a bird thing. or- what I learned about chickens.
The first thing I noticed was how much they talk. It must be a bird thing. They start talking even before they hatch, waking into consciousness and peeping while still crammed inside the egg. The baby chicks peep all day long. The sound doesn’t seem to come from their beaks, but from their bellies, like the center of a squeaky toy: happy little balls of fluff running around and under the fence and into the woods and out again, with their mother hen ruffling her feathers and running to catch up, clucking at them the whole time. She’s too large to fit under the fence, so she flies over it to stay near them, making me wonder if the rest of the chickens are just too lazy to fly.
Such a gossipy, clucky, crowy bunch. Always with an opinion about something. One of the roosters got laryngitis and lost his voice, but it didn’t keep him from talking; hanging out where I worked, cocking his head sideways at me and rasping his judgements in a barely audible croak. Then he turned his head to the sky and crowed with all his might, making no sound other than a sad crackle that had my shoulders shaking with laughter. I know now why Walt Disney chose to animate barnyard animals. Their stories are best told in pictures, with lives so chock full of comedy and violence that it makes me wish I could draw.
Every afternoon the chickens line up at the gate to the coop, and when I open the door they race to the compost box, hopping over each other, running around and over the wood pile, vying for the tastiest scraps. They are funny-looking when they run: their heads are too narrow, their bodies too round, all balanced on stick legs, so that they can’t help but waddle in motion. The best scraps are in the white compost bucket, and when they see me with it, I can hear them think “THE WHITE BUCKET!!!!”, clucking and clacking to each other while they run for it. But chickens have almost no short term memory. They also have no concept of empty or full. So after I dump out the contents, they chase me and the empty bucket back to the house, racing each other for “THE WHITE BUCKET!!!”
Every day at dusk, they gather in the safety of the henhouse, and when night comes, they sleep. Only then does the chicken yard fall silent. I wonder if there are a few of them that don’t sleep, that stay up into the night, whispering to each other in the dark.
Such a gossipy, clucky, crowy bunch. Always with an opinion about something. One of the roosters got laryngitis and lost his voice, but it didn’t keep him from talking; hanging out where I worked, cocking his head sideways at me and rasping his judgements in a barely audible croak. Then he turned his head to the sky and crowed with all his might, making no sound other than a sad crackle that had my shoulders shaking with laughter. I know now why Walt Disney chose to animate barnyard animals. Their stories are best told in pictures, with lives so chock full of comedy and violence that it makes me wish I could draw.
Every afternoon the chickens line up at the gate to the coop, and when I open the door they race to the compost box, hopping over each other, running around and over the wood pile, vying for the tastiest scraps. They are funny-looking when they run: their heads are too narrow, their bodies too round, all balanced on stick legs, so that they can’t help but waddle in motion. The best scraps are in the white compost bucket, and when they see me with it, I can hear them think “THE WHITE BUCKET!!!!”, clucking and clacking to each other while they run for it. But chickens have almost no short term memory. They also have no concept of empty or full. So after I dump out the contents, they chase me and the empty bucket back to the house, racing each other for “THE WHITE BUCKET!!!”
Every day at dusk, they gather in the safety of the henhouse, and when night comes, they sleep. Only then does the chicken yard fall silent. I wonder if there are a few of them that don’t sleep, that stay up into the night, whispering to each other in the dark.
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