Tending the flock

Posted on | December 7, 2008 | 9 Comments

I didn’t mean for it to happen, but I’ve grown away from the chickens. Chris took over their daily care after we moved here and I started working full time. I feed the people, he feeds the critters.

I talk to them when I’m outside. I think about them — the older they get the more disparagingly. We don’t even get eggs from them any more because they’re almost four years old. Really, I should have processed them for the stew pot this fall, but I just thought about it as this thing that has to happen eventually, until the logical point passed. Now the eventuality feels like something vague and neverish.

They eat and eat and make lovely poopy bedding for me to use in the gardens, so it’s not a total wash. We don’t think of them as pets. Even Lila asked as we walked past the tractor on our way over to Grandma’s the other day, “When will we kill our chickens, Momma?”

I don’t know, Lila. I don’t know. I have no idea how to do it. Sure, I’ve read dozens of accounts, but have never seen it up close and personal. Never felt the life leave another creature’s body by my hand. It’s the final piece in the puzzle of this venture. I know it’s not necessary. I can choose to just keep feeding them and let them cluck out their days in peace, producing fertilizer and scratching the earth’s back. They’ll die on their own after a while.

And that may be what happens with the five remaining hens from our first foray into caring for a flock. We lost one to unknown causes recently. She went lame in one foot and over several weeks sank closer and closer to the ground until the final week she was hunkered down in a nest in the straw, close enough to the water and feed that she could reach out and take what she needed.

The books and websites and friends with experience said we’d probably have to separate her from the others to keep her safe. That when hens sense that one of their numbers is weak, they attack and often kill and eat their own. I kept a close eye on her, but often I’d find her prone in the straw with two or three and even a few times all five of the other girls snuggled in around her — all breathing as one.

Then one afternoon I went out to give them some kitchen scraps and she was gone, her body flattened out as if all of the air had gone out of it. A small russet feather rug.

I wanted to leave her for Chris to bury. I confess I was afraid to touch her and felt guilty for it. Also ashamed. It was my idea to raise chickens after all, so what exactly did I think that entailed? Pleasant clucking and a steady stream of delicous eggs, no doubt. And we have loved plenty of that over these four years, even if they all turned into egg-eaters.

The best/most illogical part is that I would like to raise meat birds for our table. And I know that after I go through the process once, I’ll be OK. Not necssarily fine, but less dizzy about the whole messy thing. Still, I don’t want to teach myself because that leaves far too much room for me to be so nervous that I accidentaly torture the poor creatures. I hope to apprentice for a day with someone local on butchering day.

But meanwhile, back at the homestead, there was the question of this quite dead Buff Orpington in whom the other chickens were beginning to take an unsavory interest. That, and a hole to dig.

I got a nice 2 foot deep hole carved out as best I could in the woods, having to chop through quite a few tangles of thankfully thin tree roots. It should have gone deeper, but I ran out of steam quick, and the girls were clearly becoming uncomfortable with the stiff in their midst.

Using the digging fork and my hand, I lifted her out of the tractor, and her body promptly slid off the metal tines and tumbled to the earth. Nice, Kelly. The sound of her body hitting the ground was preternaturally loud, much heavier than her seven or so pounds. The other hens stopped and stared at the feathered mass in that side-of-the-head way they do. We all watched and waited. They broke the silence first, clucking, pecking and scratching away from me and my grim task. Would they miss their sister?

I set aside the digging fork and lifted the bird with both hands. She was cold and hard like a feathered plank. I hoped I dug the hole wide enough — no way that body was going to bend even an inch. She fit. Just.

Something dug up and devoured the baby rabbit we buried this summer (one of the cats killed it) so after I stamped down the soil, I rolled logs from the last tree-felling adventure and stacked them in a sloppy pyramid on top of the hole. The biddies gathered around.

I sat on a log a few yards away and watched them with the afternoon light warming my face, golden in its waning autumn intensity. The ladies scratched away the top layer of leaves, picking at armadillo bugs, worms, seeds. They clucked and scratched and rearrangeed the surface of the soil around my improvised cairn of logs — tending to the dead by feeding the living.

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