Chicken Games, Cont'd.

As of 8PM yesterday evening:

Chickens outside the coop: 1*
Chickens inside the coop: 14**

14/15: 93%

Grade: A

* Roadrunner-like chicken that cannot be caught or contained.

** Exclusively due to chicken whisperer herding intervention by next door neighbor.

Chicken Games

Remember that we have chickens? I sometimes forget, given that they’re in the faraway of our yard, and I have little to do with them. They’re generally the 500Jerk Spouse’s domain. But I’m in charge of them this week. Nominally. So I’ve been feeding them and watering them and chasing them around. Mostly the last. Chickens are either smart enough to know they would rather be free of coop confines or too dumb to get back in, I’m not sure which. At any rate, I’ve recently spent a lot of time in my business clothes crawling through bamboo, encouraging wayward hens to return to the coop.

And do they return? No. And why are they out in the first place? Because our coop has so many holes in it that the chickens just squeeze through and leave. They rip that rear-view mirror off and hightail it for the road. My only lure is chicken scratch, which the increasingly impatient 500Jerk Spouse tells me is like crack cocaine for chickens. And it’s true--when the hens see me coming with a green plastic cup full of scratch, they come bounding back. Trouble is, they’re on the other side of the coop looking through the fence. And here’s the amazing thing: They do not know how to walk around the coop and get inside. They just jam their beady-eyed heads through the chain link fence and stare at me hungrily. BWAWK, BWAWK, BWAWK. When I drop to my belly and sniper crawl through the bamboo to get them, they bound away again. Oh, it's never-ending chicken fun, I tell you.

At any rate, as of 8AM this morning:
Chickens outside the coop: 4
Chickens inside the coop: 11

11/15: 73%

Grade: C

Chicks

Yesterday we got ten new day-old chicks. Believe it or not, they come in the mail. It seems inhumane, but the thing about chickens is, they're very resilient. Also, not too smart. I think they're basically OK with traveling parcel post.




This time around, Miss M and the 500Jerk Spouse selected a host of chicken types. We have two white Leghorns, Blanca and Fluffy Two (Fluffy One had an unfortunate encounter with a neighborhood dog last summer); a German Spitzhauben, Heidi; three Americunas, nameless; one black Sumatra, Beauty; a Golden Phoenix named Chip; and two Rhode Island Reds, also so far nameless.

That brings the 500Jerk chicken flock to sixteen. Our year-old hens lay an egg almost every day. We estimate our current household egg count to be 60. That's right. FIVE DOZEN. And we eat eggs nonstop. We have made meringues; scrambled eggs; quiches; breakfast casseroles; and omelets. We have given eggs to relatives, neighbors, and friends. We have so many eggs we don't know what to do with them, and every day, there are five or six more. We're starting to think about just leaving them in strangers' cars.

But the chicks. They sure are cute.

Sneaky Chickens

Our hens have started laying, and although we do find the occasional egg, we think they're holding back on us. These chickens free-range in our yard a good bit, so they're probably hiding eggs in the grass. The eggs we've had so far are smallish, but with bright yellow-orange yolks and hard shells. They're more robust--both structurally and in terms of taste--than supermarket eggs. I love the idea of having chickens that lay eggs we can eat.

But the good thing about supermarket eggs is, you always know where to find them.

Six Chickens

We are suburbanites with chickens. It's common in bigger towns, but not too many people in Knoxville have chickens in their back yards. Most natives think it's weird, like wanting a dirt floor or an outhouse.

The chickens started out as a science project for my first grader, and now they are more like pets, very messy pets that don't come inside and potentially carry a nasty disease. They are too young to lay eggs so not useful in any way, but they do amusing things like jump on each other and stretch and steal food. They also display some cautionary behaviors, like instead of eating a berry quietly, parading the prize around and taunting the others, which (if you don't know this already) generally makes your companions mad enough to maul.

Two weeks ago, though, we left our birds out to free range in the yard, and something nabbed our best chicken and killed another. The same day, my daughter witnessed a pervert being dragged out of the Tyson Park men's bathroom and arrested. A bad day for chickens and perverts.

Since then, some friends have given us two of their chickens. So now we have six again. And we've ordered a few more in the mail--they'll be here next week. Chickens are eminently replaceable.

Unfortunately, the perverts are probably back, too.