Another Day in the Country
The empty nest
Contributing writer
I’ve had chickens now for quite a few years. Only once did I try to eat one of them. Even though it had been lovingly raised, well fed, and treated gently right up to the end, it didn’t taste good to me. Being a 95 percent vegetarian has its limitations.
My chickens have been egg producers and not just plain white eggs either. They have been the chosen few who lay green eggs, blue eggs, brown eggs, beige, apricot, and pink eggs. During the winter, when I’m having to thaw the ice and bring fresh water through snow, sleet, and blizzard, I remind myself that gathering eggs (especially before they freeze) is like having Easter every day of the week.
There is nothing (other than baby chicks) that delights me quite so much as to let my chickens out of the cage and let them roam around in my yard, eating bugs, catching grasshoppers, and digging up my petunias (which is not really delightful but I tolerate a certain amount of it just for the sheer pleasure of watching them wander).
Other than eggs, watching has been the most fun. Unfortunately, the dogs in the neighborhood with errant owners who do not keep them contained are also watching my chickens, and are just waiting for the chance to decimate the flock.
In the spring, while I was helping my grandson celebrate his birthday in California, someone’s dog tore the screen and promptly had fun killing 20 chickens. One rooster and one hen miraculously survived. The local owl got the rooster and someone else’s dog finished off the hen. This left me with a band of eight in the chicken house at my place. They were a lovely bunch of girls, got along well with Reggie the Rooster.
Reggie had a couple of near scrapes — I discovered one day that all of his tail feathers had been pulled out by what I do not know but he was embarrassed. They’d just started to grow back, and the hens had stopped teasing him about it, when I shut the gate too late one night and the fox and who knows whoooooo, made off with all but one.
“What the heck am I going to do with just you?” I asked the little black hen who fixed me with a beady eye for my tardiness.
She answered by promptly (and lonesome) laying a fat brown egg for my breakfast, five days straight. And then I came out one morning — the gate had been pushed open and there was no hen in sight.
“That’s it,” I said to myself. “I may just quit the chicken business. I’ve had it!”
I shut off the light in the chicken house.
That night the snow came, they tell me 15 inches of it, measured with a ruler. It was a lot of snow and it was very cold and dark, especially in the vicinity of the empty chicken house. The wind drifted the snow and the wind hammered at the chicken house door and set it to banging back and forth. Finally, after I’d dug myself out of the storm and the weather was 60 degrees in spite of the snow on the ground, I forced myself to wade out to the chicken house to close that door again.
“Bang,” I slammed the door and it didn’t shut. “What’s the deal with this door?” I mumbled and then I heard it.
You know the sound — the scolding of a setting hen. I peered inside and there was that black hen (who I’d thought was the foxes’ lunch) hunkered down in the nest box. She was setting on two eggs.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said to her. “Those eggs can’t be fertile — the rooster was dead for a week before you ever started setting on them.”
I removed the eggs, took them into the house, and then out of curiosity thought, “Maybe I’d better check those eggs.”
I broke open the first egg and would you believe it — a fertile egg. I promptly took the second egg back out to the hen, put it under her and apologized. When I told my friend Michaela about the reappearing hen and the fertile egg, she said, “Does the hen have a name?” I said she didn’t. “Well, you should call her Mary.”
It’s another day in the country and I’ve succumbed and ordered a batch of chicks from the hatchery — all kinds, all colors, so long as they lay those lovely Easter-colored eggs. You can’t raise one chick alone. The earliest they can arrive is March 14 and I felt like an expectant mother.
A week later, Mary kicked the remaining egg out of the nest — it wasn’t fertile. She’s still hunkered down in the nest box and fusses at me every time I come near. I told her I’d ordered chicks,
“So, Mary, how do you feel about adoption?”