Why Chickens?
Why Me?

I never imagined myself keeping chickens, let alone voluntarily doing it, and being happy while doing it. Yet here I am, living in a state that I spent most of my high school days making fun of, surrounded by chickens as they browse the riches of the yard around the house. And it all makes me very happy.

When I think about it, I suppose my daughter was to blame. She has always loved animals, and getting involved in 4-H was a natural offshoot of that. Being around some cousins made goats her animal of choice, and she did quite well her first year in showmanship, working with a borrowed goat. She also earned a couple of wethers for her work on the cousins' farm, and those became her cart project goats.

Taking her goats to the fair was next in the progression of things. Of course, spending a week living at the fairgrounds was part of that. She spent the week eating fair food, riding rides, showing animals... and doing a little horse trading. She left for the fair with three goats. She came back with two goats, a rabbit... and two chicks.

It seems a local purveyor of poultry comes to the fair every year. For PR they give children a pair of their industrially bred Ross chicks to raise and sell, and while they are there, they hatch some out so city folks can see where their food comes from. At the end of the fair, they hold a drawing and give these new chicks away. My daughter had signed up and won.

She brought them home, announcing that she wanted to have chicken pot pie on her birthday. Being bred to grow quickly into meat birds, the Rosses would have been ready just in time. We put the chicks in a small cage that had once held our daughter's pet rat, rigged a light bulb over it for heat, and hoped that we were following the alarmingly complex instructions that the poultry folks had given us (I later deduced that they did this on purpose, to make the process of raising chicks into barbecue seem so intimidating that city folks would weigh raising chickens themselves versus the claims of animal rights activists and come down on the side of letting a corporation do it for them).

The chicks survived into adolescence. And then they survived beyond adolescence. We tried to find someone who would process the two chicks - now a rooster and a hen, both named Bob by my daughter "so I won't get attached to them" - but that was problematic. When it became clear they would outgrow the rat cage, I went to my father-in-law's barn and converted one of the stalls into an ad hoc chicken coop. Then the birds really started to grow. By the time Bob had crowed, and the other Bob had laid her first egg, something happened. I realized these creatures were fascinating.

My addiction progressed quickly after that. Trying to use what carpentry skills I'd learned from my father, I built a wall to size the coop and keep the goats out. Then I build a goat gate to keep the goats out from the front, having discovered that chicken feed is like heroin to a goat. I started to frequent the Backyard Chickens Forum and ended up buying a quartet of started pullets from a nearby fellow member. The two Bobs had to be put down - they weren't meant to live as long as they did, and they weren't healthy. That was offset by the discovery of Chick Days at my local Tractor Supply Company.

I have also come to realize that there's more to this whole chicken thing than raising some rather pleasant animals and getting eggs and meat in return for clean straw and scratch grains. The barnyard has become an oasis of escape for me. There might be trouble in the world, problems at work, and my personal projects might be faltering, but there's consistency in the chicken universe. The chickens have their own squabbles and drama, and they forget it once it's over. They're grateful when fed, keep me in eggs, and run up to the porch when they see one of us there, hoping for a handout of pizza crust or the old ruins of a tomato.

Chickens have also allowed me to reconnect with my personal heritage. My father was a great carpenter, and while I tried to learn what he knew about the trade, I was too fumble fingered and impatient to get the perfect results that he managed with such ease. In the early days of walling off the coop and building the goat gate, I often heard myself muttering that I would never be the carpenter my Dad was, wishing that he were here to help me, and being glad that he wasn't here to see my incompetence. By the time I walled off the goat maternity ward and build a large gate for it, those feelings disappeared and I was grateful that I had learned as much as I did while Dad was still here.

I also reconnected with my maternal grandfather in an unexpected way. One day my mother asked what was new with the chickens, and I told her that I was thinking of getting some Barred Plymouth Rocks and Buff Orpingtons. "Oh," she said, sounding rather pleased. "Those are the kinds that Daddy used to keep." So even though he died when I was seven, I feel like I have more of a connection with him, even though I'm hard pressed to explain it.