a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: About My Chickens

  • Peel, peel, peel


    The slow growing madrona tree is peeling. It’s something madrona trees do, and it is what makes them so beautiful. Their bright red, peeling bark, reminds me of my many childhood sunburns. A game my sister and I used to play when we were small. The day after getting toasted to a crisp on the beach on a hot, summer day, we’d carefully peel our shriveled skin, trying to extract the largest piece possible. The larger the piece, the happier we were.

    We got burnt so often, I’m surprised we haven’t died of skin cancer many times over. But maybe we inoculated ourselves by eating our dried pieces of radiated skin. Sunburnt human skin doesn’t taste so bad. Where are the studies comparing skin cancer rates of children who eat their peeled burnt skin to those who didn’t? You know, it might be an option to lathering your bodies with sunscreen. Just saying.



    Ruby, one of my favorite hens, is in her usual nest, laying her egg for the day. She’s a gregarious hen, often coming up to greet me whenever I go into the chicken yard. Nancy, black with a spot of white on her cheek, and Kumo-hime 雲姫 (Cloud Princess) are all quietly laying eggs. They aren’t interested in hearing about my skin peeling hypothesis.


  • The Heat Is On


    The red alders on Bow Hill are slowly dying. My first encounters with these beautiful trees were more than three decades ago on hiking trips into the Cascades. They line the riverbeds and streams flowing out of the mountains. You can’t go for a hike in the Cascades without walking through groves of these soothing trees.


    Away from streams and wetlands, red alder don’t do well in long droughts. They drop their leaves like ours are doing in mid summer. And with our longer, dryer summers, they are slowly dying. When I go around the neighborhood, I see their bare, bleaching branches more and more.


    This morning while checking the upcoming forecast, I let out a gasp when I saw how hot this coming week will be. So far this summer, we’ve had one 80ºF day, so to have five in a row with Thursday the 3rd predicted to be above 90ºF, is most unusual.



    The young chicks are fascinated with grapes, the first they’ve ever seen. The one dashing off in the background is making off with a grape and looking for a quiet spot where it can feast on it without being disturbed.


    Madrigal’s chicks hatched during the night. She was sitting on a clutch in the woods, and she’s brought them into the chicken yard. As attentive as she is, showing them what to eat, and breaking apart large seeds and grains for them, she’s a bit clumsy too, stepping on them at times when she’s chasing off the other chicks and hens. Tonight they are sleeping soundly underneath her, safe in the chicken yard.

  • No Overtime for Ruby


    We humans invent the oddest things. Overtime. It’s a big issue in Japan as next year’s college graduates look for their dream job and companies are frantically recruiting them. It’s no secret that many Japanese workers whittle away the evenings and nights doing overtime, but college graduates are on to companies which treat their workers that way. On the news last night were clips of college students going out at night, binoculars in hand, to spy into the office windows of companies they were interested in interviewing with. If they see the office lights on and catch workers toiling away late into the night, they scratch those companies off their list of places they want to work. And with the severe shortage of workers in Japan, companies are responding, slashing overtime and figuring out how to run their companies while demanding as little or no overtime at all. Otherwise the new college graduates will go work for someone else. Some companies turn off all the lights in their offices by eight p.m. Other companies resort to reducing the bonuses of all the staff in a division if even one person works too much overtime, and increasing the bonuses of divisions with no overtime. If the trend continues, Japan may become known as the country of no overtime and holidays. There are now 16 national holidays a year in Japan. Recent additions are Green Day 緑の日 – May 4 (from 1989), Ocean Day 海の日 – 3rd Monday of July (from 1996), and Mountain Day 山の日 – August 11 (from 2016).

    Overtime, it’s not even a concept for a chicken like Ruby. There really isn’t this idea of a time for this or a time for that or schedules or having to please the boss. It’s sit on a nest if I have the urge to lay an egg. Go out and eat if I’m hungry. Gossip with the other hens. Flirt with the nice rooster. And I guess, just do what she wants, all the time.




    Overtime isn’t a concept for Takuma 拓真 and Ena 枝那 either. There’s play time, more play time, more play time, eating time, and napping time. That’s basically it. I could get to a life like that.



    For the chickens this morning it’s a tofu breakfast. Such good food and no overtime required.

  • Promise of Things to Come


    The thimble berries are in bloom. Their delicate white petals promise of red berries to come. Among the eggs, small pullet eggs have started to appear. There is something charming about a hen’s first few eggs, like a child’s first drawing. What goes through a hen’s mind the first time she lays an egg?



    The dogs are after this chipmunk. He sit high above them, scolding them for even thinking of nabbing him. He keeps them occupied for hours at a time.


    And this is, well I haven’t named her yet. She is a new Ameraucana hen without a shy bone, and always curious. She comes running to investigate whatever I’m doing. Marie Curie reincarnated perhaps?

  • After Earth Day


    It’s the morning after Earth Day and I am lucky to be able to step out of the house and in a few steps be in the woods. I could live in the city and wake up to look out the window at a wall, and have to walk a long way to get to a little speck of green, and only have time to do so on weekends and days off from a job sitting in a cubicle far from a window with my face glued to a computer screen from dusk to dawn. Instead I get to wake up to the songs of countless birds courting. Surround yourself with green, and the birds will find you.





    The elderberry have sent up their flower spikes. In a few months, the spikes will be ablaze with red berries which the birds will devour. In the forest, bleeding hearts are in full bloom. The variety that grows here is Dicentra formosa. Reading about it, I read that it was supposedly “discovered” by the Scottish surgeon and naturalist Archibald Menzies who was with Captain George Vancouver on his four and a half year voyage around the world. You read a statement like that and it sounds as if the people living here never noticed this jewel of a plant blooming at their footsteps.



    The trilliums are at the height of their bloom too. The forest floor just steps from the house is carpeted with them, so I was surprised to read that in many places it is illegal to pick them as some species are endangered. I have a fond memory of waking up in the morning while camping in the Olympic Mountains to see a fawn nibbling on trillium. Trillium have no true leaves. The three green leaves from which their flowers sprout are actually three large bracts.




    Russell and Kumo-hime 雲姫 are on their way into the forest to feast on bugs and nibble at the bleeding hearts and trillium. Freed from the constraints of the law, they can nibble at trillium without worrying about going to jail.

    Months ago, I considered making a bountiful meal out of Russell. As a young rooster, he was a bit of a pest. But I saved him on account of his unusual comb. I’m glad I did. He’s turned out to be the best watch rooster of the tribe. He spots incoming hawks and eagles with a distinctive trumpet call I can hear from a long way off, giving all the other chickens the chance to scurry to safety, and letting me run to shoo the hawks and eagles away. I’ve found that clapping my hands is a very effective way at getting the hawks to fly away.