I’m a fan of the hum-a-few-bars-and-I’ll-play-it school. I mean, I like to throw myself into new things and I figure I’ll learn along the way. It’s worked so far, for everything in my life except romance and chicken farming.
Today, we discuss the latter.
You may remember the chickens I got, fourteen in all, a complete array of Gilbert & Sullivan hens and a Women’s Chorus of Plymouth Barred Rocks. I’ve watched them grow from chick to full-grown, so now they’re all chubby and feathery and friendly. They let me pick them up and turn them over on their backs, which is hypnosis for chickens, and they become calm, cradled in my arms and looking up at me, blinking their round amber eyes. I call this game Baby Chicken, which I’m sure has nothing to do with me being an empty nester.
I installed a baby monitor in the chicken coop, which may sound a little strange, but why stop now? I’d never heard of a baby monitor in a chicken coop, but it turned out to be a fun idea. I keep it on all day long at the house, so I can work listening to the pleasant cooing, clucking, and occasional squabbling you would expect from a house that holds more than two females of anything, especially if they have beaks, nails, and major attitude.
It’s a hen party, 24-7.
So far, so good until one of my other bright ideas, which is to let the chickens out every day so they can run around free. I started doing this in the summer, and they loved it, either foraging in the grass for delicious bugs or digging to China, for all I know.
It’s a chicken thing.
I knew that they weren’t safe from foxes or raccoons, so I stood guard and watched them bask in the sun, roll in the dirt, or cluster together to form some kind of chicken molecule. Don’t ask me why they do this, either. I’m new here.
Then I noticed that they like to migrate together into the barn, and I let them because I figured they’d be safe from predators on the ground and from the sky, because they were under a roof. In time, I became a little more lax about standing guard, and they were outside all day, loving their very free-range life.
So you know where this is going.
Disaster struck.
I was in the backyard with daughter Francesca, the chickens were in the barn, and all of sudden, a hawk dive-bombed out of nowhere after them. Francesca and I started running, the hawk flew away, but we got there too late. A member of the Women’s Chorus was dead on the floor and the other chickens were terrified, squawking and calling, scattering all directions.
We managed to get all of them back into the coop, except for one that was hiding under the straw, flattened in fear, and two others we discovered with the help of Ruby The No-Longer-Medicated Corgi. She found the chickens standing completely still under a bush, pretending to be lawn ornaments.
So I consulted my chicken books and ended up buying an electrified fence, which took all morning to install, but then I couldn’t bring myself to shock my babies or turn my backyard into a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then I realized what I really needed was overhead netting, so I got one online and spent all day trying to stretch it on top of the electrified fence, which turned out to be too flimsy to support even itself, and the whole thing collapsed into an expensive mess. So now I’m trying to figure out how to build some sort of outside cage that will keep them safe from hawks, raccoons, and my other mistakes.
Come to think about it, it’s not so different from raising kids. All parents start out as rookies, and we learn as we go, making mistakes as we let our children explore. There will be trials and errors both, but parents learn from their mistakes, too, and if we’re lucky, we’ll all survive the hawks we meet along the way.
And even chicken parenting has its perfect moments.
Daughter Francesca and I took Mother Mary into the coop the other day, and were happily surprised to find that one of the Araucana chickens had laid her first egg-small, perfect, and blue as clear sky.
I’d count that as graduation day, wouldn’t you?