Chicken Scrapbook Memories

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Two years ago, in the spring, Don's cell phone rang at 4:00AM. It was the Post Office saying his chicks had arrived and to please come pick them up. They were peeping like they had something to crow about.

Since then he has bought more, and some he raised from eggs his chickens laid.

The Polish chicken varieties have spiky head feathers that resemble Samuel Beckett's hairdo. My Dutch sister-in-law Astrid named this one Kuifje (which I believe means this kind of top-heavy hair).

The two chicks below left are Polish, Honey is in the middle. You can already see their dominant bird brains, ha. You'll see more of Honey, below, when she's grown up.

Memorial Weekend 2008 was the first time Don let his first flock of chicks, the Ornamentals, out of the coop. Honey already needed a feather cut, because she couldn't see. So Lesley held her while Don played barber. Peter was Dr. Doolittle.

Don has also raised quail, ducks and turkeys. Last Thanksgiving he gave his organic, free range turkeys to many families around Michigan.

After more than two years of feeding and watering twice a day -- including in the deep freeze of Michigan winters -- cleaning coops, brooding, hatching, and gathering eggs, Don has decided to gradually thin the herd and be done with raising birds altogether. We don't eat eggs or chicken any more, and so raising them just to give away or sell is losing its appeal. Plus, we can't stay away more than one night, so we're feeling tied down. Don has raised some birds for meat to sell, but the first batch we got, the Ornamentals, we raised for farmy ambiance, and eggs. We named that first group, like members of the family. We would never, ever eat them.

Bob the Crèvecœur raped and pillaged. Squanto and Khan bit the hand that fed them. They, um, got the axe.

Our girls who were named have all been sold in the last few weeks to nearby farmers, except Jolie, who got sick and died this past spring.

At full coop Don had 116 birds. Now, all that are left are 8 turkeys, 7 quail, 7 chickens and 2 ducks. All the birds we named are gone. He wants to sell the rest, and by Thanksgiving in November, when these turkeys will be 30-40 pounds dressed out on a platter, he plans to be featherless.

When Don told me he was ready to be done with birds, I asked, What about Honey? What about Floozie?

He replied with a question, "Do you want to feed and water them?"

Pause.

Pout.

"No."

I was like a head with my chicken cut off.

I miss Honey, Floozie, Dahlia and Jolie running around the yard. (I don't think Bishop does.) But I did little or nothing to keep them alive, and as the saying goes, I shouldn't cackle if I haven't laid. Is it worth all Don's hard work, just for the pretty atmosphere they create on the farm? Do I want to venture out to the coop every morning and every evening, spring, summer, autumn and winter?

Don has promised Lesley that when she and Brian start a family, he will get chicks before they visit, so their kids can learn about animals, play with them, and gather eggs, as many kids have done here, like Kaeley, our niece.

Until that happy day when Lesley and Brian start their own nesting, ours will be empty.

Don has a blog called A View from the Green Barn, where he chronicled his chicken and other farm escapades. It's wonderful. He doesn't post much any more, but there is still a lot there worth reading.

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a rare November weekend

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Autumn sun and a light wind from the south carried the weekend up to seventy degrees (21ºC) and blue skies after a few weeks of cold weather (30ºF, around 0ºC). Towels whipped in the wind. The last of the garden peppers went into white chili (with turkey Don raised, white beans, onion, garlic, cumin, homemade chili powder from our neighbor's friend (we'd run out - thank goodness! wow was this good stuff), cilantro, lime juice and chicken broth, no tomatoes - save those for red chili).

Rosemary and parsley puffed out like it was August.



Beverly and Berta wondered where the cold went.



Don even let the turkeys wander outside their fence a while, but it didn't last long. He remembered how dumb they are, worried they'd head toward the road and penned them back up.

Floozie found a rock and wanted to brood. Wow, she looks big all of a sudden, as fluffy as the parsley. She used to be such a skinny squirt. A nosy one. (See sidebar toward the bottom.)



Spearmint, peppermint, ever-ready strawberries and frost-flattened rhubarb kept two other garden beds alive and green with red trim. Don had transplanted the foundering rhubarb here where it looks to be thriving now. I tasted a chunk of pink rhubarb stalk, thinking I'd make pie, but it was tasteless. I used to eat rhubarb raw when I was a kid from a patch in my parents' backyard - crisp, gritty, juicy and SOUR. We will have to wait until spring for this plant to grow fresh tasty stalks. Save room for warm strawberry-rhubarb pie a la mode in June. Something in the pairing with strawberries eliminates rhubarb's gritty feel on your teeth.



The lumberjack chain-sawed dead wood by the pond, which I later stacked in the corncrib. So far the forced air furnace has hardly kicked on in spite of cold weather the last few weeks because the wood stove is efficient and keeps us cozy. It will be cold again soon enough.



What can be said - except Hallelujah, Praise the Lord and pass the sour cream (for the chili), and butter and honey (for the cornbread)!



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Turkey season

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Don keeping watch over his flock by day

Has it really been almost a year since we saw Sarah Palin talking with a reporter about being Vice President and pardoning a turkey from being killed for someone's Thanksgiving table, while turkeys were visibly being slaughtered behind her? It was a grisly example of someone being out of touch with their surroundings.



In the U.S., if you call someone a "turkey" it's an insult, meaning the person is stupid (out of touch with their surroundings -- yikes). Or if you say some project was a turkey - like a movie - you mean it was a failure. Apparently this arose from the fact that turkeys are thought to be stupid. You know how we call someone a "bird brain" if they don't seem to have terrific mental capacity? Well of all the birds, turkeys have the smallest brains in proportion to their size: 2%. Domestic turkeys have supposedly been known to drown standing out in a rainstorm - looking up, mouth open, "hey, what just hit my little head?" as it pours down their throats.

Some say turkeys get a bad rap, since their mortality is not good, and they die from other things more than from drowning. But there is some truth that domestic turkeys have been bred away from their wild instincts to find shelter from the elements.

After we lived in the country of Turkey we encountered a few individuals out of touch with their surroundings who, after chuckling a bit asked in disbelief, "You lived in Turkey? What do you mean, there's a place called Turkey?" Actually the real name for the country is Türkiye. If you pronounce it correctly by rounding your lips and putting that ü just behind your teeth, no one thinks you're talking about living inside a big bird. (Did you know that Sesame Street's Big Bird was made with 4000 turkey feathers?) I remember going to bed at night after speaking a lot of Turkish and my cheek muscles were sore from all those ü's and ö's. Here's an exercise in something close to stupidity for you: When you go to the turkey farm with the kids this year, try saying "göbble göbble göbble" and make the correct sound for the Turkish ö. Öh, and in Turkey they call a turkey a hindi. Now what's that about? I think it went something like this: Turkeys have to do with American Thanksgiving -> American Thanksgiving has something to do with American Indians -> Indians -> Hindi. Phew. I feel like I just flew around the world.

Two of the big toms in the photo at top - the ones with tail feathers fanned, and big pink and blue drooping gobbledy-goop under their little 2% heads, one bronze and one white - died recently after each breaking a leg. See, I told you they die from other maladies. Don doesn't know if they were in a fight, or just too heavy for their drumsticks. :| They have another two months to grow before Thanksgiving dinner - one for us and the rest to be given away. I'm afraid the one tom that's left won't fit in an oven.

I can't say that I think turkeys are dumb, but they look dumb the way they stand and stare at you inside your personal space. Or maybe they just look curious, because they certainly are that. In fact, they look the opposite of being out of touch with their surroundings if I really think about it. Can you be dumb if you're this curious?



So this is what you can say if you don't want to call someone stupid, or a turkey:







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