Chicken Pickin'

As the screen door slammed behind me, the cold hit me like it was something hard. It made me inhale sharply, and then breathe shallowly.  My eyeballs hurt. The inside of my nose burned. My exposed cheeks soon felt stiff; they stung as if someone had slapped them.

The snow made a satisfying crunch under my feet as I clomped to the barn in my boots. My husband shoveled a path the whole way there. It was quite a treat not to have to march through the deep snow to the barn.

Children's trails criss-crossed the path. The marks of their boots, sleds, dragged shovels, and clumps of packed snow littered the otherwise smooth whiteness in zig-zag lines. They have wanted to play in the snow more than I have let them. The low temperatures and wind chills have restricted their time outside.

The wind rustled and rattled through the dead, bleached-brown beech and oak leaves that still clung tenaciously in the understory of the woods. The taller tree trunks swayed slowly. The sky above them was a muted blue, and the rising sun cast a rosy hue along the horizon.

A red tail hawk called as I rounded the corner of the pole barn. When I struggled to free the gate from the snow, where it had frozen, the raptor rose from along the back pasture fence and flew over the treetops with another characteristic screech. As I rounded the hoop house on my way to let out the chickens, I paused for a moment to watch its departure on slowly flapping, soundless wings.

The hens were clucking and complaining like old women. They brought me back to the task at hand. I could hear them scuffling in their impatience to leave the coop. With a great flapping, rustling of feathers, and squawking, they eagerly burst out of the pop-door as soon as I opened it.

I checked the plug on the heated waterer. I turned on the two heat lamps. I checked their feed. I counted them and looked them over. Two of them had tail feathers pulled. They need more room to roam so that they won't feather-pick. But when the weather warms enough to let them out again I will lose them by ones and twos to the hawks... 

and the foxes...

and the coyotes...

and the opossums...                                           and the raccoons....

and a host of other vermin. Such are the dilemmas I will face when the weather warms. In the meantime I will keep the woodpile stocked, keep the wood stove roaring, and hope that some solution presents itself.

Goodbye Rosie Roo

The bitter cold we have been experiencing has resulted in frozen eggs a few times. We hang two heat lamps in the run, but the attached coop is not electrified. When it is closed, the small space heats up with body heat, and the roosting birds are warm enough. The walls are doubled and the air inside of them acts as an insulator. But during the day, when the coop door is open so that the hens can access the nest boxes that hang off of the sides of the coop, the temperature inside the coop drops. 

Our hens have been resilient despite the frigid cold. The only odd behavior came from Rosie the rooster, the bantam who never finished his secondary molt. He would burrow into the bedding material in the run under the heat lamp and next to the feeder. It seemed to work for him. I worried some, but since he was a rooster, he was no longer allowed to be coddled in the house. 

Rosie this fall

Well, the other morning my husband tended the animals for me since he was going to drive the truck to work and we park it in the barn. And the poor bird had passed away, presumably from the cold, since he was frozen. He was on the bottom of the coop, where it is the coldest. I'm sure that if he was fully feathered he would have been fine because our large silver phoenix rooster, Hercules, has been fine roosting by himself in the big, drafty barn. And all the feathered hens were fine. Sigh.

So now we are down to one ruling rooster. This is good I guess, since there won't be any cock fights, as my brother-in-law kept teasing me about. But it is sad too. And I feel stupid for having fed him for three quarters of a year only to lose him. I'd never make it as a farmer. My husband informed me of this last night as I admitted my guilt about Rosie to him. I'm too soft-hearted, too generous, and too into doing things the "right" way. And that doesn't mean the way that makes the most money or is the easiest. It means the way that is best for the environment, given my circumstances, and the way that is inevitably the hardest. 

Hercules this past fall

I even feel guilty about an unwanted rooster free ranging (with supplemented feed), who has access to a heated waterer, has bedding to scratch in, and is roosting at will in the barn. (Where he is doing fine, by the way.) I feel guilty about an unwanted runt rooster dying of exposure to the cold after I'd nursed him back to health in my house on multiple occasions. I could never dispatch the runt pigs, butcher hens, or shoot the wounded-beyond-rehabilitation farm animal. I guess my female-ness is showing itself? Or maybe my relatively well-off position is? I guess I'd buck up if I had to choose between hungry kids or putting a hen in a killing cone. But we live in such a sanitized, wrapped in cellophane, never-see-the-butchering age... And I'm a product of it. I'm with my daughter. If I had to do the slaughtering, I might be a vegetarian.