The Silence of The Roosters and Other Fall Traditions

Sad to do it, but we get to the point every year when a few formerly cute little chicks morph into nightmarish teenage boys who fight each other and roughly molest hens. One nearly blinded our former Alpha rooster, Big Daddy. BD now is our Beta, and we'd be sorry to lose him. As Roger our "chicken whisperer" tells us, older males mating with young hens result in fewer male chicks.

Win win.

And the aggressor? That punk teenager went into a dutch oven today. Young roos "taste just like chicken." Only older birds prove too tough to eat, good only for the stockpot.

Culling roosters we cannot re-home with Roger is, thankfully, only one of the annual rituals that begin about the time of the Autumnal Equinox. The heat and humidity have broken, so I get entire days for physical labor of splitting firewood and stacking it, pruning trees ahead of hurricanes, baling a bit of late-cut hay, planting garlic and onions, putting in kale and lettuce, picking figs and last tomatoes for last batches of jam and sauce.

As my full-time professional career nears its end, I'm ever more in love with this perfect time of year. I cannot sit still for long or look at screens except to write or study more about my hobbies. At night I read books, but while there's enough light in the evenings I get a bit more work done. There's also enough cool, dry air to make sweating fun. It's not hunting season yet, but the lakes are good for fishing for quite a while longer.  We even suddenly, after my wife's retirement, have time now for short vacations. It requires a farm-sitter, but the "shoulder months" are good for that, without fretting about animals needing constant attention to water and shade in summer or well-prepared shelter and fresh dry bedding in winter.

With Fall in mind, I went to the movie theater and sat in front of a big screen for the first time since COVID-19. I was deeply moved by Brett Morgen's film Moonage Daydream, about my favorite musician, David Bowie. I've missed his music terribly since his passing; he never seemed to run out of good ideas, even late in life.

Bowie's passing may have left a hole, but the film provided closure appropriately connected to my thoughts about Autumn.

 Fall can seem sad to some folks I know, yet to others "the veil is thin" between us and eternity. Our ancestors seem near. It was a good time to see that film. Bowie left this coda in the film, expressed as a prose-poem, and it fits well with any meditation about Fall:

You're aware of a deeper existence
Maybe a temporary reassurance that indeed there is no beginning, no end
And all at once, the outward appearance of meaning is transcended
And you find yourself struggling to comprehend a deep  and formidable mystery
I'm dying
You are dying
Second by second
All is transient
Does it matter?
Do I bother?
Yes, I do
Life is fantastic, it never ends, it only changes
Flesh to stone to flesh
And 'round and 'round
Bеst keep walking. 

Yes, keep walking. I'm walking outside now to cut up some limbs that fell in the last storm, before what is left of Hurricane Ian arrives.

(Do Not) Beware of Doug

It's been three weeks since I took "Doug," a fast-growing rat snake, to the back of our property and let him loose in a pile of scrap metal, invasive plants, and leaf-litter: snake paradise. "Go get 'em, Tiger!" I said, meaning that Doug would displace a few venomous Copperheads.

I rather miss him. He'd taken up residence in our newest large chicken coop, and once when I took him to the ravine at the western edge of our property, he was back inside a week. I found him curled up, with hens and a rooster just stepping over him. I put out feelers for a name on Facebook, and my grad-school bud Alan came back with Doug, for "I shall return" General Douglas MacArthur. Alan and I are both WW 2 geeks, so it was an easy pitch.

Now Doug is gone. I picked him up that last time with my snake grabber because he was trying to eat eggs, not just mice. And baby chicks were on the way.

I've long enjoyed having black snakes (Black Racers and Rat Snakes) in all our out-buildings, as they keep down the mice that eat wiring harnesses in vehicles and farm equipment. Though I can find no peer-reviewed study of the matter, black snakes are said to keep Copperheads away, which is more than enough reason to want these rather curious and gentle (unless provoked) creatures around.

Doug never tried to bite me, even when being carried and he slipped loose from the grabber, hanging out and inspecting his surroundings. I suspect I'll see him again. I already had a sign on our dog house that references an old Far Side cartoon, pictured up top. It feels like a welcome sign now.

Superfluous Roosters

One problem about hatching your own poultry: you are going to end up with too many roosters. The one pictured above was a "keeper." He's doing his work, watching out for his girlfriends so they get to eat and nothing sneaks up to eat them.

But what if you have to eat a rooster?

Next year, a slightly higher temperature on the incubator should result in fewer males, but this year, we had six roosters. Four were mean birds, that charged you and pecked at you, no matter what. Their fate?

Butchered and eaten, or in the euphemistic sense, "sent to freezer camp."

I'd never done this before, so I enlisted the help of a theoretical physicist and his architect wife.

Yes, on paper that sounds very unqualified, but they both grew up in Romania under Communism. One advantage of that otherwise dreadful system was that city kids often learned rural skills, and my friends are no exception. Of course, our grandmothers were all laughing at us for the grand production we made of "processing" the birds.

Except for the first rooster, I did the worst part: the quick dispatch.

No, there are no photos here. Yes, we tried mightily to get the extra roosters adopted. If you belong to any lists about poultry, you'll find lots of handsome males up for adoption. Nearly all are listed as "sweet tempered."

We were lucky to have two roosters survive. Both are defensive of their harems when it comes to predators, but they let me pet them and their ladies. They eat out of my hand and come up to talk to me.

That's the only thing better than eating a rooster. Coq au Vin is, however, excellent.

So, if you are faced with no other options, here are some excellent resources I used:

• how to humanely butcher and clean a chicken.
• an excellent Coq au Vin recipe from New York Times.
• how to clean chicken feet.

When You Have to Put an Animal Down

One of the hardest things any pet owner must do is make the painful decision to end an animal's life. That is most often done by injection at the Vet's. But what if you had to do it yourself?

Without going into the (blessedly non-gory) details, I had to euthanize a sick chicken (not any of the ones pictured) a few weeks back. It was harder than killing a wild animal, something I do with varmints or, for food, with deer.

Our Vet performs necroscopies, which confirmed cancer as the culprit for the creature's visible pain.  It's not likely systemic to our flock, but we are keeping an eye out.

That's only the fourth chicken we have lost in four years, with two to heat and another to a sudden illness, but it's the first where I had to end the animal's suffering. We really think so little of chickens, don't we? Those nuggets hardly seem to have come from something that once made noise and walked around, though industrial-production chickens lead lives of horror.

For many of us, however, the most personable pampered hen lacks the warm feeling of a loyal dog or purring cat, but they do have individual personalities and often follow you around clucking for treats.  We don't eat our birds, so they have become pets even after the flock grew to nearly 20 animals, with our first rooster and about 7 more hens on the way.

Chicken keepers may have a tough time finding Vets to treat a bird, unless one lives in town where urban chicken-keeping seems to have replaced beekeeping as the ecological hobby du jour.  I phoned one of those in-town vets and they treat animals but do not do any postmortem exams. Luckily, our  country Vet here was more than happy to assist.

As for the death of the hen, it was painless for her. There's a great blog post here with advice I used to euthanize the bird. When I have to process my surplus roosters I cannot re-home, I'll use the same technique. No hatchets or helicoptering for me. I treat living things with respect, and the method shown really keeps the animal comforted and tranquil until death. Yes, a chicken will thrash after severing its spinal cord, but that's involuntary. The deed is done and if animals go somewhere after they leave this world, our hen made the passage.

Since we began raising chicks, I've not eaten any chicken. Oddly, euthanizing the bird bothered me little more than killing a fish for supper. But I'm not quite ready to eat one of our flock.

Chickens in the Garden. Hah.

We have had chickens for more than 18 months, currently a flock of 13 hens. Number 14 (I don't like naming them; my wife does) perished in the heat last summer, getting trapped in a raised bed garden and unable to escape the fencing.

As we have discovered, those cute pictures on gardening books that feature chickens are comfortable lies.

Photos like the one above (not our garden, not our chicken! They'd make short work of the Nasturtiums) make a novice gardener think that hens will simply avoid plants you want for food in order to get at the lovely scratch and chicken feed you set out for them. I'm guessing that these are the same urban owners who put little sweaters on their chickens and walk them on leashes. Perhaps they are working on a much smaller scale than we employ; our big garden measures over 5000 square feet, about 3000 of it in raised beds, so projects like building "chicken tunnels" and other elaborate structures run into the steamy reality of Virginia summers where weeds can grow 6 inches after a bad week of heavy rain.

Our experience with chickens shows us that they can be wonderful in and around fallow beds, where they turn and manure the soil. They turn compost faster than I can. I did add boards to keep them from kicking out all the topsoil and compost into the paths, but when I added mesh fencing to beds, chickens would get into the smallest hole, and often they could not get out. They do fly, a bit, and one variety, the Golden Comet, is a great flyer even when we trimmed back the feathers on their wingtips. Over the fence they went!

To prevent more dead birds and ruined crops, we will keep the chickens out of all the beds in summer of 2017. The flock will now have a nice shady run and  their own coop area for scratching and resting. In fall, we'll have 5' tall permanent horse-fencing around our strawberry-and-rhubarb spot and the asparagus bed we are gradually expanding to about 150 square feet.  One other bed will get the 5' fencing and host our winter-greens garden.

I enjoy our chickens. They are good entertainment, they eat a lot of bugs, and they give me breakfast every day of the year. They can, as this author claims, do many things that farm machinery or back-aching labor accomplish.

But, in the end, they are livestock, not pets. If you want to keep chickens, keep in mind that vigilance is the price of having them near a garden, let alone in one.