But now wearing a white apron with protective glasses and booties (biohazard protection to avoid disease sharing from our own livestock), I was more anxious than excited. My stomach felt unanchored. The live birds saved out for us from a recent cull (farmer-speak for slaughter) looked a lot like our own chickens. Hearty pasture breeds—no skinny leghorns here—showing a bit of road wear with unkempt feathers and faltering combs.
Michael, a poultry PhD from a few states south, led the session. He’s renowned in his field and works with many farms, including large corporate operations. And he doesn’t suffer bleeding-heart yahoos. The day before he’d said, “Seems like anyone who’s watched a few Joel Salatin videos thinks they can start a chicken farm these days.” I thought back to Jason on the couch, mesmerized by the glow of his Mac, and couldn’t help but nod in agreement.
“Okay,” Michael shouted above the murmur of participants, “let me show you the best way to hold a hen.” He reached into the crate and grabbed one. While I instinctively hold a chicken like a football, he extended his index finger (also known as your distal phalanx, but better recognized as the barrel of your mime gun) and slid it in between the legs of the forward-facing bird. As he did, the chicken, who’d been nervously cuffing her wings, calmed.
“I’m gently squeezing her,” he said, indicating her leg regions, and to further illustrate her state of relaxation, Michael turned the chicken completely upside down—and her wings flapped open without even one concerned cluck. It was like a poultry party trick and our group ooohed in appreciation.
He handed me the hen, which I lifted from underneath as demonstrated. The black-and-white-flecked Barred Rock, the zebra of the chicken world, settled in nicely. Just as I thought she felt secure and protected in my warm clutch, Michael broke my illusion.
“Chickens are prey animals, and it knows it’s caught. But as long as I’m not making any moves to eat her right now, she’s all right with it—right?” he said, directly addressing the bird.
While I preferred my scenario, Michael’s made more sense. A captured chicken would instinctually conserve energy on what has historically been a losing battle, perhaps storing energy to bolt later. I wanted to whisper that I had no plans to eat her whatsoever, but felt disingenuous given that I was about to take an educational tour of her insides. Instead, I told her she was a pretty bird, a nice bird, as she robotically tilted her head to the soft lilt of my voice.
Michael then used my chicken for another demo. “You can take her wings up like this,” he said, gently lifting them, “and cross them over one another as such.” He then swirled the wings in a move that looked like the first step in a French braid, folding some of the left flight feathers over the right wing, keeping them in place. The bird, still amazingly serene, was now wings up as though sporting an exotic hairdo. This useful positioning allowed for an unfettered inspection for lice or mites, easily spied under the wing where there’s the least feathering.
(Later at home, I typed “wing tie, chicken” into my Internet search engine to see if I could review a video. That was when I learned it’s a term shared with the BDSM community—and was served up an entirely different movie clip.)
Passing my hen over to be placed in a rubber garbage container to be euthanized, I looked away. The trash can lid accommodated a plastic tube attached to a silver tank of carbon dioxide. It delivered a swift kick of anesthesia and, within a few minutes, death due to respiratory arrest. It was fast and seemed, from my side of the container at least, to involve little distress.
Eric, back in Minnesota, took mild umbrage with my using the term euthanasia this way, feeling it should be reserved for relief of great pain during a terminal illness. But looking it up, I saw it’s from the Greek word thanatos, meaning “death,” and the prefix eu-, meaning “good,” thus giving these girls a “good death.” And I can assure you that it was.
I skew squishy-hearted in many matters, but being in the company of these farm-hardened professionals held my composure firm. These were not the chicken keepers who purchase the commercially available hen leashes to take their birds on an evening stroll. No. Most had been talking nonstop about hunting or processing animals or culling flocks since we’d met yesterday, like it was as natural as wearing camo to the feed store.
As we entered the hay-scented cow barn, I headed for the preset lab table that the Heidis had claimed. The Heidis were a pair of affable and funny gals who’d driven up for the conference from Rhode Island. When we did our group introductions and were instructed to “add something memorable,” one Heidi shared that she’d once been both the fair queen and tobacco-spitting champion at her county fair—the same year. It would be foolish to even try not to like them. And now, more than ever, I needed to be distracted from the dizzyingly large and sharp shears on the tables.
Handed a dead chicken, this time a cinnamon-colored bird who looked a bit scraggly, I silently offered her thanks for her service and looked up to see that most of the other participants had already dug in. I exhaled and got to work.
The dissection was narrated by Michael, who talked us through the first resistant crunches of the rib cage. I concentrated on his voice to avoid focusing on the grisly sounds of breaking bone. But once the bird’s impressive chest cavity was revealed, I was taken with the chicken’s tidily packed organs. Snipping out the lungs and heart, I’d gently set them aside, in order, like I was dissembling a broken toy and I might be asked to reassemble and perhaps even reanimate her later.
With Michael’s help, I located the crop, the store for food before it goes onward for digestion. It was a yellowish sack protruding from the esophagus, and I heard someone at another table refer to it as the bird’s built-in to-go bag. Opening it up, I scooped out a sloppy clump of wet grains, her day’s meal, as other tables pulled out amazingly long strings of grass.
That’s a risk for free-ranging chickens.
They pluck and swallow blades of grass, which can lead to a condition called crop impaction. That’s when food fails to pass through on its digestive carnival ride through the body. It can be due to a few things, but for outside birds, it’s often that the organ’s exit is blocked by something like wood chips, twine, or stringy plants. It’s a condition that can take a healthy chicken and waste her to nothing. To prevent this at our Mom, Pop, and Bro operation, we pass a mower over an overgrown pasture, keeping the field to no more than six inches before bringing in the flock. This is in lieu of cows or some other grass-chewing ruminants. I’m pretty sure that they’re in my future, but I pushed this out of my mind, too. I needed to concentrate.
I continued on down our bird with the other woman at our table, Nicole, an organic certifier from Vermont. She was a capable and curious learner, and I tried to vampire off her eager presence. Hitting the lower abdomen area, we waded our way through large and copious globs of yellow fat. Nicole shouted out a question: how can outdoor birds, presumably exercising every day, accumulate so much fatty tissue?
“Because they’re bums!” piped up Dr. Michael from across the barn. “Hanging around eating all day and not giving eggs.”
In the poultry world there are two kinds of mature hens: layers and loafers. Earlier, Michael had flipped over a live bird and showed us several indicators of infertility such as a dry vent opening and stiff pubic bones that would not allow an egg to pass. Then he swung her back up to examine her comb. A bright red headdress indicates fertility, while a light-colored, scruffy one signals that she’s spent. The fading mane and disposition toward heaviness around the middle and backside are parallels not lost on this middle-aged woman.
Continuing with the dissection, we pushed on to the gizzard, a tube Nicole neatly sliced wide with our cutting shears. We were to look for worms. After poking around with a gloved finger, we declared our bird clean. Michael was impressed that only about a third of the flock hosted these wiggly moochers. The Heidis showed us a sample from their chicken’s gut—three or four thin, long, white strings, a small infestation give
n that worms work to entirely encircle intestines until a well-eating chicken starves.
“If you don’t want your chickens to miss out on having parasites, put them outside,” said Dr. Michael with a little snark. I bristled under the pointed criticism but couldn’t deny his point. While chickens outside on pasture encapsulate the beauty that is poultry in motion, it’s sadly also the perfect medium for freeloaders like lice, worms, and mites. It’s safe to say that nearly all outdoor flocks are fighting some sort of bug.
As chickens first started making their way indoors and into confinement, they exchanged the lively feeling of wind in their wings for actual life. Mortality rates in outdoor laying hens dropped from 40 percent in the early 1900s to a mere 5 percent in modern caged operations. And that’s a number that’s hard to argue with. Especially with feisty Dr. Michael.
But would that chicken choose to have every indoor need met or face a more scrappy existence outside? Some of our birds have to be coaxed out of their shelters, perhaps avoiding interaction with bigger birds or reluctant to give up a particular sweet spot on a roost or some poultry scenario simply unknowable to me, like a bad feather day. But I can tell you that without fail, when our barn doors open in the morning, there’s a head-bobbing, goofy stampede of fowl—even into inclement weather. One could argue that in a chicken’s walnut-sized brain there’s no room for critical thinking regarding bacterial microbes and parasitic risks. I wouldn’t argue that. Though her instincts tell her that there are hawks and foxes out there and despite the ample feed, water, and safety in the barn, she still ventures out. Chickens, no doubt, have pluck. Though I would think on Michael’s words for months to come.
There were other standout moments at the conference, several with another poultry scientist, Paul. Tall and lean with salt-and-pepper hair, Paul had an easy manner while walking us through his slides of free-range pasture projects he had been doing in Pennsylvania.
“My grad students are supposed to move these chicken tractors around the field,” he said, showing a photo of a portable henhouse. “But somehow it always ends up being me.” He laughed easily at himself.
“Our findings show that eggs from these outside birds had more omega-3, vitamin A, and vitamin E.”
And before my smile was fully formed, he interjected, “But, you know, I could just add that to the feed.”
I sighed. He’s right, of course. There’s a national egg company that has made its name on pumping its eggs full of chemical vitamins and minerals, even adding marigold to give its yolks the orangey hue that pasture-raised chickens earn outside.
However, I have no doubt that eggs from hens outside truly are better. This sprinkling in of vitamins feels akin to the story of baby formula. When I was an infant in the 1970s, I was bottle fed because the collective consciousness embraced a “better living through chemistry” ethos. Recently I noticed that formula cans are now splashed with claims of new additives like DHA and ARA fatty acids for brain and eye development, which might explain my eyewear and inability to juggle numbers in my head. One would guess these acids have always naturally occurred in breast milk, but it took some forty years for scientists to replicate them. So, when it comes to pasture-raised eggs, other than those fatty acids and vitamins that present-day scientists are all about, what other beneficial properties are going on in the yolky down-low that we can’t yet test for, much less make in a lab?
My most startling piece of incidental learning happened later that day in our hotel conference room. A local food program director and small-scale pasture bird farmer asked a specific question about a new flock of chickens. She described a familiar scene—piling into corners, aggressiveness, and all and all being a difficult, nervous flock. This was unusual, she said, as they’d had several cycles of birds and had always enjoyed mellow hens.
I leaned forward. For one, I rarely met farmers who raise chickens the way we do and I was interested in her difficult flock. But I was even more attentive to the ideas that these troubles were an exception, not the rule.
“Sounds like they were not properly lighted as pullets,” said Paul.
An entire back-and-forth ensued that I watched like a bug-eyed Ping-Pong tournament fanatic. It focused on the light-tight barns where commercial chicks are typically raised. The artificial light showered on pullets is an entire science, complete with charts and graphs and interactive computer applications that will pinpoint a brooder house’s position on the earth for exact sunrise and sunset information. It’s that important. While I understood that light affects a bird’s pituitary gland and the release of her reproductive growth hormones, what I didn’t get before is how important it is to adjust for birds destined to be outdoors. Otherwise, a hen will go from a hormone trickle to a virtual estrogen tempest, which sends their little poultry nerves into a hysterical swirly.
Poultry hysteria is a terrible condition that entails everything our birds suffered through in those early days on pasture. It cranks up perfectly lovely chickens to acts of cannibalization, piling and suffocating in droves, and becoming flustery, wing-batting freak-outs to every actual or imagined sound or movement.
“Good Lord,” I said involuntarily.
When the next break was called, I bolted out of the room. Holding my aging cell phone in front of me, I paced the circular driveway of the inn, desperate for a signal. When I found two bars’ worth, I dialed Jason.
“Hey, Bird,” he answered. “How’s Maine?”
“It wasn’t our fault.” I talked quickly, with the realization that I had far more to say than the cerebral bandwidth to say it.
“What? I don’t think we have a good connection.” I heard our own Minnesota chickens clucking in the background.
“The pullets—all their problems—they were improperly brooded and I know I’m not being clear here, but Jason, it wasn’t our fault. The smothering, the blowout, it wasn’t space issues or diet.”
“Myron’s birds?” he asked, catching up in the way only the long-married can.
“Yeah.” I nodded into the phone. Surprised by the bubble of emotion that forced its way up my throat, I pulled my red jacket tight around me and said, “Yeah, you know, if we brooded our own, we could do it right.”
“We could do that when we live at the farm,” he said.
Yeah, about that.
I’d tried to picture it: our family out in rural Wrenshall living the happy ending that everyone wanted. The solid home, the sweeping landscape, all among our beloved birds. Over the past weeks, as I wanly smiled over these bucolic images in my head, there’d been something worrisome around the edges.
Then it became clear. Maybe it was hanging out with my new conference friends, people who took such joy in their agricultural pastimes and simply infused the air with their capability that allowed me to see it more clearly. I truly admired them. I thoroughly enjoyed their company. But while I wasn’t exactly a fraud, I wasn’t exactly a farmer, either. I left Maine remembering something important. I never wanted to move our family out to the country.
“Jason,” I said, cornering him in the kitchen when I got home. Thus began a carefully worded, tender speech outlining our life events, starting with my giving up a Twin Cities writing career and moving to Duluth—for him; then starting this farm with all its travails—again, not my life goal. And while I admitted that these things had turned out more or less okay, if you don’t count the years it sheared off my life, there had also emerged an undeniable theme.
“I know you think it’s another case of my resisting change or maybe not being brave, but actually, I’ve been thinking about this for weeks now and”—I swallowed—“and, Jason, moving to Wrenshall is simply not my dream.”
His response was physical. I could see a happy, hopeful something in his body drop low, pulling the confidence in his chest with it. I had to hold myself back from chasing after this man I loved as he stomped downstairs into his office. But at that moment, I held another someone dear to me in the forefront of my mind: Abbie.
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br /> Although she was up for the move, I didn’t want her to watch her mother, her closest female role model for how a couple negotiates a marriage, take her life in a direction she didn’t want—again. I’d already walked right up to the edge of where compromise meets pushover and Abbie, unknowingly, was the ballast keeping it all from tumbling over.
The next days, I endured a household anxious under a communication blackout. Conversation was limited to the necessary subjects of kid pickup and chicken chores. It remained that way until Jason came to me as I made dinner.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, slouched into the corner of the breakfast nook, “and you’ve done enough, probably too much.”
That turned my head.
“So, Bird, if you want us to keep living in Duluth, then we should.”
There is nothing more handsome than a man who thinks I’m right. But what put the lump in my throat was his acknowledgment that I had given, had indeed sacrificed. I rushed him, pushing him against the counter with a hard kiss.
But that still left the question of the farmhouse. Not every tenant wants to share a yard with a couple thousand chickens.
Then just as Jason had once saved Brian in Cambodia and Brian, in turn, saved Jason on the pasture that first winter, Brian quietly saved me.
He approached us about moving his young family, now with a second baby daughter, Daisy, out to the farmhouse. A few months later, they did.
Chapter 24
On the cusp of winter in November 2014, Jason came home dirty from farm chores and wearing a sour face.
“I just got a complaint call about the eggs,” he said. “The chef told me they’re just not what they used to be.”
This stung, mostly because I knew it to be true. While I wasn’t washing eggs every week, the last time I subbed in I’d noticed a weakness in the shell—and recognized it for what it was: a symptom of advanced poultry age.
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