Oh, The Joy of Being a Crazy Chicken Lady
Oh, the Holy Joy of being a crazy chicken lady! There is something so fulfilling and peaceful in raising day-old chicks to healthy, happy, egg-laying hens.
The moment the chicks hatch at the hatchery, they’re sexed, vaxed, put into a box, and shipped around the country. By the time they get to you it’s possible they’ve traveled hundreds, or even thousands of miles by their 2nd day of life! It’s hard going on baby chicks, so the post office calls you to come pick them up because spending a whole day in a hot, claustrophobic mail truck is just one more stress they don’t need.
Oh, but what a call to get! There is a breathless moment of anticipation when you realize it’s the post office calling to let you know your chicks have arrived from the hatchery. (Squeeeee!!!)
And the delight at opening the door to our rural country post office, and hearing the excited peeps and cheeps coming from the back of the room cannot be overstated! I time our baby chicks annual arrival to come in late July, when all my grandchildren come to visit. You should see their squirmy giggles when we all file into the post office, and they hear the the chickies in the back! So much joy!
(And yes, every seat in my suv is filled with children screaming how unfair it is that the oldest gets to sit in the front seat and hold the chickies ALL the way home!)
Once we get them home, the unboxing madness ensues. We count the chicks - to ensure they’re all there - check for pasty butt - a condition in which dried, crusty fecal matter blocks the orifice, which must be removed because if a chick can’t poop freely it will die - then I dip their beaks in water, so the super thirsty chicks can have their first drink ever, and hand them over to the children to put them in the brooder.
My sweet little grandchildren line up single-file, like ducklings following their momma, to get their turn putting a chickie in the brooder.
Once the chickies are safely in their brooder, my grandbabies will gather around the cheap plastic tote that serves as their makeshift brooder, and stare at them for hours!
We can go overboard, for sure. My husband is an engineer, and has built two chicken coops that can withstand hurricane force winds, and he installed a solar panel on the chicken coop, so that the door opens and closes automatically at a set time.
He wanted to put WiFi and a camera inside the coop, so he can check on them all day while he’s at work, but I said no. It seemed a little TOO MUCH!
We put a bench just outside of their chicken run, and love nothing more than sitting outside on a brisk fall evening watching them scratch in the grass for last minutes bug goodies as they dawdle their way across the pasture, and into the coop to roost for the evening.
Let’s not forget the glorious moment you open the nesting boxes to find that one of your girls has laid the first egg! I could swear I heard a choir of heavenly angels break out into song the moment my eyes, expecting nothing, landed on that sweet, precious egg!
The romanticism of going out to the coop to collect eggs from sweet hens you’ve raised yourself, and using them to cook with is real, and so unspeakably gratifying.
Cracking an egg open with a yolk so deeply orangey-gold that it stains your fingers if you inadvertently break it makes you feel like your not just feeding your appetite, but nourishing your body. Such gratitude for my ladies!
It’s not always rainbows and sunshine. Where there is livestock, there is deadstock. I’ll never forget walking out into the pasture to find our new puppies eating one of my hens. I sank to my knees and sobbed hysterically. Snot flying, tears streaming, soul wracking sobbing, ugly crying.
That was a hard one!
And, although we ordered 15 female chicks, two of them were roosters. What do roosters do? They protect their ladies to the death if necessary, and fight for the right to breed. We had one rooster who was super aggressive. He killed the other rooster, and would sneak up behind me and attack. He drew blood more than once. I was so afraid of him I had to walk backward whenever he was free ranging out of the chicken run.
My sweet granddaughter, who was six at the time, asked me what we were gonna do about him, and I told her we may have to put him in a pot and make mean rooster stew. She cried, of course, and begged me not to harvest him…until he attacked her, that is. Then she said, “Yum, yum, mean rooster stew!” Mean rooster currently resides in our freezer waiting for the first cold snap when I can make some mean rooster & sausage gumbo!
I learned a lot from that first flock, of which we went from 15 to just 4 due to the mean rooster and predation from foxes, hawks, and coyotes. And our second flock we ordered 25!
We’ve been keeping chickens for just over a year. They are peaceful, friendly little dinosaurs who run at me like a puppy excited to see his human, which tickles me to no end. And just this morning, I had one of the ladies keeping me company as I wrote this.
Yeah, I’m hooked! I wonder how I made it to 56 years old without having chickens, and cannot imagine living the rest of my life without them.
My husband says I’m a crazy chicken lady, and I’m just fine with that. (Truth be told, he’s a bit of a crazy chicken man too!)
