All the chickens seem normal and healthy.  They’re eating, and pecking, and dust bathing.  Nobody’s obviously at death’s door. 

But this clearly came out of a chicken, and we don’t have the foggiest idea what it is.  Do you?

The mystery in the nest box

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When your house is just barely good enough to let your friends inside it, you don’t aspire to Architectural Digest.

It's ready for its close-up

But I am here to report that my husband has scored a design coup of Architectural Digest proportions. His chicken coop is featured on BobVila.com! In the hayseed set, that’s as good as it gets.

Those of you who were following this space last year got the blow-by-blow of coop design and construction. Those of you who weren’t can see a recap here.

If you have a minute, take a look at Bob Vila’s gallery of chicken coops – we’re number ten out of eleven. The text gives me more credit than I deserve; Kevin did most of both the design and construction. I butted in here and there, went with him to the lumberyard, and did the part of the roof that has two huge bumps where the shingles aren’t staggered properly.

The chickens, luckily, don’t seem to mind.

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When our hens first started producing (September 22, 2009, that would be), we thought it was utterly miraculous. You’d think that two people who’d known all their lives that eggs come from chickens could take it in stride when their chickens laid eggs, but we didn’t. We carefully preserved the shell of the first egg, having blown out and scrambled the contents (one bite each). We marveled at how the eggs got bigger, commensurate with the chickens, as the months wore on. Every day, it was our little bit of excitement to check the nest boxes and tally the take.

You have to draw the line somewhere

And we ate more eggs. We scrambled them and poached them and fried them. We made omelets and frittatas. I even baked, an activity dangerous to the waistline of someone who can’t resist baked goods.

I had taken it as an article of faith – most of us do – that back-yard eggs from overindulged chickens taste better than the supermarket eggs that are the product of factory farms. But, while I certainly enjoyed our eggs, I couldn’t say for sure that they tasted any different from other kinds.

There was only one way to find out.

Last fall, we hosted an egg tasting. We invited six of our closest friend, several of whom are food professionals. We made them put on blindfolds and we spoon-fed them (and they, us) soft-boiled samples of our eggs, regular supermarket eggs, supermarket organic eggs, and fancy-pants Country Hen organic eggs.

It was not a dignified event, and at least two shirtfronts will never be the same.

The upshot? No one can tell the difference. The tasters’ comments were all over the map – each kind of egg got both good and bad assessments – and the best-in-show vote was split almost evenly among all four.

It made for a good story, and it was on the front page of the food section of yesterday’s Washington Post. From there, it got picked up by Slate and The New York Times.

The comments came pouring in, and the vast majority made one of two points:

1. Tamar, you’re a jackass because the reason you eat eggs from well-treated hens isn’t for the taste, it’s because you want hens to be treated well.

2. Tamar, you’re a jackass because I and all my friends – in fact, everybody in the world except you and your friends – can tell the difference between a backyard egg and a storebought egg.

That first one’s easy. I agree completely. In fact, I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post to that effect a couple years back. I also made that point in the egg tasting story, but apparently not everybody reads to the end.

That second one is more complicated.

Those of us who keep chickens, and those of us who get eggs from people who keep chickens, know that fresh, backyard eggs certainly look different. They generally have brighter yolks (because the chickens eat greens and bugs, and not just feed), and the yolks and whites hold together better and are harder to beat (because the egg is fresher and hasn’t lost carbon dioxide through its shell).

It would stand to reason that eggs with manifest visual and textural differences would also taste different, but all evidence is that it just isn’t so.

There was our tasting, in which we found that all eggs taste pretty eggy. There was the poultry scientist I interviewed for the article, who confirmed that, if tasters can’t see a difference in the eggs (the industry does tests using lights that mask colors), they don’t taste a difference either. There was also a commenter on the New York Times site who said that they did similar tests in France, with the same result.

That's Kevin spoon-feeding Rick, who's flanked by David and Mary Ann. (Thanks to Doug Langeland for the photo.)

Despite the consistent results in all blind tastings (that I know of), people just don’t want to believe that eggs from the pampered hens in their backyards taste the same as the eggs from the mistreated birds in factory farms. (If you are one of those people, I urge you to try a blind tasting yourself. I think you’ll be surprised.)

I understand why people hold on to that belief. Everyone at my tasting, including Kevin and me, wanted to hold on to that belief. The idea of backyard, free-range eggs is so much more palatable that it’s natural to think that the eggs themselves must also be more palatable.

If people believe their home-grown eggs taste better, even if that’s not true, why disabuse them of the notion? Don’t we just deny them that pleasure, to no real purpose?

There is a real purpose. Many of us who believe livestock should have a decent life are trying to convince American consumers that it’s worth it to spend a little more for eggs, milk, and meat from well-treated animals. One of the arguments, often, is that those products taste better.

If those products don’t taste better, the American consumer who ponies up the extra bucks only to find that the expensive stuff tastes just like the cheap stuff is going to feel, quite rightly, that he’s been sold a bill of goods. It’ll make it very easy for him to tell himself that people advocating sustainable, animal-friendly farms are drinking their own Kool-Aid and needn’t be listened to.

If we’re going to convince people to buy products from farmers and growers who look out for the well-being of their livestock, we have to sell the products on their genuine merits.

In short, if free-range farmyard eggs don’t taste better, it doesn’t do those of us who oppose factory farms any good to go around saying they do. What’s important about eggs has little to do with the eggs themselves, and everything to do with the chickens that lay them. So let’s just say that.

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After 2 ½ days in solitary confinement, our broody hen metamorphosed back into her normal self. When she first went in the broody-busting cage, she’d do her Henzilla act – fluffing her feathers, lifting up her wings, clucking – whenever we got near her. And then, yesterday morning, I went in to give her more food, and she didn’t do it. She just paced back and forth like a regular chicken.

We let her out with the flock, and she spent the day free-ranging, with not even a wistful look at the nest boxes. She spent last night on a roost bar, like a proper chicken, and she came down the ladder with her flock-mates this morning.

She is so busted.

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She’s been broody – sitting on imaginary eggs, not moving unless we bodily remove her from the nest box – for five weeks now. When this first started, we decided to see if her raging hormones would run their course in the three weeks that’s the gestation period for an egg, but they haven’t.

Queenie takes the cure

It was Kevin who decided it was time for drastic measures. This may surprise those of you who follow this space and understand Kevin’s attachment to the chickens, but it’s entirely consistent with his problem-solving philosophy.

Best we can tell, a broody chicken is not a happy chicken. When we take her out to make sure she eats and drinks, she turns into Henzilla, Monster of the Coop. She fluffs herself up, sticks out her wings, and runs around clucking. She attacks the other chickens. She tries to nest on any available surface. It’s no fun being a victim of your hormones. Just imagine five weeks of PMS.

A caged chicken is even less happy than a broody chicken. But the caging should be a three-day affair, and the broodiness could go on for the entire summer. While Kevin and I agree that three days of being very miserable is better than three months of being pretty miserable, Kevin’s the one who can take the long view and actually put the chicken in the cage. I have a tendency to take it a day at a time. Today, she’ll be less miserable if we don’t put her in the cage, and who knows what tomorrow might bring?

Kevin’s right, of course. Caging is both in Queenie’s best interest and in ours. She’ll go back to being a happy chicken, and we’ll start getting eggs from her again. It’s clearly the best solution.

Real farmers have to make hard decisions daily. Livestock, even the best-treated livestock, are subjected to unpleasant procedures all the time. Animals that are sick, or a drain on resources, or a threat to people or other animals, have to be put down. You commit to giving your animals the best life you reasonably can, and then you do what you have to do.

Just yesterday, I went out to Long Pasture Sanctuary, a Mass Audubon preserve, to talk with its director, Ian Ives, about working on a project together. As he was giving me a tour, one of the property’s many rabbits hopped across our path. My first thought – the very first – was what a nice dinner it might make.

Later in the tour, I saw a little boy, about six or seven, tip-toeing up to one of the rabbits – could have been the same one – trying to get as close as he could to the nice bunny. I felt like a barbarian. What has this life done to me, that I see a nice bunny and I think guns and stewpots?

In a way, it was reassuring to feel something very much like distress at seeing one of our chickens in a cage. Maybe I’m not a barbarian after all.

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A real tough guy

Perhaps this is why I find it particularly touching that he loves our chickens. He picks them up and clucks at them. “Who’s your daddy?” he coos. He talks to them, and communes with them, and gives them special treats. He watches how they interact, and understands their individual whims. When one of them gets separated from the others, he helps her find the flock.

Just the other day, I was working in the house when Kevin walked in after being out in the yard for several hours. I had a question for him – I don’t remember what it was – and I started to ask it when he interrupted me mid-sentence. “Hold on, “ he said. “I promised the girls some corn.” He got a scoop of corn out of the fifty-pound bag on the porch and scattered it outside the porch door.

“Did you just interrupt me so you could give the chickens corn right this very instant?” I asked when he came back in.

“Well,” he said, obviously not having seen it in this light. “I did promise.”

There was a stretch last year when Kevin’s job was particularly stressful, and weeks would go by when the only time I would see him relaxed and happy was when he was hanging out with the birds. “Hell will freeze over before I’m jealous of a chicken,” I said, “but I hope the time will come when you can again find happiness in other things as well.”

He loves all the chickens, but he loves Blondie best.

He loves our chickens. In fact, he would be the perfect chicken-keeper but for one shortcoming: he plays favorites. He loves all the chickens, but he loves Blondie best.

Blondie is a buff Orpington, and she seems to be the most curious and intrepid of the flock. She’s the first to trot over and see what’s going on when we’re working in the yard. She’s the one who always pecks the shoelaces of our visitors. When I cleaned out the car, she hopped in to investigate.

All this has endeared her to Kevin, and he has singled her out as his particular favorite.

This weekend, our friends Mary Ann and Rick came over for lunch. It was a beautiful day, and we were all sitting in the sun talking when the chickens came around to peck at the corn that we’d scattered. Kevin pointed out Blondie, and sang her praises. After she’d had a little corn, he picked her up tucked her under his arm.

“They like a little chest massage,” he explained to Rick as he rubbed the base of Blondie’s neck. “Who’s your daddy?” he said into her ear.

And then she shat on him. All over his shirt and shorts. We must have laughed for five minutes. You’d have thought we were in junior high.

Mary Ann told me the next day that Rick re-enacted the scene several times that night, using their cat, Gracie, as a stand-in for Blondie. “Who’s your daddy?” He’d say. “Do you like a little chest massage?” And then he’d make a farting noise and two intelligent, sophisticated adults would collapse in helpless laughter all over again.

This is what chickens do to you.

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Out here in the sticks, we’ve got a new set of things to get used to. Insects. Heating bills. Having to drive absolutely everywhere. And chicken poop.

Oh please -- not in the car!

If you’re going to have chickens, there’s no way around having chicken poop. Chickens poop, wherever, whenever. They poop on our front stoop, on all the outdoor furniture, in the driveway, in the garage. They don’t poop where we don’t let them go – inside the house – but we end up with chicken poop there anyway because we step in it and track it all over.

If you’re unfamiliar with chicken poop, and picture a small, dainty product, let me disabuse you of that notion. Maybe it’s because their mostly-plant diet is high in undigestibles, or maybe it’s a function of a gizzard-driven digestive system, or maybe there’s some kind of contest going on that we don’t know about, but chicken poop can be prodigious.

If there is a contest, first place goes to Henzilla (a.k.a. Queenie), our broody hen. Because she’s reluctant to leave the nest, she just holds it in. When we remove her bodily from the coop, she generally takes some food, drinks some water, and then excretes something a pony would be proud of.

I’ve read that a laying chicken, confined, will produce about a quarter-pound of manure each day. My theory is that our unconfined birds, since they burn more calories, eat more and excrete more. A conservative estimate is that our flock will poop about a thousand pounds a year. Once the moisture content, which is around 70%, evaporates, we’re down to a mere 300 pounds.

It seems like a good half of that ends up on my shoes, but I realize that’s a perception problem. I suspect about a third of it ends up scattered across the property, a third in the run, and a third in the coop, where our birds roost for the night.

Our deep litter

The scattered poop takes care of itself, one way or another. It either exits the property on boot soles or car tires, or it gradually decomposes in situ. The poop in the run, astonishingly, disappears. The run’s floor is coated with a thick layer of wood chips, and the poop seems to sink in and break down as the chickens scratch and peck. The coop poop, though, is enclosed, which means we have to deal with it.

There are many ways to manage chicken poop (and you can read about all of them at www.backyardchickens.com, the go-to site for amateur chicken keepers), but we chose the “deep litter” method, which calls for putting a thick layer of bedding (pine shavings, in our case) on the coop floor, and periodically mixing in the poop.

This method is supposed to have all sorts of advantages. The process by which chicken poop becomes fertilizer begins in the litter layer as the manure breaks down. In winter, the litter acts as an insulating layer in the coop, and it may even generate some heat as the mixture breaks down. Robert Plamondon, an Oregon farmer who dispenses chicken advice, says that deep litter is probiotic and fights coccidiosis, a common chicken disease.

The biggest advantage, as far as I’m concerned, is that you only have to clean out the coop once a year. Once a year! I’m in.

Kevin and I decided to do the Annual Poop-Out last week.

Of course, when you only clean something once a year, the event can take on mythic significance. When I was a kid, the garage was the thing we cleaned once a year. The date was never set in advance, and my father would spring it on my brothers and me over breakfast on a Saturday in May. “Time for the Annual Miracle,” he’d say, and we’d groan and gripe. The Annual Miracle consisted of taking everything out of the garage, scattering sweeping compound, sweeping, and then putting everything back in, in some semblance of order. Naturally, my father always chose a nice day for this – why would you clean out the garage in the rain? – and I remember hating having to participate.

Raking it out

Kevin and I decided to do the Annual Poop-Out last week. We started our deep litter last summer, when we first put the chickens in the coop, but we wanted to get it cleaned a few months ahead of schedule so we could compost the litter in time to use it on this year’s garden.

I was steeled for it. I expected that cleaning out a chicken coop in which chickens had been pooping for nigh-on a year would be a smelly, dirty, icky job. If I let the cat box go that long, there’d be hell to pay. But it turned out to be a breeze. The litter was completely dry and absolutely inoffensive. Other than an occasional whiff of ammonia, we didn’t smell a thing.

We raked the litter into a wheelbarrow, wheeled it down to the composter, and shoveled it in. Then we made a second trip. Then we opened the bag of compressed pine shavings we’d bought at Cape Cod Feed & Supply, and spread them in the coop. The whole job took about half an hour.

Halfway to fertilizer

Not only is chicken poop something I’ve gotten used to, it’s something I value. Once we compost it, we’ll have enough to fertilize our garden, and plenty left over to share with friends. Since chicken-manure fertilizer is expensive (a six-pound container of Cockadoodle Doo goes for about $12), I’ve found that gardeners we know really appreciate it.

We’ve promised some to our friend Christl, who has the best vegetable garden I’ve ever seen. In return, she’s raising some tomato seedlings for us. I think it’s an excellent trade. I get her beautiful Sungold tomato plants, lovingly raised and tended by a skilled and experienced hand, and she gets my chicken shit.

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Oh wait … that last one might just be Kevin.

But it was Kevin, communing with his chickens, who first spotted a behavior that highlights the deep-seated differences between the sexes of all species.

Queenie, hunkered down

Yes, we have a broody hen.

A broody hen is a bird who has abruptly shifted into motherhood mode. She is convinced, all evidence to the contrary, that she is hatching a clutch of eggs. In this case, the “she” is Queenie.

Before I tell you about Queenie, I want you to understand something: we didn’t name our chickens. A few of our chickens, though, named themselves. Baldie, may she rest in peace, got attacked by a hawk and had a bald spot on her back for several weeks. Blondie has lighter feathers than any of the other buff Orpingtons. Queenie is really, really big.

It so happens that only the Orpingtons have names. The Rhode Island Reds are harder to tell apart. Kevin swears that he can tell Big Red from Chicken Little at a glance, but they look so similar to, respectively, the second-largest and second-smallest Reds that the names haven’t really stuck.

Queenie, though, is pretty obvious. She’s gigantic. And it was two days ago that Kevin first noticed that she was spending an awful lot of time in the nest box, not laying an egg. When I put the birds to bed that night, she was still in the box, and she spent most of yesterday not budging.

We forcibly removed her a couple of times, both because we thought maybe she’d snap out of it and because she probably needed something to eat and drink. She did eat and drink, but she didn’t snap out of it. She hunkered down in a corner of the coop where we couldn’t quite reach her.

This morning, there she was, and we took her out again. After they’d laid their eggs, we let all the chickens free-range and we took the ladder to the coop down so Queenie couldn’t go back in.

Boy was she mad. She took a few desultory scratches in the leaves, ate a few random blades of grass, all the while making a sulky cluck-cluck-cluck. Then she hopped up on the low table outside our kitchen window and nestled down for the long haul.

Henzilla!

As long as nobody gets too close, she looks like a normal, well-adjusted chicken who’s taking a rest. Get near her, though, and she turns into Henzilla. She fluffs out all her feathers, lifts up her wings, clucks ominiously, and employs all the resources at her disposal to look armed and dangerous.

It isn’t easy for a cute, fluffy chicken to look anything other than cute and fluffy – it’s kind of like when Meg Ryan played that tough, gutsy helicopter pilot – but I have to admire the attempt.

This is the power of evolution, the imperative of which is to propagate the species. Here’s a hen who has never so much as laid eyes on a rooster. She’s been bred for generations to just lay eggs and forget about the part that comes after. She’s enclosed in a coop where there aren’t any eggs to nest on. But still, nature will out. A couple hundred years of selective breeding is no match for millennia of natural selection. Hens will brood.

Everyone who keeps chickens encounters this problem sooner or later. In our case, it was sooner – older birds are more likely than our 11-month-olds to go broody. And it is a problem, for a couple of reasons. First, broody hens don’t lay eggs, as they’ve flipped the switch from egg layer to chick rearer.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if broodiness, like yawning, didn’t tend to be catching. Sure, it’s fine when one bird does it, but if you’ve got three or four or seven doing it, you’re in a for a long eggless spring.

She of the droopy comb

The other problem is that a broody hen doesn’t like to leave the nest even for long enough to eat and drink. Their combs pale and droop.  They lose weight. They’ve been known to starve themselves.

Add to this that they’re downright unfriendly, and you can see why broodiness is something you want to avoid.

There are many strategies for “breaking” a broody hen. The most straightforward is to put her in a suspended cage with a wire floor – a “broody buster” – so nesting is out of the question, and leave her there for a few days until her mothering instincts retreat whence they came. Others, more hearsay than strategy, include putting a clutch of ice cubes under her and dunking her in a bucket of cold water.

The most constructive strategy, though, is to get hold of some fertile eggs and make a virtue of necessity. (Chicken forums are filled with stories of chicken owners who, failing to break a broody bird, finally resolve to do this, scour the countryside for fertile eggs and pay through the nose for a clutch of them only to have the bird break of her own accord the moment they slip the eggs under her.) We’re not ready for a new flock, though, so that’s not an option for us.

We tried to get Queenie to spend most of the day free-ranging with her sisters, but she kept returning to the run and settling in a corner. When we take her out again, she seems distressed and unhappy.

I’m inclined to let the broodiness run its course – which should be about three weeks, the incubation period for a chicken egg. If all the other hens start thinking it’s a good idea, there may have to be a new broody-busting sheriff in town, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Meanwhile, I have to admit I’m impressed with the strength of Queenie’s purpose. Her single-minded focus is a testament to the very real differences between females and males, and I’d really like to know what’s going through her little bird brain as she sits, hour after hour, on her clutch of imaginary eggs.

I wish I could ask her about it. I’m sure she’d like to talk about her feelings.

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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.

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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.

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