Let's Talk About Chicks, Man

When Regina and I moved into this house, in the spring of 1999, there was an enormous, creepy chicken coop out back.  It looked like something out of Blair Witch.  We should have torched it immediately, instead, we got chickens.  I did my best to patch up the coop, but the skunks and raccoons found all the flaws in its design and Regina frequently woke me up in the middle of the night with a, "There's something in the coop."  I'd grab the shotgun I kept beside the bed for such occasions and Regina would grab the spotlight and we'd run outside to watch the raccoons scatter like we'd just broke up a really cool party.  Occasionally I'd blast one of the chicken killers, and once, when the problem got out of hand, we had the county trapper come to catch an especially diabolical raccoon.  But we were no match for their love of farm fresh chicken, and when we got down to just 2 hens, I didn't have the heart to sacrifice them to the beasts, so I gave them to my cousin.  Then I promptly tore down the coop.  It took us about 10 years before I built another, slightly safer, one and we got back into chicken farming.

The new coop is pretty secure.  The skunks can't dig underneath to eat the eggs, and the raccoons can't pry up the roof to eat the hens, so our girls' only predators come when we let them out.  We had Rodney, the Polish hen (she looked like Rod Stewart circa 1988), who got carried away by a hawk or an owl.  She lived through the flight, but had holes in her head and was never really quite the same.  Elvis, our first St. Bernard, once stuck his head in a box of baby chicks and gobbled them up like they were little nuggets.  Several have just died mysteriously, as chickens are wont to do, and a few have been fed up to Nacho, my brother's old Golden Retriever.

Last weekend we returned home from a movie date day and noticed we were missing Jerry, a big Brahma hen.  We scanned the perimeter and looked for the hiding hen or a pile of feathers and when nothing came up, we called Nacho's owner, Grant.  He said he hadn't seen anything suspicious, but the pile of feathers he'd seen in his closet earlier should have set off some sort of internal alarm.  Ollie, his daughter, went in the closet later that day and found Jerry hiding behind the shoes.  Nacho had carried her, alive, a quarter-mile up the road to his house and hid her in a closet.  She had a pretty good chunk out of her back so we doctored her up and put her in a box by the wood stove.  By day 2 she was no better and when Regina took her outside for fresh air she croaked.  Dylan took it pretty hard and made me promise I'd bury Jerry, which I reluctantly agreed to do.  I've never buried a chicken before and I wondered to myself if tossing Jerry in the river would count as a burial at sea.

We're down to 4 chickens now and one is so small she lays quail sized eggs.  Cute, but not so filling.  Our girls are on the 1 egg a week laying plan, but only if the weather is nice.  Don't get me wrong, the eggs, when they come, are delicious, but the effort and cost are hardly worth it.  But we're in this for the long haul.  I'll go dig a nice grave for Jerry, and we'll all keep a wary eye out for Nacho.