Once Upon a Flock

by Lauren Scheuer

  For Sarah

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. Backyard Makeover

  2. The Coop

  3. Chickens 101

  4. Fleeting Cuteness

  5. Henhouse

  6. Summertime

  7. Marky Joins the Flock

  8. Chickenspeak

  9. Lucy Limps

  10. Change in Pecking Order

  11. Wintertime

  12. Budup

  13. Team Broody

  14. Pip

  15. Egg Emergency

  16. Lucy Gets to Work

  17. Lucy Returns

  18. Roosterman

  19. Cycles

  20. Hatsy

  21. Pigeon the Chicken

  22. Pigeon Joins the Flock

  23. A Flock Once Again

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Once Upon a Flock

  1

  Backyard Makeover

  With a yard like ours, there is little reason ever to be indoors. Our home in Massachusetts is surrounded by forest, with classic New England granite ledges and boulders and wetlands. When our daughter, Sarah, was small, we hunted blueberries.

  We dissected owl pellets, caught garter snakes, and built leafy homes for pet caterpillars. We scooped tadpoles and tiny frogs out of the vernal pool in the woods and raised them in an aquarium on our back stoop.

  We adopted Marky the terrier, an independent fellow who also enjoys outdoor adventures in all seasons.

  While Marky patrolled the yard and the forest, Sarah and I continued to explore and create. We made forts out of sticks, and we hung rope swings from the trees. As my girl grew, so did our building projects. I built a tree platform for Sarah and her friends, and I was thrilled to find a new use for my beloved collection of power tools.

  Back when Danny and I were newlyweds in Boston and were graduating from milk crates and trash-day sidewalk finds to respectable grown-up furnishings, I had made many a bookshelf and table with these old tools.

  For a while, when I had no idea what to do with my newly acquired fine art degree, I considered furniture making as a career.

  Then I took some woodworking classes in which I learned that I should not consider furniture making as a career. My attention span is too short. I can never find a ruler or a level when I need one, so my final product ends up looking a lot like the five-second sketch I did just before starting to build whatever it was I just sketched. The excitement for me is in making a sketch of a chair and then turning it into a real live chair that I can sit on. To sketch a bookcase, and then—voilà!

  A real bookcase is born. And really, who needs a ruler and a level when you’ve got a few hundred drywall screws and a big tub of wood putty? I possess the talent to skillfully disguise my mistakes, no matter how huge.

  The tree platform I built for Sarah and her friends was so liberating that way.

  Fine details were unnecessary. The kids didn’t stand back and critique my work; they just climbed all over it. They wanted pulleys and ropes and ladders and more pulleys. So that’s what I gave them, along with trapdoors and secret compartments.

  It was a solid structure, albeit a little precarious, perched eight or nine feet above a rocky outcropping. So as a precaution I threatened to punish anybody who got hurt.

  I stretched a zip line from one end of the yard to the other, again with the threat of severe punishment for any broken bones or concussions. As a result, we had no serious injuries or deaths, and for many years this backyard was a mecca of colorful adventures and activity.

  Then one day, totally without warning, Sarah grew up. She retreated to her room and began morphing into a teenager—the sedentary, electronic type.

  Carpenter ants and paper wasps took up residence in the tree platform and went to work reducing it to mulch. A forest of tiny pine trees sprouted in the sandbox. The zip line rusted and sagged. Soccer balls and hula hoops disappeared under autumn leaves.

  I stood alone, slump shouldered, in my echoing wasteland of a yard. Well, I wasn’t totally alone. My faithful canine whacked the back of my leg with his squeaky toy.

  Marky was always ready for fun, but at that moment I wasn’t. And besides, Marky only wanted to play his own game, with his own rules. And he always won.

  Eventually he dropped his toy and chased a chipmunk into the old woodpile. Something had to change. My yard needed a serious jump start.

  I thought about my friend Patricia, who lives down the road and whose yard is full of life. Whenever I visit Patricia, she and I wander among her perennials. We sip tea and discuss the year’s tomato crop. In her yard, children frolic, sheep graze, and colorful chickens drift in and out of the garden. In Patricia’s yard, the sun shines brighter and the grass is always greener.

  I didn’t necessarily want to have a farm. I’ve never pined for a flock of sheep, nor have I ever felt great desire for a herd of children.

  Chickens, on the other hand … Chickens might be just what I needed. Chickens would bring my yard back to life. I would get my own flock of wonderful birds, and my family would come skipping out into the sunlight to enjoy them with me. And even if my family never emerged, I would have a bunch of birds to call my own. The thought delighted me.

  And fresh eggs! My birds would give me eggs—what a bonus! Backyard eggs would be my ticket out of the factory farm conundrum. No longer would I have to buy supermarket eggs and feel guilty about it, knowing that the chickens who produced them had most likely never seen sunshine or enjoyed fresh grass or bugs.

  If all these reasons weren’t enough, my flock of chickens would necessitate a new building project. I would design and build the perfect coop.

  It didn’t take much chatting with Patricia to get me hooked on the idea. She assured me that raising chickens was both easy and fun. As a matter of fact, Patricia was thinking of getting some new chicks in the spring too. So we planned our order together and discussed a schedule.

  If we ordered our chicks to arrive in February, they would grow up and lay eggs by the end of the summer. That sounded good to me. February was three months away, plenty of time to study and plan and learn all I could.

  I began with the coop.

  2

  The Coop

  Chicken coop. A simple concept.

  Once I had scanned a few library books and chicken websites, I pretty much had the gist. The coop and henhouse keep the chickens safe from predators. In the henhouse, chickens roost by night and lay eggs by day. In the coop, they scratch and peck and take in the fresh air and sunshine and wait impatiently for me to come and let them out. I tore open a fresh ream of paper, picked up a pencil, and started drawing.

  Sketches flew.

  I pulled ideas from exotic tales,

  faraway lands,

  art genres,

  Greek drama and ancient empires,

  and my favorite foods.

  Ideas came faster than I could scribble them down.

  Sketches stacked up on the kitchen table and blew across the kitchen floor.

  I stirred pasta with one hand and drew coops with the other.

  Danny and Sarah stepped over piles of coop books and shuffled across mounds of drawings, and wisely kept on walking. They were familiar with my tendency to obsess and watched from a safe distance.

  I hadn’t really discussed the chicken plan with my family. We’re not the family-meeting type. But since so much evidence had accumulated, it was certainly not a secret, and I felt that if they had any concerns, they could attempt to discuss them with me. And if they chose never to chat about it with me, then hey … No conflict? No problem.

  In my free time I wandered through l
umberyards, breathing deeply the smell of fresh sawdust and examining lengths and grades of pine and plywood. I visited the local hardware store to fondle latches, bolts, and hinges. I hunted down the most economical materials, and I planned my coop’s dimensions based on the length of wood that could squeeze into my Honda Fit: eight feet max from hatchback to dashboard. With these restrictions, I came up with just the right design.

  Attractive, sturdy, and with wheels on one end so I could move it around the yard. Secure, easy to clean, and with a doorway just wide enough to fit my wheelbarrow.

  Perfect for a small flock.

  3

  Chickens 101

  February crept up, and suddenly it was time to place the chick order. I swept aside mountains of coop sketches in order to barrel into this chicken thing.

  It was more complicated than I had expected.

  There were so many breeds to choose from, and so many considerations. Fancy birds are not necessarily the best egg layers. Silkies and Sebrights and bantams can be tricky to raise and care for in a mixed flock. And those hens with the big poufs on their heads? I read that they can’t see a darn thing—they tend to run around bumping into walls.

  Really, I just wanted a few colorful egg-laying chickens. Nothing fancy. But even among basic chickens, there are dozens and dozens of breeds to choose from. These chickens were going to be my living lawn ornaments, so color was the first consideration. They had to complement the peony and the coneflower, the sedum and the phlox. I wanted a variety of birds, I wanted good layers, and I needed hens that wouldn’t freeze to death in a New England winter.

  I settled on a black, a striped, a yellow, and a red one.

  Rhode Island Red and Barred Plymouth Rock originated right here in the Northeast. They would know how to handle the harsh winters.

  My Black Australorp would glimmer in the sunshine like an iridescent beetle.

  And the Buff Orpington? Well, I just wanted a reason to say “Buff Orpington” every day. Buff Orpington, Buff Orpington, Buff Orpington.

  I wanted only three chickens, because three chickens constitute a flock, and three hens would probably provide enough eggs for our family of three people. But I figured I ought to order the fourth one for good measure, because raising chickens has its risks.

  Every night I read about these risks in my chicken books, and every day I worried about everything I had read the night before.

  My chicks could drown in their water bowl. They could die of heat stroke; they could die if they got too cold. They could sleep in a pile and suffocate each other. They could get pasty butt when a nugget of dried poop gets stuck like a cork and you have to dislodge it with a wet towel or a bit of olive oil, or else they will die from, I guess, internal combustion. And if the floor is too slippery, their feet could splay, and I would have to make miniature leg splints out of toothpicks and tape. And if they survived this gauntlet of horrors in their little chickie lives, they could still drop dead at any time for no apparent reason.

  It’s true. I read it on the Internet.

  If I managed to keep them alive all the way to adulthood, more dangers lurked in their future: they could get sour crop, bumblefoot, fowl pox, and egg drop.

  They could get eaten by foxes, skunks, hawks, owls, raccoons, weasels, fishers, or neighborhood dogs. They could go broody, which is when a hen decides she wants to be a mother, or they could come down with any number of fatal ailments. And worst of all, they could grow up to be roosters.

  Patricia and I planned to pay extra for our chicks to be “sexed” at the hatchery by a professional chick checker who can tell a girl from a boy, but this is not an exact science. Mistakes are known to happen. So the fourth chick in the order was my insurance. Although at four dollars apiece, I wasn’t risking much as far as money was concerned.

  Just like with the coop plans, I didn’t involve Danny and Sarah directly in my chicken plans. They could see what I was doing. Every night we scooted stacks of chicken books to the far side of the kitchen table in order to eat dinner, and every day those books were scattered all over the table again. Lists and sticky notes hung out of every book and were taped all over our walls as well. If Danny or Sarah had any concerns about my plan or wanted to know the details, they could have asked me.

  They did occasionally mutter some comments, opinions, and feeble arguments against chickens.

  I listened politely and then flipped open another chicken book.

  When I officially informed Danny that chickens were inevitable, he rubbed his forehead, let out a faint groan, and initiated one mature and rational discussion. He said he didn’t see the need for more pets. We already had a dog, two guinea pigs, and the Betta fish that Sarah had won at a birthday party. He felt that our lives were already plenty complicated, and didn’t I often complain of not having enough time to dedicate to my freelance illustration business?

  I responded with silence.

  “Why do you want chickens?” Danny asked.

  “Because I want the experience.”

  Long pause.

  “Okay,” he said.

  I called Patricia and we placed our order that night.

  4

  Fleeting Cuteness

  Our bundles of fluff arrived by mail. Day-old chicks can be shipped successfully because they are born with enough nutritional reserves to last three days. In a real broody nest situation, this makes it possible for all the chicks to hatch over the course of a day or two without the mother hen needing to leave the nest to feed her early hatchers.

  With the current backyard chicken craze under way, postal clerks are familiar with peeping packages. They call recipients immediately to pick up their parcel, and chicks arrive at their new homes a little shaken but in good physical condition.

  Patricia picked up our chicks at the post office, and I met her at her house to sort them out. The Barred Rock and the Australorp chicks had distinctive coloring, so we knew for certain which ones they were. Most of the other breeds were tough to distinguish—they were all variations on the basic yellow puffball—so we made our best guesses, and I took my four babies home.

  I arranged them on a bed of paper towels and straw in a plastic bin in the living room. Danny and Sarah stumbled in to take a look and were instantly smitten. All three of us were. At two days old, these little birds tottered nonstop, bumped into each other, sat down, stood up, and jettisoned about … and stole our hearts.

  Our three giant human heads hovered over the chicks’ bin, huge smiles on our faces. Within minutes, Sarah had given them names. That evening, we ate a picnic dinner in front of the chick bin, and that night Sarah serenaded them with soft guitar chords.

  The chicks stood quietly in the warm glow of their heat lamp until they tipped over, one by one, right where they stood.

  The next morning after Sarah had left for school and Danny for work, I called my illustration client to tell her that something had come up—I needed to extend the deadline another day. Then I poured my chicks out onto the carpet and wallowed in them.

  I discovered right away that each one came equipped with a unique personality.

  Little White was docile and just plain sweet. She stayed willingly wherever she was placed: on my finger, on my shoulder, upside down, right side up. Sarah had named her Little White because the first tiny feathers that had come in were white wing feathers. We thought we’d gotten a chicken mix-up and that she would turn into some sort of white-feathered chicken that we hadn’t ordered. When we later realized that she was, in fact, a Buff Orpington, the name Little White still seemed right for her sweet demeanor, so she kept her name. In fact, because of her calm and respectable comportment and her blossoming good looks, her name morphed into Lil’White, spoken with a soft Southern accent. She was a belle if ever there was one. And she became Sarah’s favorite.

  Lucy, the Barred Plymouth Rock, seemed curious and thoughtful and a bit anxious. But as long as we didn’t make any sudden moves, she was happy to hang out on my hand. Every
day I watched with anticipation for her striking barred plumage to emerge.

  And as her feathers came in, she began to look like a baby robin.

  Hatsy started out as an elegant golden chick.

  But she began to grow very quickly and took on a hawklike appearance that was a bit disconcerting. We worried from the start that she might be a he. Regardless, we realized she was neither the Rhode Island Red nor the Buff Orpington that we had expected her to be. In fact, we couldn’t figure out what breed she was. But we were fine with that mystery and just kept our fingers crossed that she would grow up to be a hen and not a roo.

  Hatsy stepped into a leadership role right away. She was smart and quick and adventuresome, and she set off on solitary reconnaissance missions across the living room whenever the opportunity arose.

  The fourth chick, Jenny, was our Black Australorp. Her coloration was striking, and her personality was … well … Jenny was a screaming, wailing, inconsolable baby.