Mother With a Mission (or More Adventures in Poultry Paradise)

There is a hen sitting on eggs high aloft a stack of hay bales in my barn. I do not want, nor do I need, any more chickens. This very same hen and I had a go-round last summer over this very same issue. Each night I would find her tucked inside one of our laying boxes or nestled amongst the hay, quietly sitting on the latest egg. And each night she would shriek with fury when I lifted her off her egg and put her in the hen house with the other less maternal hens.

She is a Buff Orpington. “Buffies,” as we call them, are a gentle, quiet breed with beautiful rich golden feathers and soft downy “pantaloons” that give them a plump, mother hen kind of look. This particular hen is determined. I saw it in her eyes the first night I lifted her off her eggs a few weeks ago. Chickens are not the smartest of God’s creatures, nor do they necessarily have the capacity for scheming, but I am beginning to believe they do dream. This hen dreams of being a mother. And mothers are a determined sort.

Free To A Good Home: One Rooster (maybe two)

The thing about chicks is they grow up. (Guess the same could be said about having babies or puppies or kittens) They don’t stay tiny and cute and manageable for long. Soon they are big and awkward and making all kinds of noise. Our seven little chicks that hatched out last Memorial Day are now chickens. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except some of them, or at least one of them, is a rooster. I know this for certain because of the crowing. It’s time to put the new hens in with all the old hens, but what to do with the rooster? Surely if I toss little rooster-boy (he actually has a name the kids have given him, but I can’t ever keep them straight) in with the big roosters, I could get sited for cock-fighting. Although, I have no spare affection to shower on any rooster, and the extra cash from side bets might help me buy the new breadmaker I need, I really can’t bring myself to do that.


Instead, I’m investigating butchers. As much as I like to think I’m a farm girl and for as much as I can handle the realities of the animal kingdom, I can’t quite bring myself to take a life. I have no problem with taking the little crowing, strutting life to someone else for the killing, but I just can’t do it myself. So I’ve been making some inquiries. The butchers say, “Oh, it’s easy, you can do it.” I’ve had two very nice gentlemen carefully explain exactly what I need to do. Simple, kill ‘em, drain em’, pull the insides out (ew), boil ‘em, and the feathers come right off. Simple. Uh huh.

I need a farmer friend to volunteer his services. Another neighbor suggested I just take the rooster up in the woods away from the house and turn him loose for the foxes. This also seems cruel and irresponsible. What if the rooster finds his way to one of the nice 4 bedroom-2 ½ bath colonials nearby filled with pleasant people recently transplanted from the city? Will they trace it back to me? Is there a law against rooster-abandonment?

As I write this I can hear the little boy rooster crowing away and for every effort he makes, the big rooster yells back even louder. They’ve got a real call and response going, only I don’t think the message is anything like what you’d hear in church.

I’m giving myself until next weekend to make a decision. Then I’m going to put on my big-girl panties and take care of this situation. My ancestors did this. And really, all of us who eat meat should be able to do this. We’re hypocrites if we can’t, right?

First, I have to determine how many roosters I really have. Determining chicken sex is not as simple as you might think. There are two other young chickens in with rooster-boy who look suspicious. They have longer tail feathers and small attitudes. But they haven’t let loose with a crow yet. I don’t know if they’re intimidated by the guy already doing all that crowing, or if they haven’t figured it out yet, or if maybe (hopefully) they’re actually hens in rooster drag. I do want to be certain who I’m killing before I start killing.

Next spring when my hens start all their brooding nonsense, I promise I won’t be such a softy. There is no reason they need to hatch chicks. The Achterberg farm is a small China in reverse – only one male allowed in the chicken pen. The rest, well, the rest are going to be eliminated by someone. Maybe me. We’ll see. I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, I welcome your chicken butchering suggestions and assistance. Free To A Good, oh heck, ANY Home: One rooster.

Parenthood According to Poultry

WARNING: This post is much too long and if you don’t really care much for chickens or mamas, you can skip it. I won’t be offended. Heck, I’ll never know. But if you linger over the nature channel, or struggle with your own ideas of motherhood, this one might be right up your alley.

Lesson one – You can’t stop motherhood.

This spring several of my chickens became mothers. Witnessing their adventures has been a privilege and a lesson. It’s also made it apparent why it’s necessary for chickens to lay an egg nearly every day to ensure the species’ survival.

Way back in February, when I was cursing the cold and fumbling my way through the barn in the near dark trying to find the light switch, my hand fell upon something feathered. Now, all things feathered should have already made it back to the dorm by the dusk curfew so this was unexpected. One of the surprisingly consistent behaviors of chickens is that as soon as the sun begins to set, they will always find their way back to the hen house for the night. So when I come flying up the hill in my pajamas at 10pm, they are all there quietly cooing on their perches only a little indignant that someone forgot to shut the door on the cold night.

I finally managed to locate the light switch and was shocked to see one of my Buff Orpington hens perched in the hay bales. I was even more shocked when I attempted to pick her up to move her to the hen house and she puffed up, bristled her feathers, and started screaming at me like a junkyard dog protecting a bucket of fried chicken. My first reaction was to jump back and put my hands up to show that I was unarmed (or maybe to be certain that I still had my fingers). Then I remembered that I’m the person and this is a small, relatively brainless bird. Plus I was wearing gloves. So I swooped in once more, ignored her protests and her sad attempts to remove my fingers and hauled her to the hen house. I retrieved the eggs she had been protecting and went about my chores.

Everything I’ve read says that the “broodiness” has been bred out of our modern chickens. So I felt fairly confident that this hen was simply confused, until we repeated this little scene every night for a week. To my children’s protests, I simply said, “We don’t need any more chickens unless these are chickens we raise for the dinner table.” That shut them up. And soon the hen quit her attempts at motherhood, or so I thought. A few nights later when I was moving some hay bales, I caught site of my would-be mother hen hiding back between the bales and the walls. This time to remove her I was forced to squeeze myself between the wall of hay and the nasty cob-web covered side of the barn. When I bent down to pick her up, my face was way too close to her fussing beak. I’ve fed this hen for two years, raised her from a peep, but I’m fairly sure she would have taken my eyes out if I’d gotten much closer. I considered moving the hay, but it was stacked six bales high and it was late. So, that’s how “Jules” got to live her dream. Because I’m the chicken.

I looked up “broodiness” in my chicken-keeping bible (Storeys Guide to Raising Chickens) and discovered that while most domestic chickens no longer have the urge to brood, occasionally a Buff Orpington hen will and sometimes she is even be successful. Huh.

Jules sat on her eggs faithfully as the hay bales slowly receded. Not being sure exactly when she began her sit-fest, I wasn’t sure when the eggs might hatch. It takes 21 days. I didn’t know how many eggs she was sitting on and I didn’t know if she knew what she was doing. It seemed pretty cold for an egg to be sitting on the ground. Plus the barn flooded during that time and I was too distracted with getting everything else to high ground, I forgot about Jules.

When I was pretty sure it had been more than three weeks and enough bales were eaten that I was able to reach her, I donned the gloves and picked her up. Much to my shock she was sitting on over 30 eggs. And I knew they weren’t all her eggs because there were brown, blue, white, and green eggs. Obviously, Jules was ready to raise everybody’s babies. When the other hens were out during the day, they must have been laying them next to Jules and letting her claim them. I didn’t have the heart to tell Jules that most of the eggs lying near the outer edges were ice cold.

That day we moved her to her own private box (the old pack-n-play). I selected six eggs that seemed warm and built her a small nest out of hay and shavings. She settled right in after lecturing me a bit to stay back. I had to admire this little hen’s determination to become a mamma. She was bucking her breeding, ignorance, and my efforts to deter her. And then one day, in addition to Jules nasty warnings, I also heard a little “peep”. A chick was born! There was much celebrating! And of course I posted her picture on Facebook. I’m glad Jules has a bird brain and probably doesn’t realize that this chick is obviously an Arucana chick and not a Buff Orpington, like her. A few days later a nearly identical chick popped out. And that was enough for Jules. She abandoned the remaining eggs and fretted over her two babes.

Lesson Two: Motherhood is contagious.

About two weeks in to the sitting project, another hen set up shop high in the bales. This was another of my Buff Orpington hens, so I knew better than to fight her on this. I barricaded her in with more bales hoping to deter the other hens from dropping their potential off-spring on her but soon discovered it wasn’t working. Her egg pile quickly rose to 15. So my husband and I “candled” her eggs. Candling is when you shine a light through an egg so you can see what’s inside. It’s no ultra-sound, but we were able to tell easily which eggs had a chick-in-progress and which were duds. My roosters are busy boys, but apparently they aren’t servicing each and every hen. So we pulled out the hot eggs and set this hen (“Treat”) up in her own digs just like Jules. Treat hatched her one and only chick about a week after Jules. Even though she sat faithfully, one day the stench of rotting eggs was so bad, I had to ditch all the remaining eggs and convince her that one chick is plenty.

My oldest son named the lone chick “Not-a-Rooster”, never even considering my suggestions of Ranger or Hans (as in Hans solo). He stuck with his choice, reasoning that this way maybe the chick would have better odds of survival since I (being the “meanest mother in the world”) had already declared that we had plenty of roosters and if any of these chicks was a rooster, he was going, one way or another.

When the chicks got a little older we let the two hens and their chicks out and delighted in watching them running around together. The two moms shared mothering duties and some nights when I would go up to the barn to put them away, I’d find all three chicks under one hen and no chicks under the other.

Not long after we began letting the chicks and moms run loose, I found a hen in the chicken pen sitting on eggs in the laying house. I guess seeing the other hens with their chicks was too much for her. I wasn’t too worried because this hen was a Jersey Giant and the book says that Jersey Giants are not good brooders, “rarely able to successfully hatch”. Good news for us. I confidently removed the would-be Mama from her egg box each night and shoved her back in the hen house with the others, apologizing profusely and grateful that she kept her beak in check.

I did this for two weeks straight. And then I began to worry about this hen’s psyche. What if she really, really wanted to be a mama? What if she would never stop sitting on eggs until I finally let her fulfill her destiny? What if she was really a Buff Orpington trapped inside a Jersey Giant? The two mama hens and their brood had moved in to the same pack-n-play, so I had an extra box. And now that we had three chicks, what’s a few more? I’m becoming soft. So now we have another hen sitting on eggs in a pack-n-play in our barn. She’s due on Memorial Day.

And that’s not the end of the story. About the time that I moved “Monty” to her new digs, “Python”, another black Jersey Giant began a campaign of her own. It’s been a week now of pulling this hen off her eggs every night. I’m torn. I feel the injustice that must tear at this hen’s heart (or it would if she had a brain that worked like that). How can I allow three other hens to realize their dreams of becoming mothers, and deny her? Probably I can’t, but right now there just isn’t an available pack-n-play.

Lesson Three: Some mothers are better than others.

Sad, but true. Some of us are just not cut out to be mothers. That’s what Jules figured out about two weeks in to the shared motherhood with Treat. One night I was late getting up to the barn to put away the mamas and babies. Normally at night they settle down in the old nest Jules built way back when this odyssey started. After dusk, I move them to the pack-n-play and cover it to protect them from any stray foxes or cats that get the wrong idea. But on this night I found only one hen. All the chicks were accounted for, but only one Mama. I looked everywhere, but no Jules. The only answer could be that a fox had gotten her. I imagined her sacrificing her life so that the others could escape. There was a real Lassie feel to my fantasy, but alas, no Lassie had come to the rescue.

In the morning, I sadly told the kids. Being kids (or maybe being my kids), they didn’t believe me. They slapped on their boots and went in search of Jules. Maybe she was trapped somewhere! They held out hope. And in just a few minutes they arrived back at the house triumphant! They’d found Jules! She was in the chicken yard with the other hens. Apparently, this motherhood gig wasn’t for her, so she hopped the fence and rejoined the single life, leaving Treat to deal with her two chicks. Oh, I laughed over that one. And now I remind the kids of Jules’ chicken run when they are pushing me to the brink.

Lesson Number Four: Some mothers will sacrifice all for their babies.

This was the saddest lesson for all of us. This past weekend, my husband and I were away on a rare weekend without kids. My parents had kid rustling duties. I had divvied up the barn duties and the dog duties and the cat duties, and yet it was still my mother who discovered late Saturday night that there were three chicks in the barn, but no Mama Treat. And in the morning, she was still gone.

When we got home I sent my husband to find the body. We both knew what had most likely happened. We have an old dog, a good dog, who is also a foxhound. She can’t help herself. We were fairly sure if the mama was gone and the babies were there, it wasn’t the act of a fox because a fox would have eaten those babies for dessert. No, this had to have been our old dog. And sure enough the evidence was under the deck. I lectured her as best I could, but really, she can’t help herself. Most likely, the babies had wandered in to dog territory and Mama Treat had put herself on the line between danger and safety. I’m certain she stood her ground to that huge, bumbling dog who kills simply for sport. Poor Treat. What a good Mama.

We knew better than to ask Jules to step back in, she’s moved on. So the babies are settled in to the chicken tractor until they are large enough to join the rest of the flock (except for Not-a-Rooster who really is a rooster and will be moving on to greener pastures hopefully at a neighbor’s farm).

I feel more attached to my girls now than ever. We are kindred spirits of sorts. I remember when I gave birth to my first child feeling very primal and at one with nature. As humans we tend to project our own experiences of motherhood on the animals around us. Animals do motherhood in a million ways, but some of their behaviors are very human.

Sadly, it does seem that motherhood is unstoppable and it can be contagious. Some people jump in to motherhood without serious consideration. Societal expectations have been ironed on to their hearts just like animal instincts, or maybe they do it because “everyone else” is doing it. There are others who would do anything to become mothers – suffering all kinds of indignities and hardships.

Motherhood is not for the faint of heart. There are some days I truly do want to fly the coop and rejoin the single life, but deep down I know I would lay down my life if it meant the safety of my babies. So maybe lesson five is: Everybody does motherhood differently. Expectations and comparisons are a dangerous game. We never truly know what we are capable of until we let our children (or our chickens) teach us.

Peep Show

We’ve got quite a peep show going on over here at our house. We are seriously overrun with chicks. I’m not completely sure how this happened. Actually, that’s not true, I know exactly how it happened. It happened because I am a weak mother and I have chick problem. But going back further it happened because of a gray fox that entered our chicken pen at dusk a few months back. The roosters alerted me to his presence and I went running in to the pen with the only weapon I could find at the moment, an empty manure bucket. My husband pointed out later that there was also a pitchfork available to me and I said “Ah! I should have grabbed that!” And then he gently asked me if I could have truly speared a fox, to which I had to honestly say, “No.” So the manure bucket was as good a weapon as any considering the situation.

I waved my manure bucket and yelled all kinds of hateful things I never knew were hidden in the far recesses of my brain. The fox ran back and forth along the fence line in a panic because of the crazy woman with the big blue bucket blocking his escape through the gate from whence he came. This stand off went on for what seemed like hours, but was probably only 30 seconds before I realized I was blocking the only way out for the fox. Since I just wanted the horrid beast gone, I stepped out of the way and he darted by me while I jumped up and down (just in case he was planning on nibbling my toes as he passed by RIGHT NEXT TO ME!).

In the aftermath of the fox’s visit, we were left with only eight living chickens, six of which are hens and two of which are worthless, noisy roosters. Unlike our first rooster, Snowball (may he rest in peace) who gave his life for our hens, the two useless roosters had high-tailed it to the top end of our pasture where they commenced crowing their lungs out while the hens were savaged in the chicken yard. True, it was their yelling that alerted me to the situation in the chicken pen, but still, if the fox had to kill so many chickens why couldn’t it have been one (or two) of the roosters? Why did it have to be my best laying hens?

We have been down to 1 or 2 eggs a day (at the most) since the fox incidence. I’ve even had to go to the market and buy eggs, which felt completely wrong. And our whole family learned again that no store bought egg tastes as good as a fresh one.

This set the scene for what happened two weeks ago on my laptop. My daughter and I were taking advantage of some free wifi at the music studio where she sings with her rock band (think School of Rock) and we surfed over to the McMurray Hatchery website. We explored all the options available for ordering peeps (one day old chicks). In my mind I was thinking we might order as many as a dozen peeps, but as we paged through the options there were just too many beautiful choices! Hens that lay blue eggs, pink eggs, brown eggs, speckled egss. Hens with fluffy feet, pompadours on their heads, jet black ones, speckled ones, striped ones, and fancy chickens with extra long tail feathers. And they only cost about $2.50 a piece, so what’s the harm in throwing in a few more? We were up to 18 chicks when I attempted to place the order. A message came back quickly, “Minimum order is 25 peeps”. Well, we don’t really have a choice do we? And what if the fox comes back? He hasn’t been back since the fateful night. Either he was freaked out by the crazy woman with the bucket who trapped him in the chicken yard or he’s terrified of the ferocious puppy that has been turned loose to patrol the barn (chase the cats and bark her fool head off at fast moving spiders) and has been forced to move to more lucrative venues. But what if he decides to come back? A few extra chicks aren’t a bad thing.

In the end we picked out more Arucanas (they lay blue eggs!) and Rhode Island Reds (my favorite and the smartest chickens, if there is such a thing as a smart chicken). To that we added some Buff Orpingtons (because our neighbor has the most beautiful one named Julie who hatched our roosters for us last year, even though they weren’t her eggs), Black Giants (they lay lots of eggs, even in winter and they look really tough), Silver Laced Wyandottes (because they are just so pretty), and Buff Laced Polish (they have the pompadours on their heads). Then when I was ready to place the order, another message from the hatchery appeared, “Would you like a free exotic chick with your order?” Well, of course we’d like a free exotic chick – how exciting! It’s almost as if there was a wizard behind the screen in the next room pulling my strings. My only defense is temporary insanity and an overly-excited daughter.

So that’s how we came to have 26 chicks in the Pack n Play in our mudroom. It was easy to do. None of us can figure out which one is the “free exotic chick” because she looks kind of like an Arucana, but then again she might look like the Silver Laced Wyandottes. And who’s to say what’s exotic anyway. We’re talking about a chicken.

I could spend hours just watching the chicks as they scurry about and peck at each other. Every once in awhile one of the chicks picks up a piece of bedding and tears around the enclosure like she’s got some kind of treasure and several others will start chasing her wanting what she has and setting all the chicks to peeping. And sometimes one chick will be happily lying under the heat lamp and another one will walk right over top of her like she’s a simple speed bump, or worse yet, a chick will stop and peck the prone one in the head for no apparent reason. And even though the chick feeder has 24 holes to eat from, whichever one the first chick starts to eat out of becomes the one every chick wants to eat from and a tussle ensues. And then there’s the mess - it’s everywhere.

Funny, these chicks act a lot like my children but I don’t find it nearly as entertaining or as relaxing to watch their antics as I do the chicks. Still, I have to enjoy the peep show while I can. Pretty soon instead of 26 little balls of fluff that peep and play, there will be 26 big noisy hens attacking my gardens and leaving their eggs everywhere. Now if the fox comes back for a visit, we can spare a few hens because I’m wondering just how many eggs we can eat.

Note to my local readers – feel free to stop by to see the peep show!

The Chick Story

Here is the story of our chicks. At the bottom I’ll give you all the details for raising your own, so if you don’t have time for my yapping about our chicks, skip right to the technical details. Sometimes it’s easier to imagine doing something yourself when you’ve heard someone else’s story.

There were lots of good reasons for bringing home six chicks. Maybe not as many “good”, but certainly understandable reasons for the dozen more that followed a month later. Technically, they are called “peeps” and their arrival in a small box resembling a Happy Meal container brought about a new adventure for our family.

We raised our chicks in a pack-n-play in our mud room with the door shut tight to keep out the two curious cats. When left alone they liked to huddle in a huge mass of multicolor feathers all clustered around the rubber duckie my daughter had given them to play with so they wouldn’t be bored. They provided unending entertainment for my younger children. Each chick was given a name and, although they all pretty much looked the same to me, my children began telling long stories of the adventures of Chickoree, Axomillie, Plum, Queen feather-a-lot, and Sami & Liam (the Rhode Island Reds named after their cousins in Rhode Island – never mind that all the chicks were girls – or so we thought).

One morning we opened the door to the mudroom to the shock of an empty pack-n-play. Had the cats finally lived out their fantasy? Another glance around the room at the chick poop everywhere and the answer was clear. They’d made their escape. For weeks they had been “flying” around their pen. It was adorable to watch. Lots of effort and frantic flapping just to rise an inch or two off the ground and one more successful chick who had taken to roosting on top of the waterer. But now they had all “flown the coop”, my husband pointed out gleefully. It was not the first time he would employ a chicken metaphor to illustrate his point. It didn’t take long to find them all – huddled together underneath the pack-n-play.

It was time for the chicks to move out. And not a moment too soon, as the stench seeping out from under the mudroom door was beginning to permeate the entire house. The chicks moved in to a borrowed “Chicken tractor” that our neighbor lent us. If you were not raised on a farm, the phrase chicken tractor might conjure up all kinds of strange ideas – as it did for us when our neighbor first suggested it. A chicken tractor is actually a giant wire cage on wheels. You move it around the yard and the chicks can peck the ground and get to know the world safely.

It was not long after the chicks first moved outside that we had our first casualty. One of the chicks was murdered in cold blood with no evidence left but a neck-less chicken embedded in the side of the tractor. We didn’t want to imagine what would have done this to our precious chick and after another call to our knowledgeable neighbor, we moved a cat carrier we could close securely at night in to the tractor.

When we moved the tractor in to the horse pasture, one of our ponies, Dolly, was delighted. She spent her days hovering over the chicks, using the corners of the tractor as her personal scratching post, nibbling the chick fed that scattered the edges of the tractor, but generally just dozing with her head positioned over the tractor. It was adorable to watch her adopt those chicks as her own. As the hens have grown she still enjoys them, allowing them to share her hay pile and peck around her when she lays down for a nap. Some animals, like some people, just have a knack for caretaking. Dolly has always been an ornery pony not to be trusted with children on her back or other pony’s food nearby. So it has been quite enlightening to see this side of her. I guess we all have our redeeming qualities.

Technical details:
You can order chicks from many feed stores and also through catalogs. Now is the time to order to get spring chicks (think Easter). When they arrive, they are called “peeps” and are about one day old. You’ll know why they’re called peeps as soon as you bring them home because that is the noise they make, literally, “peep”. Amazingly cute. If you order them from a catalog they’ll arrive at your door in a small, noisy box with air holes. Your delivery person will get a kick out of it.

Your new peeps need a small enclosure with some kind of safe bedding. We used our old Pack-n-Play leftover from when my kids were babies. You can also use a plastic storage bin with high sides or a galvanized feed tub. I covered the bottom of our pack-n-play with several newspapers and covered the paper with an old crib sheet. Then I covered the crib sheet with vermiculite and peat moss. I chose vermiculite and peat moss so that when I cleaned out the cage I could dump it on my gardens to enrich my flower beds along with the chicken manure (one of the greatest fertilizers!!). I put the newspaper in my compost and threw the crib sheet in the washing machine. This made cleaning simple which helps because it must be done at increasingly frequent intervals as the chicks grow. You can also use hamster bedding or newspaper or anything that won’t hurt them if they ingest it (chicks spent 90% of their days pecking things).

You’ll need a heat lamp, waterer and chick feeder (available at feed/hardware stores). You can’t just use a cat dish because the chicks will fall in it, poop in it, and knock it over. I use the waterers and feeders that attach to a quart size jar. They’re small inexpensive plastic do-woppys that screw on the jar and you invert it for steady food/water. We fed them non-medicated chick starter. Not all stores carry the non-medicated version, but as long as you keep their cage clean there’s no reason for the unnecessary antibiotics.

The only problem we had with our chicks was some fairly bad diarrhea which stuck to their butts. You don’t want to know about picking dried poop off chick butts, but I was only able to do this because I’ve raised three babies. Anyway, to avoid the diarrhea just add some cornmeal to their feed. Worked like a charm. We were also told to try yogurt, but that got very messy and the chicks didn’t eat much of it.

When the weather was nice we moved the pack n play (with a secure chicken wire lid my husband pieced together) outside so they could enjoy the sunshine and air. When the chicks were about six weeks old they were ready to move in to the chicken tractor outside fulltime. I don’t think a chicken tractor is completely necessary, it was just very convenient. If you have a contained, secure pen ready to go, you can move them directly to that. When our chicks were about 12 weeks old they were ready to live on the open range. We did lose one to a hawk and one to our dog early on, but since then (knock on wood) all are present and accounted for.

A book that was helpful was Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens by Gail Damerow. It has lots of information on raising chicks, chicken breeds, hen houses, and pretty much everything you could ever want to know about chicken keeping. Sometimes it had a little too much information causing me to fret over the seemingly hundreds of things that could go wrong with our chicks.