Chicken Mystery

During the snow storm last month, the “roof” to my chicken yard collapsed. It isn’t actually a roof, but a combination of bird netting and lattice covering that keeps the chickens in and the chicken hawks out. The buildup of heavy, wet snow, followed by the freeze, first took down the light-weight bird netting over the west part of the yard, and then crashed through the lattice covering on the south side. That meant all my chickens were now free to come and go as they pleased.

I keep my chickens in a yard for a reason that goes beyond the usual predators that roam my farm. In fact, I tend to refer to their relative confinement as “protective custody.” My dogs are very good with sheep (For the most part, that is- Mac is still trying to learn the difference between herding and chasing). They are not so good with chickens. Or maybe it is that they are too good. Anyway, two of the three of them think it is a grand game to chase these squawky toys around the yard until they are caught, at which point they become squeaky toys until, for some strange reason, the squeaking stops. It is not a pretty picture.

So the chickens cannot be free to come and go as they please. With the roof down, they all had to go into the coop and stay there, under house arrest, until I could find the time to repair the roof.

That is not too much of a problem, as they all go into the coop in the evening anyway. They wander in as it gets dark, find their place on the roost, close their little chicken eyes, and go to sleep. All I had to do was shut the door once they were all tucked in for the night.

And there they have remained since the snow. I have been busy pretty much seven days a week since the snow, with conferences and retreats to attend and work to catch up on after the three snow days resulting from the storm. That is, there all but two of the chickens have remained. There are two girls who have not come in from the cold. They huddle under the chicken coop during the night, and they run under the coop whenever I try to catch them. I put food and water out there for them and just hope they stay safe. And every day I look under the coop and more often than not find an egg.

Chickens generally don’t lay many eggs in the winter months. In fact they usually stop laying altogether. As the days get short and the nights get long, the lack of light tells their bodies to take a break and quiet down. We generally get winter eggs from chickens who are confined in laying cages with 24-hour artificial lights. Then their bodies never get the “slow down” signal, and they just keep going.

But for some reason, these rogue chickens who won’t come inside with the rest of the flock are also laying eggs. As if to prove to me that I don’t know everything about chickens. As if I didn’t already know that I don’t know.

But while I was away this weekend, one of the rogue chickens went missing. My “farm sitter” told me she hadn’t seen her the day before, and when I looked under the coop when I got home, I couldn’t see her either. I figured she had found her way out and imagined she was headed off for some big adventure. And since my squeky-toy-loving dogs had been there too, I figured she wasn’t coming back.

My young friend Maxine has been teaching me a lot about chickens lately. She is nine, and part of my Seattle flock. She lives there, in the city, and she raises chickens. One of them, Birdina, is from the hatching of “Farm Day’ fame which I wrote about last spring.

And these chickens of Maxine’s have personalities. Shy and timid or bold and boisterous, they roam her Seattle backyard, and when Maxine is visible in the house, they run to the window and look in at her, as if to say, “Hi. Whatcha doing?”

Birdina was the first of Maxine’s chickens to lay an egg, and I received a texted picture of that egg, a soft, blue-green beauty. Maxine’s chickens have been laying this winter too, and you can get a half dozen of them, in a pretty pink carton, with information about which chicken laid which egg, for a price. Maxine is not only a wonderful chicken whisperer, she is also a clever entrepreneur. But what Maxine has taught me most about chickens is that they are more than feathered fish. Chickens too are beloved creatures of God. So when my lovely little red hen was missing, I felt a sense of loss.

Then, this morning, when I was feeding the one rogue left, there was the little red hen, poking her head out from under the coop and pecking at the pellets I had just put down. Had this adventurer somehow survived her adventure and found her way safely home? Or had she been under the coop all long, hiding in the back? I like to imagine it is the former, and that she can now relax and reminisce about her time in the wild, as a wiser and happier bird.

Life on the farm, as life everywhere, is a mystery. I am grateful for the gift. And I plan to find time this weekend to fix that roof.