – again – about whether we’ve been doing our chickens a disservice by putting them in harm’s way. If they stayed in the run, they’d be perfectly safe, but not nearly as happy, and we’ve opted for happiness. I’m beginning to wonder whether we’ve been wrong.

I know that neither the fleas nor the hawk brands me as an unfit animal owner. In the first instance, I was overly committed to the idea that flea medicine prevents fleas. In the second, I made a choice that some would undoubtedly disagree with, but others would, I’m sure, support. I’m not breaking out the hair shirt or forswearing animals for all time, I’m just thinking long and hard about pigs or goats or cows.

Hermit crabs, though … I could handle hermit crabs.

When our chickens began to come of age we noticed a change in their behavior. Over the summer, when they were heedless adolescents, they were all but impossible to catch. They’d come running when you came out of the house with a chicken treat, but if you bent over or reached out or knelt down they’d scamper out of reach. They emphatically did not want to be caught.

Then, in early September, one of them started acting strangely. If you reached out to touch her, instead of running away, she’d squat down, extend her wings a bit, and sometimes even tremble. It looked as though she were petrified, but if you picked her up she’d nestle under your arm quite contentedly.

The next week, another one started doing it, and then a third. On the 22nd (as those of you who follow this space already know), we got our first egg. “Coincidence?” I wondered. I thought not.

Our official chicken-raising text, Storey’s Guide to Raising Poultry (“the Storey book,” Kevin calls it), is silent on the subject of the chicken squat, so I turned to the more comprehensive but less reliable Internet. A review of chicken-related web sites indicates that it is either A) submissive behavior, B) mating behavior, or C) submissive mating behavior. It is, however, universally acknowledged to be a precursor for egg-laying.

My experience with roosters is limited, but they look to me to be overbearing, aggressive, and large. If a hen weren’t submissive, I imagine the barnyard battles would be epic and very little mating would go on, so I’m figuring submissiveness is necessary for the propagation of the species.

A couple weeks ago, our last hold-out started squatting. Blondie’s development was so far behind that of her seven flockmates that Kevin suspected she was a rooster. The squat was almost enough to convince him of her henhood, but it wasn’t until our first eight-egg day that he really believed.

It’s official. Eight hens, no roosters.

We anticipate losing chickens to predators. We’ve never met anyone who’s had birds for more than a season or two who hasn’t seen at least a couple of them become dinner for a raccoon, fox, or coyote.

Our chickens are out in plain sight, there for the taking, most every day. Luckily, raccoons, foxes, and coyotes are nocturnal, and by the time they show themselves, the chickens are locked up snug in their coop.

Nevertheless, there are three likely chicken-losing scenarios. The first is negligence (ours). If we forget to lock them in after they’ve gone into the coop at night, they’re sitting ducks. A fox merely has to waltz right through the open door to the run, and up the ladder to the coop, to find himself a fine feathered smorgasbord.

One of the locals

The second is hunger (no, not ours). In the middle of winter, when food is scarce, a predator who’s normally nocturnal may drag himself out of bed in daylight in the hopes of picking off prey that’s inaccessible at night. We know someone who lost a Bichon Frise to a coyote, in his front yard, at high noon.

The third is hawks.

Red-tail hawks are common, and their predatory ways have earned them the epithet “chicken hawk” and the enmity of farmers everywhere, although actual incidents involving actual hawks killing actual chickens are rare.

At first, hawks were a threat I couldn’t take seriously, having grown up in the ‘70’s. Like almost everyone in my age cohort who isn’t a farmer, my sole experience of chicken hawks came from spending Saturday mornings watching Foghorn Leghorn.

Foghorn Leghorn and Henry

Foghorn Leghorn is – or was, I suppose, unless cartoon characters live forever – a rooster, a prankster, and a blowhard. The cartoon series that bore his name had a cast of characters that included Barnyard Dawg (the foil for Foggy’s pranks), Miss Prissy (the object of his affections), and Henry, the chicken hawk chick who was perpetually trying to figure out just how it was he was supposed to eat a rooster about twenty times his size.

Sure, Henry was just a chick, and a cartoon at that, but his problem was real. Had he been a actual red-tail hawk, he would have grown up to be somewhere in the two-to-four pound range – big for a hawk. Our chickens are somewhere in the four-to-six pound range – medium-size for a chicken, but still bigger than a hawk.

Jim Fowler (l) and Marlin Perkins

I realize this isn’t an insurmountable problem. I know this is going to make me sound like I spent my entire childhood in front of the television, but I learned early on that smaller animals could kill larger ones because I watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Who can forget Marlin Perkins, narrating from the safety of the Land Rover, as his sidekick, Jim Fowler, stood in the path of the oncoming cheetah in order to make the point that a cheetah can take down a zebra.

But the cheetah didn’t have to fly away with it. Could a four-pound hawk really swoop down and scoop up a five-pound chicken?

I’m not sure, but the chickens think so. Several times over the last several months, we’ve heard a great squawking commotion and rushed outside to find a low-flying hawk eyeing the chickens, which have sought safety under a bush. If they so much as hear a hawk-like cry (and they know what it sounds like; crows and blue jays don’t faze them), they scan the skies warily. If they catch sight of one, they run for cover as fast as their legs will carry them.

You’d think that cowering in fear would be a silent activity, but chickens don’t seem to have fully internalized the idea of hiding. They yell and scream as though the very world is ending, and they have convinced me that the hawk threat is genuine. Ten thousand years of evolution can’t be wrong, even if it hasn’t quite worked out the kinks in the hiding strategy.  (Besides, I finally figured out that the hawk doesn’t fly away with the chicken; it kills it and eats it on the ground.)

One chicken seems particularly alarmist. Kevin named her Chicken Little because she’s our smallest hen, but she lived up to her name today, when we had another hawk incident. There was the commotion, and the running outside, and the circling hawk, and the squawking chickens. The hawk, of course, left at the first sight of us, but Chicken Little just couldn’t get over it. She stood under the bush squawking at the top of her little chicken lungs. She had us so convinced that the sky was falling that Kevin rounded up all eight birds and shut them in the run, safe.

I don’t know exactly how long chickens remember things, but hawk fear seems to last about 45 minutes. When we first closed them in the run, they seemed almost relieved to be there but, half an hour later, they decided the sky wasn’t falling after all, and were squawking to get out again. There’s no pleasing a chicken.

Is it safe yet?

Grover

There’s a Sesame Street piece, dating back some forty years, about prepositions. It features a large cardboard box and Grover. An offscreen Voice exhorts Grover to get in the box. Grover walks over to the box and stands beside it. “No, Grover,” says the Voice. “You’re next to the box. Get in the box.” Grover looks apprehensive for a moment, and then climbs up and stands on top of the box. “No, Grover,” says the Voice again, with just a touch of irritation, “Now you’re on the box. Get in the box.” Grover, again looking nervous, first tries standing in front of it, and then behind it. The Voice corrects him each time, and then finally gets completely exasperated. “Grover! Why won’t you get in the box?”

Then the box opens and a giant hairy monster pops its head out and says, “Because I’m in the box.”

I’m reenacting a version of this skit, with me as the Voice, and the chickens as Grover.

When we built them their incredibly luxurious, beautifully fitted-out coop, we included a row of four snug, straw-filled nest boxes. The chickens lay their eggs everywhere else.

First, they laid them in the run, in a sheltered corner beneath the coop.

“No, that’s under the nest boxes,” I said. “Lay your eggs in the nest boxes.”

I drove my point home by making sure there weren’t enticing piles of straw in the corners of the run. That seemed to discourage them from laying there, but they came up with a new gambit. They scratched all the straw out of the nest boxes and onto the floor of the coop, and then made their nests there.

“No,” I said, with just a touch of irritation, “That’s in front of the nest boxes. Lay your eggs in the nest boxes.”

Then I found an egg in the middle of the coop floor.  “Come on,” I said.  “That’s nowhere near the nest boxes.  You need to lay your eggs in the nest boxes.”

Far from showing apprehension or nervousness, the chickens pulled rank. “Hey,” their ringleader, Chicken Little, told me. “We’re chickens. We’re professional egg-layers and we know how to pick an appropriate spot. Lemme ask you. You ever laid an egg?”

She had me there.

I tried to reason with her. “You won’t know how nice your nest boxes are until you at least try them.”

“Bruuuuk,” she snorted. “You just want us to lay there to make it easier for you to take our eggs away.”

Chicken, 2: Me, nothing.

My next plan is to put a little ramp from the coop floor up to the nest boxes, in the hopes that they don’t want to lay on a slanted surface. If that doesn’t work, I’ll check for giant hairy monsters.

Hey! What are these little compartments for?

Last night I called Kevin from the road, and I happened to catch him as he was pulling into our driveway. He’d gone pheasant hunting, and was telling me about it when he broke off mid-sentence.

“I don’t have anything for you,” he said, although clearly not to me. And then, to me, “Chicken Little wants to follow me into the house.” Chicken Little is, unsurprisingly, our smallest hen, a Rhode Island Red.

I heard a rustling sound and then, “Braaak, buk buk buk. Braak.” Then more rustling, and Kevin was back.

“Honey,” I said. “Did you just put a chicken on the phone?”

“What did you expect?” he said. “You know the cat never says anything.”

I don’t get out much anymore. Today, though, for the first time in quite a while, I’m flying. As I write, I’m en route to Louisiana on a press junket. I will spend the next four days eating my way through Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Since I was going out in the world, hobnobbing with my peers, justifying the faith the Louisiana tourism people have in me, I wanted to brush off the dust and reassert my sophisticated urban self. I futzed with my hair, put on my hipster jeans, and headed for the airport.

Knowing I’d have to take off my shoes at the security check-in, I wore the suede clogs I leave by the door to slip on when I leave the house. When I got to the conveyor belt at the check-in, I slipped them off and put them in one of those gray bins provided for the purpose. That’s when I noticed the walnut-sized glob of chicken poop sticking to the heel.

Seems you can’t take the sticks out of the girl.

We can’t be quite sure which of our hens are laying eggs. We’ve caught two of the Rhode Island Reds in what we think is the act, but which may only be a nesting instinct that prepares them for the act. The two most mature Reds we have are also the two smallest and the fact that our eggs – two on some days, one on others – are small is another piece of evidence.

From left: the little egg, the giant egg, and the Grade AA Extra Large

Only one of the buff Orpingtons looks like she’s ready to lay. She’s a bigger bird, and we expected that one morning we’d wake up to a bigger egg.

This morning, we did. It’s about twice the size of the other egg we collected, and even a bit larger than the official extra-large egg I compared it to. By the time our hen is full-grown, she’s going to be laying grapefruit.

After changing out the screens for the windows, Kevin left the porch door open and fell asleep on the couch.  This is what I found.

Egg #1

… Lisa.

We got our first egg this morning.  It’s small, but it seemed the be-all and end-all to the Rhode Island Red I had to dislodge to get it.  

Honorable mention to Rhonda Jean (who writes about, among other things, chickens at Down to Earth), for only missing by one day and correctly calling the breed of the first bird to lay.  Kudos also to Catalina, who was one day off in the other direction.   Thanks to all who played. 

Lisa (who happens to be my sister-in-law, but I assure you the fix was not in) will get a dozen eggs next time either I am in New York or she is on Cape Cod.  It is small recompense for keeping my brother off the streets all these years.

Now you’ll have to excuse me as I have some baking to do.  Kevin and I are going to celebrate with — what else? — a layer cake.

Step right up and place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. We’re making book on the date of our first egg.

Now taking bribes ...

Just to keep it above board, I will disclose everything we know about the chickens – which amounts to precious little. We have four Rhode Island Reds and four Buff Orpingtons, and they were all hatched within a day or two of May 1 of this year. They’ve been raised on a diet of greens, bugs, and chicken feed (first the kind for chicks, then the grower feed), and they all seem healthy and happy.

We’ve filled their nest boxes with straw, and we will start checking them daily in a couple weeks, which would be the absolute earliest we could, in our wildest dreams, hope to find an egg. (I’m hoping that, once we start getting eggs, I will have wild dreams that don’t involve chickens.)

So, pick a date and leave it in the comments and, assuming my technical skills are up to it, I’ll make a little calendar with the chosen dates noted.

Whoever picks the date closest to Egg Day gets a dozen newly laid brown eggs. If the winner lives locally, I’ll even deliver them. If the winner is from afar (and, thanks to the excellent folks at The Cottage Smallholder, I boast an international readership), those eggs are going to be a great reason to vacation on Cape Cod.