In late October 2024, our 13 hens were in full molt, a.k.a. naked of feathers, and no more eggs on the horizon until the skies begin to brighten in the spring. Which I had in mind when I considered the following…

Sixty-one. That’s how many chickens we’ve tended to and only 13 heartbeats currently beating. Since I last wrote, we have lost three more hens. Meantime, in mid-August, a crow with a broken wing was hopping about along the driveway.

Of course, chickens. Another hen got an eye thing going on. Here is Barnie, our Barnvelder. A sweet girl although she is really good at dodging humans who are flinging themselves about the chicken yard, trying to catch a hen with an eye infection. Between Barnie and the Broody French Morans, I get a lot of Hairy Eyeballs (some of which are swollen) when I come out to the hen yard.

Snowball had an eye infection and there are a lot of chickens in need of a bath out there. The turkeys I see with my very own eyes, flirting and dancing and buffing up their wings. But for all those others tweeting and fluttering? Here is a list of birds that I hear in the mornings when I go out to jump into the pool.

A few days ago, on a Saturday morning in the midst of a storm, I went out to tidy the chicken coop. I noted that Rosie was not well. She huddled, hardly lifted her head, and her wings were drooped.

I went to the coop for a photo shoot. I haven't been spending enough time with the hens and they let me know it. Squawking, pecking and staring at me mournfully, as if to say, “We thought you had forgotten us.”

Last week, Carl broached the subject of the hens and their egg production, or lack thereof. I stood up, alert. Was he suggesting a slaughter? Which just shows how quick to the negative I go these days. In fact, he was pointing to a happy fact. It isn’t just a lack of feathers and short days that might have caused the hens to take a vacation. Carl was suggesting in a very respectful way that the hens are not young chicks anymore.

We ended up rehoming Toey to a friend of a friend. I have been told that she settled into her new home seamlessly. Here at Darwin’s View, her absence was felt most by her former BFF Flopsie, the hen who kept Toey company through her pecking-order trials. With Toey’s departure, Flopsie plummeted to the bottom of that pecking order; in the chicken world, no good deed goes unpunished.

We got about 20 quarts from our blueberry bushes and they are done for the season. Then these disgusting worms arrived. Carl picked off, heroic fellow that he is. And this is our fourth hen to go broody this summer: Princess Bitchess. She used to be such a sweetheart. As you will see, not so much right now.

Hop aboard! Here is the daily morning Chicken Train. Very endearing and deceptive given how mean they are still being to Toey . . . though she has, with trepidation, dared to sleep on the roosts again.

Toey is our best mother hen. She is consistently and obnoxiously broody. Unfortunately, when we later put Toey and her seven pullets together with the twelve other hens, they accepted the babies, but not Toey. Drama ensues.

Lice anyone? Bumblefoot? Dirty bums? We had that perfect storm here at Darwin’s View. The result? Two plus full days devoted to cleaning out and cleaning up Cluckingham Palace. And chicken spas.

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?

I’m remembering January 2018. I had broken my arm that Thanksgiving. My mother, still alive if with Parkinson's, was visiting. It was a New Year and I got up to write, to draw in the dark of that day’s dawning. I built up the fire in the wood stove because the temperature outside was in the negative numbers. And the chickens at the time were inside the house. Then the fire alarms went off.

Meet the chickens of Darwin’s View, including Apricot, the Pullets, Bernadette-Go-Bernie, Snowball, Fogbank, and more. The older hens are disheveled and pale, having all gone through a heavy molt this fall. But the Pullets—defined as under-one-year-old girls—have matured to the point they will consider laying their first eggs. After a month of no eggs, we are now getting 3-4 a day. From nineteen hens…

This past July, I made an audiobook of my memoir At Crossroads with Chickens, A “What If It Works” Adventure in Off-Grid Living and Quest for Home. I enjoyed the process of reading it aloud, revisiting what brought Carl and me to this point. And, to my surprise, At Crossroads with Chickens is not as humorous a book as I remembered it. In fact, I found it rather sad. Maybe because I am on this side of that crossroads and know what has happened since.