Reflections: Tending the Flock

About ten years ago there awakened in my breast a primal desire to raise poultry. Maybe it was the dawn of a new decade or the arrival of my fortieth birthday. Maybe it’s because I’m descended from Welsh farmers, or evidence that my forebears were more on the “gathering” end of humanity’s hunter/gatherer spectrum; I’ve never been much of a hunter. Then again, it could also have been hubris brought on by having successfully kept two children alive to the point at which they could speak in full sentences (i.e. the ‘how-hard-could-it-be’ school of animal husbandry). But for whatever reason, during the winter of 2009-2010 I devoted considerable time and attention to the construction of a small but sturdy chicken house just large enough to accommodate the four juvenile layers of impeccable pedigree that I bought to live in it. With input from the children, these baby birds were nurtured, named, fed, watered, cuddled, cooed-to, and lovingly raised to adulthood … at which point they were more or less immediately set upon and messily eaten by a family of raccoons. Naturally, the children were devastated. There were tears, recriminations, and interment complete with squeaky funeral dirges played on violins, pledges to rebuild followed by the beefing up of defenses and procurement of replacement poultry. Name/feed/water/repeat … 

The next time it was possums. Then foxes. Then hawks. We’ve lost them to owls, bobcats, coyotes, weasels, snakes, gnats. Apparently a chicken can live to the ripe old age of six or more under the right circumstances, but we’ve never had the chance to test this theory. Over ten years I estimate that we have underwritten the diets of area wildlife to the tune of 150 chickens or so. At some point the kids stopped naming them and really, who can blame them? Nowadays my flock lives in the Guantanamo Bay of poultry houses—a supermax facility that incorporates all the lessons learned during ten years of trial and error in the chicken protection racket. A fully roofed enclosure with floor-to-ceiling welded wire mesh anchored into a concrete-and-broken-glass-filled trench that extends a foot beneath ground level, with self-closing doors and automatic feeders, it is large and secure enough to keep thirty chickens in comfort and total security for a week at a time without any human interaction whatsoever. 

[Read this: Read another chapter on James's chicken-raising shenanigans, here.]

So what do I have to show for this? Four chickens. Here at the dawn of a new decade, I am right back where I started. During the course of the year a flock that numbered more than twenty has been whittled down to four of the fattest, most entitled chickens that ever drew breath. In their capacious chicken mansion they squat, pecking disconsolately at the dusty ground and gazing longingly through the concertina wire at the lush grassland and predator-filled undergrowth beyond. I go down to check for eggs, take pity on the prisoners, and reach for the latch. Overjoyed, the chickens rush out onto the grass, foraging and scratching ecstatically. I gaze at them and think “… just for a couple of hours. What could go wrong?” And pledge not to turn my back. Then the phone rings. This is why, following a noonday massacre at the hands (paws) of the neighbors’ dogs, we are back down to four chickens. The problem, of course, is me. 

I tell you all this because right now on my kitchen table there is an incubator keeping forty-four eggs at a steady 99.5 degrees. Donated by several more successful chicken-keeping friends, these eggs probably won’t all hatch, since roosters tend not to behave quite so, well, roosterishly, towards the hens in the middle of winter. But by January 5 I should be ushering twenty or thirty baby chicks into the world. Having finally made peace with the fact that I will never learn to keep my poultry permanently incarcerated, I am embracing the “live-fast-die-young” school of chicken husbandry and concluding that the best course of action is to keep a steady supply of replacements coming up. Luckily I have a better track record with children who, despite now being teenagers, are showing renewed interest. They definitely have fewer natural predators. Perhaps, this time around, they’ll even help me name them again.