I count to five, final installment

This is the final installment of the beginning of my chicken story. I wrote this a few months ago when it was fresher in my mind. Now I'm just polishing it up to share with you. We begin where installment four left off. It is the story of how chickens came to live inside my house.

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The New Hampshire Red was the tallest of the three new girls. She was actually tall enough that the runt would snuggle under her for warmth, or maybe just security. She would snuggle under a wing to where you could see her beak poking out from under feathers or all the way under so that all you could see was one chicken and four legs. We posted a picture of our “four-legged chicken” on Facebook that was so convincing one friend actually asked me if we really had a four-legged chicken. We toyed with names particularly for the runt. Being small and cute, she naturally attracted us all to her. But I insisted her name was still “don’t-get-attached-she-may-not-make-it” for my own sake more than anyone else’s.

Then we had what might be the coldest patch of December weather I have experienced in Georgia along with an unusual amount of snow. Temperatures dropped to well below freezing at night and stayed around freezing or just above during the day. After a couple of days I was checking on the chickens in the morning before leaving for work and heard what sounded like a sneeze from one of the Reds. I decided to separate the Reds from the others, leaving them in the small run while I put the other six back in the coop. I was on my way to work, so I called Jan to let her know what was going on and ask her to keep an eye out. That night the Reds came back inside to the porch. We worked on making the porch more wind resistant. I didn’t want the chickens to have the shock of going from cold to warm and back by putting them in the house, but I thought they needed to be as warm as I could make them outside. I was going into the busiest part of my year, working in retail at Christmas, so Joan and Jan took on a large part of the chicken care, Joan doing what she could to keep the new girls as comfortable as possible in the cold weather. No surprise to anyone, the sneezing spread to the runt.

The weather continued to stay unusually cold. The red runt was the first to die. It seemed like she got separated from the other two on the porch and just got too cold. Joan found her while I was at work. The next day the Rhode Island Red made a huge racket on the porch that brought Joan out to see what was wrong. She flapped around, squawking and then just dropped over dead. I was beginning to feel sorry for my wife being the one to have to deal with dead birds so frequently. We finally brought the tall New Hampshire Red in the house. We put her in the front bathroom and put newspaper on the floor. She started roosting on a towel rack next to the door. It was a little unnerving the first couple of times we walked into the bathroom to check on her and found her at eye level just inside the door.

Then we started noticing eye problems in a couple of the bantams. Two of them each had one foamy eye that was staying closed most of the time. One morning Joan found Esmeralda dead in the hen house, and I decided I was not going to lose any more chickens. I brought everyone in the house. We have a small hallway to the front bathroom that can be completely closed off. We put down more newspapers and settled the bantams into the hall and kept the tall Red in the bathroom. One of my co-workers told me I was coming dangerously close to being the “crazy chicken lady”. I suspect that moving the chickens into the house proved I was already the crazy chicken lady in some people’s eyes, but I didn’t think I had a choice at that point if I wanted any chickens to survive. Of course the day I decided to open the door between my study and the hall where the bantams were living, just so they could keep me company, probably put me over the line to crazy.

On a Saturday morning, before I had to be at work at noon, Joan and I made an early run to the feed store for antibiotics. We got instructions and advice from the very nice men who work there and went home to start medicating our flock back to health. For a couple of days we kept the door to the bathroom closed to keep them all separate. As this became a pain in the butt I finally decided to open the door and let all five have the run of both rooms. At first the bantams picked on the red girl, but they all learned to tolerate each other. Before long the surviving chickens all moved back out to the coop. A short break in the extremely cold weather combined with an improvement in the chickens’ health made me feel okay about getting us all back to normal. The tall redhead had stopped sneezing and the two bantams eyes were no longer foamy, though we weren’t sure yet whether they would be partially blind because the eye on each continued to be closed most of the time.

The chickens all seemed happy to be back outside, even when, a week or two later, the temperature plummeted again, and we got more snow early in January. I refused to bring the chickens back in the house. They were all healthy now and shouldn’t have any trouble surviving the weather. They all made it through just fine. February’s weather improved, and we even had some nice days that we were able to sit outside in the afternoon on our days off and watch the chickens roam the yard. We were able to allow most of the dogs in the yard with the chickens.

We finally named the tall redhead. My wife was getting into roller derby and wanted a roller derby name for her. We had also considered names of famous redheads. Finally I decided on Lucille Tall. Mostly we just call her Lucy. Once again, I count to five: four surviving healthy bantam Easter Eggers and one New Hampshire Red. We started looking forward to eggs.

I count to five, installment four

I started this blog to record my first year as a backyard chicken farmer. I've been alternating between periodic installments from an essay I called "I count to five," that records the earliest months, and more current entries written as I go. It's been a while since I've shared an installment of the essay, possibly because the upcoming part is the hardest to recall. I almost feel like I should apologize to Joan, Jan and Colleen for including the next piece because it will be hard for all of us to remember. But it was a significant part of our first few months and it's behind us now. So here is installment four of "I count to five, four bantam Easter Egger chicks and a New Hampshire Red."
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The smallest and prettiest of our collective dogs is also the craziest and the most dangerous. She is the quickest to bite and the one we have to warn people about. She has bitten me two or three times even though she has lived next door to me for most of her young life. She will bark at me furiously when I come into the yard until her mom tells her to stop, and then, when I sit down, she will jump in my lap wanting to be loved. She was also the most aggressively fascinated with the chickens to the point that we wouldn’t let her out in the yard if the chicks were in the garden. One morning in mid-November, I was getting dressed for my 12 to 8 shift at work. Joan was already gone. I heard Jan yelling frantically “get out of there.” I ran out in the back yard in jeans and a bra, barefoot to see what was happening. The small, beautiful dog had found a way through the fence into the back forty. Colleen got her back in the house while Jan and I began counting. One bantam was missing. We searched the tree branches and the grass until Jan found Xena in the far corner of the chicken run already dead. The chick who had battled a raccoon and recovered from stitches to still be top chicken had not been able to escape this small dog.

We all wanted to cry, but first in all of our minds was what Joan’s reaction would be. This was her favorite chick, the one who’s life she had saved, and her least favorite dog. Jan buried the bird outside the fence where the dogs couldn’t dig it up, and I went to work. I did Joan the favor she had done me and decided to wait to tell her. I planned to leave work early so I could get home before Joan did and before she noticed a chicken missing. We often keep in touch with text messages during the day, with snippets of news or comments about our day, so it wasn’t really unusual that I checked in with her periodically to make sure I knew when she was leaving work. When she let me know she was leaving early I had to call her to tell her the news because I knew I wouldn’t beat her home.

When I got home we had a drink on the front porch. I want to say we sat quietly feeling our first chicken loss. But in reality we talked about the vengeful things Joan wanted to do to the little dog who had killed her favorite chicken. I let her talk, getting her anger out. We all knew that she would be angry for a while, and we all conspired to keep the dog away from her and avoid fanning the flames. Joan distracted herself that weekend by reinforcing the fence around the back forty.

In Georgia we have deceptively warm winter days into November and December. Most winters the weather doesn’t get brutal until late January or February. My good friend Andrea, who also has chickens, had been looking for a new one. She’s kind of a collector of breeds. One breed she didn’t have yet but wanted was a Barred Rock. She found a chicken farmer less than an hour away who had Barred Rock pullets and was considering getting one. Her talk of more chickens got me wanting more. Well, really encouraged a desire I already had. I wanted to get a couple of full size chickens to go with the Bantams. While the Bantams were still young seemed to be the best time to add to the flock.

On Sunday morning I sat down with craig’s list and looked up chickens for sale. I found the farmer Andrea had told me about and a couple more. I called a couple of them and picked out a place that was selling Plymouth Barred Rocks, New Hampshire Reds and Rhode Island Reds. I looked up breeds and decided I wanted Reds. I sent Jan a text to ask her if she wanted to go chicken shopping and got a positive response. It was a beautiful day for a drive in the country. I sent my friend a text to ask if she wanted me to pick up a Barred Rock for her and received a resounding yes. Jan and I dug out a medium-size dog carrier, put a towel in it and headed for Paulding County, about 45 minutes away.

As usual, driving through the country made me wish for a small farm of my own. We followed the directions Jan had gotten on-line and found the house. A man in about his early forties came out to meet us and walked us around behind the house where we saw the biggest chicken coop I had yet experienced in person. My only experience so far had been with small, backyard chicken owners. Even though this man kept his chickens in his back yard, his yard was much larger than yards in the city and he had too many chickens for me to count, all running free around a coop the size of a small warehouse, or so it seemed. I was overwhelmed. How would I pick out three chickens from this crowd.

We talked for a bit about the chickens and how much we all enjoyed them. He offered to help us pick out some good strong, healthy chickens. The chickens he had were adult hens and 3 month old pullets, the same age as our bantams. I saw a couple that were smaller and asked about them. They were runts, probably wouldn’t survive, he explained. I was naturally attracted to small and cute, so I picked up one of the runts and held it while we talked. It became apparent pretty quickly that I was going to want to keep this one. He offered to throw in the runt for free because he thought it would have a better chance of survival in my small flock than in his much larger one. We picked out a New Hampshire and a Rhode Island Red and a Barred Rock, paid the man and left. The chickens settled in quickly in the dog carrier and rode home quietly, making occasional little noises that we had already come to know and love.

At home we put the dog carrier down in the vegetable garden, now just a patch of cleared dirt but with a small fence around it. We thought that might be a good way to introduce these new chickens to our existing flock. We let our girls out of the coop and they wandered the yard paying little attention to the new girls. We thought maybe this could be easy! With glasses of wine in hand, we sat in the yard with the chickens until it got close to sundown. The bantams and Esmeralda started heading for the coop, and we loaded the new girls back in the dog carrier and took them to the screen porch where we had set up a temporary home for them. I decided right away that I was not going to give any of the new girls names right away, especially the runt just in case she didn’t survive.

The next day I loaded up the Barred Rock back in the dog carrier for the pass-off to Andrea at work. As luck would have it, her shift was ending as mine began. I started my shift excited about owning three more chickens. My flock had grown from five to eight.

During the days we carried the Reds, as I was calling them, out to the yard to join Esmeralda and the bantams free-ranging. At night we hauled them back to the porch. After a few days everyone seemed to be getting along pretty well, so we held our breath and let them all spend the night in the coop. The next morning we still had eight chickens and, except for the normal establishment of pecking order, everyone seemed to be doing fine. I had been concerned that the full-size chickens might bully the bantams, but as it turned out, the opposite happened. The bantams were the original flock on site and they were clearly in charge. They made sure the new girls knew this, bigger or not. The bigger chickens accepted the seniority of the bantams without fighting back when one of the smaller girls pecked at them or chased them. It was funny to watch the small chickens chasing the bigger ones around, especially since no one was getting hurt. Esmeralda just lumbered around oblivious and content to stuff herself. Massaging her crop to keep her food flowing through had become a regular periodic part of her maintenance.