A Chicken Lesson
We got the Bus Stop in 2016 when we were thinking of creating a grey water system for the house. The Bus Stop was going to be a green house in which would be plants that would clean the grey water and grow plants, too. This didn't work out as the chicken usurped the idea because the Bus Stop chicken run protects the hens from the relentless winds, and allows for protected sun baths throughout the year. The Bus Sop is now attached to the old coop and shed, and a metal roof combines them.
The Hens are excited to be out and about without their claws bound into snowshoes.
They don’t actually have snowshoes, but the idea is very cute and would be much appreciated by the girls, given how much they hate slipping and sliding on snow and ice. They celebrate the lack thereof by running out of the coop and Bus stop run, bounding out into the orchard, their bottoms swaying to the wind as the sun rises over the Wapack ridge.
Sadly, we lost our Isa Brown, Lucy, this past week. She was the friendliest of our current lot, reminiscent of Ping in her forthrightness and willingness to be picked up and hugged. Her most recent molt had changed her from a scruffy tan and white ragamuffin into a nearly elegant elder.
Last Wednesday night, I noted that she wasn’t on the roost but on the floor of the coop. Maybe she was having an egg? But the next morning, she had moved herself to sitting near the water buckets. And a couple of hours later, she was under the Quonset hut. Granted it was an unseemly 85 degrees, but lethargy was unusual for her, who was typically found gadding about with all her girlfriends.
The Quonset Hut is the Green coop and the Hay Chalet is in front of it. The hay bales—that have protected/created the Hay Chalet— have been removed to serve as mulch.
As the vet said, we’ve been through this before. I had called Jaffrey-Rindge Veterinary Hospital where works a farm animal vet. I was told I could drop Lucy off, which I did, placing her delicately into an old cat carrier filled with hay. I assumed it would be something about her female parts; Isa Browns are known to get egg bound. Shortly thereafter, the vet called to say that Lucy—as had Little Red two years ago—had a fluid-filled sac inside her. Liver failure? Congestive heart failure? As with Little Red, I could opt to have the excess drained, but it was only postponing the inevitable, and given the stress Lucy seemed to be in, the vet doubted she would make it home alive.
We have had sixty-one chickens, if you can believe it. Eighteen alive and squawking. And with every passage, however seemingly matter-of-factly I have let them go, the ache that develops in my heart over the next hours and days, as the reality sinks in, is familiar. Loss and the concomitant grief exists in my body, along with a subtle but all-encompassing course of cortisol.
And then the guilt of facing the remaining hens.
Lucy, ready for adventure.
Where is she? They stand all crowded at the fence door into the garden and chicken area and seem to demand an accounting. And no small wonder they run away from me, rarely trusting me not to snatch them away for a bath to tidy their poo-ey bottoms or worse: just away, never to be seen again.
Lucy is in the freezer, awaiting burial, I say to them. Too blunt? I apologize. I explain that the only other option had been suffering. They stare at me, clearly miffed by my ignorance of chicken-speak, though their retreat suggests a degree of tolerance. I am, after all, only human, and think of all that we humans have done —with the best of intentions.
I have been asked, How old do chickens get? I usually respond that most don’t live past 2 or 3, given that their worth to most humans is based on egg-laying and meatiness, not lessons to learn.
But our hens are this old: Apricot, our eldest, is 8. Suzy B is 6. Copper, Toey, Flopsie, and Rosie are 5. Pearl Baily is 4. Lucy was 3. As are her two French Moran sisters Grande & Petite. Beardette and Creamsicle are 2. Barnie, Snowball, Fogbank, Duchess and Lady Gray, and our two Black Beauties are all 1.
I know that it’s life’s cycle. I’m not quite as heart sick as that first time we lost a chicken, nor the second or the third.
Maybe I am becoming more like a chicken. Chicken attitude! Lucy has gone to join the chicken spirits in the sky, and life continues. There is scratching still to be done, roosting and egg-laying. And so, let’s bound out together and enjoy the weather, however indecisive it might be. Because now is today and tomorrow will come and the past, and those who have gone, live on in our hearts and memories. And so does the ache as we flap our wings, half uplifted by the winds, and celebrate our freedom in this glorious, if slightly bizarre weather.