Love Stories: Life of a Chicken

It’s Valentine’s Week; I thought I’d share Love Stories as my own tribute to the general love fest. If there is anything I believe in (and there is) it is Love. Which Love (as some of us know), is A Many Splendored Thing. Manifesting itself in endlessly, beautifully different ways.

For Instance, there is a Love Story in The Life of a Chicken.

 This is a sweet and tragic tale about a chicken named Moose, and Mozzie her sister, and the family who kept them as pets. And it really is a love story.

It comes from my Aunt Cynthia and her daughter Elle (and was felt keenly by the rest of the family), who brought Moose and Mozzie home as chicks and kept them as pets. I was visiting Cynthia when she bought the little chicken coop kit as a surprise for Elle’s birthday. Elle had been hoping for a chicken, and the coop meant that yes, she would soon be the proud owner of a chicken. I will share this story mostly in Cynthia’s words, in excerpts I’ve taken from emails she sent me as the story progressed.  Cynthia is one of my dearest friends, and since I’m in Utah and she’s in Hawaii and “doing lunch” or dropping by each other’s couches isn’t practical, we email a lot.

(photos contributed by Elle and her dad, Chad)

A Chicken’s Life

…We just picked up Elle’s chickens Saturday.  I find myself stressed over them, fearful that we are going to kill them.  Elle has no fear.  She seems to sense their needs and just gets online when she needs to figure something out.  I love the fearlessness in her that accompanies her love.  And what I have discovered: those chickens are mean poop machines.  I am thinking my garden is going to be quite happy with their output.  I am also hoping that my suspicion that [homegrown] eggs taste considerably better than industrialized eggs is true.

…And the chickens.  They are a lot of work.  I am wondering if we are doing things wrong or if they would be a lot of work for anyone.  A friend of mine asked me to get two for her and then decided (after we got them home) that she didn’t want them.  We found another family who wanted them. They said that they would get them in a day after they readied a place.  Four days later…..My conclusion is that chickens mostly are poop machines. I cannot believe how much waste comes out of their posterior.  I try to put a positive spin on it and think that down the road it will be fertilizer.  But right now, as Chad says, it is bio hazard.  First we had them in Elle’s room.  Now they are in the garage.  The box we had for them was good for about 1 week and then they could fly out. I think I am building their pen tomorrow and getting them in there as fast as possible.

[Elle and Cynthia named the two remaining chicks Moose and Mozzie.  A month or so later:]

…What great pleasure it was to go out and tend to the garden.  And the little chick-a-dees followed me around.  They come a running when we call out to them.  But they don’t want us to catch them and hold them. They want food. I am trying to be a chicken whisperer and get them to come to ask to be held.

[Cynthia also related…but I can’t find the email…that Moose and Mozzie were escape artists, and that the family was hard pressed to secure the whole yard against chicken escape. Mozzie wandered far when she escaped; Moose was a bit more of a homebody.]

[a few months later]…We lost one of our chickadees.  It escaped and hasn’t come back.  It was the curious one [Mozzie].  I think someone caught it and adopted it.  Hope they are good to it.  The chickadee that stays close to home even when it gets out has laid two eggs.  Such cute, tiny, brown eggs.  We are pretty excited.

…There is something so fulfilling, so calling out an earth mother name to me, when I carry my scissors to the garden to cut greens. Same with collecting brown eggs from our chicken.

[time passes]…our little chick-a-dee has the chicken pox. She is a funny thing. She likes to be around us but definitely does not want to be picked up. I think she has control issues. My dad told me that when he was on his mission, he knew a lady who kept a chicken in the house and the chicken loved to sit in her lap. That story amazes me on several levels–can chickens be house broken?

[Moose’s illness continues]…Little chickadee has had a hard time of things. Avian pox. Her beak fell off. That has been weird. Just came off like a toenail and there was one underneath. But the end is not in the right place, so she can’t pick things up. We have been hand feeding her and giving her expensive food like yogurt and canned peaches. She is doing better. I am hoping she will file her beak points to the right place. And we are feeding her foods in case the beak was a sign that she wasn’t getting all the vitamins she needed. I thought she might be more inclined to let us catch her with all the holding, petting, loving, and hand feeding she has been getting. But, no, she is still hard to catch. Tame as can be once we get her though. Had no idea I would feel so attached to a chicken.

[and continues]…Our little chickie is surviving although not thriving.  Her beak is normal again, so she can eat on her own.  But she is an amazingly picky eater and we can’t quite figure out how to get her enough food without keeping her in her pen where the feral chickens can’t get at her food.  So she is still twiggy thin.

[Finally Moose is getting better]…Chickadee is doing much better now that her second beak has grown to its proper overbite proportions.  She can eat with the best of them, at least in technique. Unfortunately, she has become a picky eater.  Next chicken, I will know better to mix things up earlier. [Moose] still delights all of us, even Chad who loves to roll his eyes at our infatuation with her.

[And then, Enter the Man…background info: feral chickens play an active role in Oahu’s wildlife. They have no boundaries, roaming everywhere from hiking trails to parking lots.]…Little chickadee has a beau.  He is an almost-adult rooster.  We caught and took his feral siblings to a chicken haven [much of the local wildlife consists of feral chickens].  He, however, refused to be trapped and go.  So he has been a lone rooster.  These days he is very interested in chickadee.  But she can still hold her own.  So right now he follows her around without trying anything.  It may be that we will have to be more clever than he and get him to where his sisters are.  But for now I am letting things play out.  Moose is looking healthier all the time.  I think she is going to live a fairly decent chicken life.  Right now we let her out in the morning.  When she is ready to lay an egg, she comes in the kitty opening in the lanai to let us know she is ready.  We take her to her coop and, wahlah, an egg.  Then out she comes again to graze.

[My daughter Maurya, while she was in Hawaii for school, was an occasional witness to the chicken story. I think I learned from her that Moose, the remaining sister chicken, disappeared. Moose the homebody. Maurya told me that Cynthia and Elle, to comfort themselves, theorized that she had been “accidentally” chicken-napped by a random sweet old lady suffering from mild dementia, and that both Moose and the old lady were content. And that, for a long time, seemed to be the end of Elle and Cynthia’s acquaintance with Moose and Mozzie. But no].

…I think I told you that our little chickadee, Moose came back (Maurya told me, actually, and we laughed for a good long time together about it).  All skinny. Very hungry. Missing important feathers. And growing a toenail two inches long.  We fixed her up and fed her lovely things like yogurt and peaches to fatten her up.  (Plus she adores peach and yogurt). Well, a week later, along comes her sister that had gone AWOL about nine months earlier.  She was still fat and sassy.  She was always the fiesty one and I was pretty sure she had learned through her wiliness to get along in the wild….and probably used her beauty too to get people to feed her. I am thinking that the sisters had found each other and decided to stay together.  That’s why Moose didn’t come home for so long, and probably why she only came home when she was so hungry that she remembered she had another family too.

So when Mozzie started hanging out, we tried catching her, but she was still wiley and it was rough getting her.  So I spent quite a while closing up any and every hole that a chicken could get through.  And sure enough we were able to catch Mozzie.  We put her in the coop with Moose.  Moose, who definitely was not the alpha, was somewhat uncomfortable sharing such a confined space with Mozzie (who instantly took the best perch and best food).  But by the next day, they had both figured out how to live in the coop together and that they liked it. So every afternoon we would let them out and they would graze on new grass blades, bugs, and oats (thrown out by yours truly).  They were adorable.  They started getting plump and became shadows for each other.

Saturday, when Chad and I got home from the temple, I saw the chicken coop was open.  That was not normal.  And we couldn’t find the chickens.   And no chicken noises.  It was looking bad.  Elle saw the two chickadees down the alley, and it was clear that they were dead.  I guess a pack of dogs got them.  We can’t tell how the chickens got out of the coop, but it looks like the dogs pounded on the chicken wire.

I had no idea how bad I would feel about those two chicken friends dying.  So, so sad.  It just didn’t seem right.  I know it is nature’s way, but Moose had survived so much–her beak falling off, leaving the yard for so long, her toenail, chicken pox.  And to die. I don’t think that I anthropromorized (sp) the chickadees.  I think I liked them on their own terms.  But as I get older and spend more time with plants and animals, I believe their lives are more sacred than I had understood before.

I had planned on writing you a blog entry telling the sweet story of the girls getting back together and coming home.  But [the story] has such a sad ending now. I was surprised at the depth of my sadness.  Still am sad.

Elle and I decided that we will get more chickens.  We keep learning more and more what to do for them.  Chad and I are planning our backyard so that it is animal friendly. [Cynthia’s family is in the planning stages for building a new house in Hawaii.]

[During the more tranquil moments of Cynthia’s family’s adventure with chickens, Cynthia and I wrote whimsical essays about our chickens.  The essays played off each other a little bit, and in the end, we both feel they are a tribute to Cynthia’s family’s experience, and to her pets.  I will publish those essays later this week.]