a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: About My Chickens

A Late Winter Afternoon

Late afternoons are special times for the chickens. As the sun sets, and shadows stretch to the edge of the lawn, the roosters and hens make their last rounds before heading to their roosts. They find things to eat, court, and enjoy the last rays of the sun.

The yellow rooster is Billy, the five year old rooster who is the progenitor of many of the chickens here. He no longer rules the roost, but he’s made his peace with the rest of the roosters, and seems to enjoy retirement. This spring he was looking pretty ragged and walking with a limp, but he recovered over the summer, and is well on his way to growing back his tail feathers.

A typical rooster lives from five to eight years, so for a rooster he is a senior bird.

December 5, 2014
Made for Running

Feathers hide the truth that roosters are made for running. These are birds that run much of the day. Most of the time, they are running after hens. And when there are too many roosters, it’s time to remove the more aggressive ones.

Some days when I go out, the hens look into my eyes and tell me which roosters they want me to sell or eat. I’ll do anything for the hens.

The legs on these roosters are amazing. Look at the size of the feet. It’s no wonder these birds can tear across the grass at blinding speed. Due to all the exercise they get, the older roosters have meat as red as beef on their legs and thighs.

December 4, 2014
Phantom Dogs, Dried Leaves and Herring

The late afternoon sun likes to play tricks. Against the side of the house is the shadow of a strange dog … which turns out to just be the shadow of a rock.

The golden sunlight turns a wheelbarrow of leaves into a pile of gold. The leaves are actually worth more than gold. You can’t eat gold, but the leaves will turn into rich soil which will nourish a field of carrots and beans and kale, which in turn will feed us.

A calamity many organic farmers in the Fukushima area experienced after the nuclear meltdown, was the radioactive contamination of the forests. They relied on the fallen leaves of the forest to help nourish their fields. The government could decontaminate their dwellings and their fields, but no one knew how to decontaminate entire forests, and so the farmers lost an important source of nutrients for their crops.

We humans keep building these incredible, fantastic, complicated mechanisms like nuclear power plants, but when they go poof! we have no idea how to undo the unimaginable harm they cause. There will be towns around the Fukushima nuclear power plants that people will never live in again.

It is like the destruction of the Herring fishery in Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez ran aground. Twenty-five years have passed since that manmade calamity, and the herring have still yet to recover. There never seems to be any adequate accounting or compensation or meaningful punishment for those who bring such devastation to an ecosystem, because it keeps happening again and again. 600,000 to 800,000 birds died due to the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. All the money in the world can’t make up for such enormous devastation.

In the case of the Exxon Valdez disaster, a fitting punishment would have been to make the CEO and board members of Exxon eke out a living by fishing for herring in a sound with no herring. Only after twenty-five years would they have begun to comprehend a fraction of the harm their greed and decisions wrought.

December 3, 2014
A Job Well Done

Lucky set her chicks free today. Just yesterday, they were all together, but this morning she was by herself, and her chicks off on their own. All I can say is, “Job well done, Lucky!”

What does a mother hen feel when her chicks leave home to fend for themselves? What about the chicks? Are they finally glad to be out from under their mother’s feet? Or is it a non-event for them?

Below is a series of photos from when she hatched them on September 15, 2014 through November 17, 2014. They’ll give you and idea as to how hard a mother works, raising her brood.

And as dusk settles, Lucky is back roosting with the rest of the hens for the first time in 12 weeks, while her chicks are bedding down where she used to spend the nights with them. Well done, Lucky. You were a superb mother. Your chicks were lucky to have you hatch and raise them.

November 29, 2014
One Head – Two Heads

First there is one head, then there are two heads. There is safety in numbers. Three heads are better than one. With two other chickens paying attention, it’s safe to preen and take your eye off your surroundings. If a hawk or eagle or farmer with a butcher knife appears, someone will sound the alarm so everyone can escape.

Fences make good places to take a break. Nothing can sneak up from behind, and it’s easy to spot danger from afar. Take a look at their heads. Each one is pointed in a different direction. Coupled with a chicken’s remarkable ability to see nearly all around them, very little happens without them seeing it. Which explains why chickens have so much to gossip about.

Humans often begin salacious conversations with, “Did you see … ?” Among chickens, it goes without saying that they saw it already, so their gossip must start with, “What do you think of that, Hazel?”

November 26, 2014