Here a Chick, There a Chick

I’ve said it once before, but it’s worth saying again: Chicken math is real! When Snow-vid ’21 hit, we had 52 feathered friends, but after the two weeks of Elsa’s temper-tantrum, predators were hungry. Our number dropped to 25. Last spring, we had one successful hatch – a handsome cockerel we’ve named Prince Ali. He is now happily strutting his stuff around the chicken yard, especially since he’s figured out what girls are.

But three roosters and 22 hens is bad math. Each roo needs at least 10 hens, so when my local farm goods store received their first batch of chicks… Well, let’s just say there was no need to ask where I went right after work on the day they arrived.

Just like eight was the magic number when we started, eight was the goal of the day.

But those baby faces are just so darn cute! As their peeps echoed throughout the store, I could hear myself saying, “Eight. Only get eight! Eight makes 30 hens. 30 hens and three roosters is plenty.” Man! I should really listen to my own advice.

That first day, I came home with ten. Two more than I had allowed. Five Rhode Island Reds – great layers with even temperament. Heat and cold hardy. And five Speckled Sussex. A breed I’ve never raised before, but beautiful. You would think that would be plenty for any normal person.

Ya’ll… I am anything but normal!

A colleague at work mentioned another farm store that I don’t frequent… They have other breeds, he said. Now why did he have to go and say that? Darn it! And just like that, chicken math hit.

This time, I came home with twelve. Six Olive Eggers and six White Leghorn (the daffiest of breeds – great layers, but without a pea-sized brain in their noodle!).

Our number is now at 22 little baby chicks peeping away in the brooder in our garage. TWENTY-TWO. A directly proportional number to the amount of hens fluffing their feathers in the coop.

It deserves to be said again: Chicken math is real. And babies are so stinkin’ cute!

All the Better to See You With

Christmas Eve looked different that year. Things were a bit blurred and out of focus. I had started grad school for a Masters in English AND I was teaching full time. The frenzied pace of the fall semester carried over into the holidays. 

But that year, things were blurry for a different reason. 

Did you know that chickens have pin-point accuracy? That they can spot a moving figure out of a field of multiple moving things and peck that one and only spot? I found that out the hard way. 

Our girls were just old enough to start laying eggs, and my husband and I waited anxiously for those little butt nugget breakfasts! Every day we listened to the clucks and would occasionally hear a girl practicing her egg song. And every day we would check the nesting boxes, bushes, tubs, and crates hoping to find a gem waiting. 

This particular egg search, Christmas Eve of 2018, gifted a different surprise. The surprise of first-hand knowledge of how accurately a chicken can peck. 

I was stooped over looking under shrub branches keeping one eye on Darling, the ever-defensive rooster, and one eye out for eggs. Lo and behold, Laverne hopped up on my shoulder and clucked happily in my ear. She had decided to pose as a red-neck parrot. Now, Laverne loved to munch treats from our hands, but she normally wasn’t too friendly and didn’t like to be held, so I was quite surprised at this sudden camaraderie. She was also one of Darling’s favorites, and he was not happy with our new friendship. 

As I monitored his threatening foot stomps and wing flaps, I tried to gingerly convince Laverne to leave my shoulder. She was having none of it and looked me dead in the eye while chatting away. 

The last thing I remember seeing was her tiny black eye staring straight into mine. Then it was all over. Her little orange beak streak toward my eye once and only once. 

I shrieked, she clucked, Darling stomped and then it was over. 

Flinging her forcefully off my shoulder, I clamped a hand over my left eye and ran toward the house screaming for help. I just knew my hand would be full of blood by the time I reached the porch. 

Hearing the commotion, my husband rushed to my aid. Warm compress in hand, he slowly lowered mine from my eye. Nothing. No blood. No bruise. Not even a scratch. But things were blurry. Quite a bit so. 

That little pecker had snagged my contact lens and only my contact lens. Amazing pin-point accuracy at its best. This was a first (and only) for me, and was for sure one for the record books for the optometrist!

Little Miss Muffet’s Worst Day

I remember it vividly. The forecast for the day was warm and sunny, high of 84. Living in the country, we get the best of the best: freshly mowed pastures and fields, birds chirping, bees buzzing. And we get to sit out under the trees and enjoy it all with a glass of lemonade.  Ah! Springtime in Texas is glorious!

Except for the spiders. Those eight-legged terrors that come out in droves to feast at night and then tuck away safely in their webs during the day. They string their snares up from the eaves of the house to the canopy of trees overarching our drive. Their webs stretch from the underhang of the chicken coop to whatever is near. Morning chicken chores in the spring become a running of the gauntlet: dodging all the spiders hanging in their webs. 

And I have long, curly hair. 

So just imagine my panic when spring time hits. Whether my hair is up or down, once one of those little creatures gets trapped in my web, there is no getting it out! 

On this particular morning, I strolled out the front door to let the chickens out of the coop before heading to work. I didn’t even make it past the front door when I ran face-first into one of the largest Spotted Orbweavers known to North Texas. She had boldly strung her web between our two porch lights and must have been as surprised as I when my face met her web. I almost met Jesus that day! I did the Holy Roller dance that told the neighbors the Spirit had fallen, and, if any lived nearby they would have heard the screams. 

Knowing that my girls needed to be let out for the day, I recovered my poise, walked off the porch and started making my way down the drive. Under the canopy. Under the villainous creatures that shall-not-be-named. And straight into two. More. webs. 

“Screams” does not begin to describe the sounds that must have come out of my mouth. “Dancing” is not even what was happening as two of my neighbors stopped to stare at the crazy chicken lady doing yet another Holy Ghost dance in her yard. I’m surprised neither was taking videos to post to YouTube or Tiktok. 

I counted twelve spiders that day on the short trek to the chicken coop. I did so much praying that God knows exactly where I live and the worst way to ever let my enemies torture me. 

And I spent the rest of the day shaking my head and and whipping my curly locks around – much to the amusement of my colleagues. That was little Miss Muffet’s worst day.

Almost a Year Ago…

It’s been nearly a year since my last post. We made it through Snowvid 2021 hauling 3 gallon buckets of water through 10-14 inch snow drifts to and from the coop several times a day only to have the flock nearly decimated by predators. Blogging about the creatures I love dearly just became too painful.

But now my flock is nearly back to par. I don’t have 52 chickens again (yet), but am up to 38. My last set of roosters gave their all defending the girls, so now I have a new set. Peckerhead’s, Buddy’s, and Baby Huey’s sons have taken their place and are trying to live up to their dads’ legacies.

Cogburn, PC (short for Prince Charming), and Dewey sweet talk the girls with juicy bug-treats, do their little romance-dance, and give the alarm call when a shadow swoops overhead. And man! These girls respond to their charms, especially Cogburn’s. It’s especially sweet to watch him escort a group of ladies up to the house for treats. He takes the lead, but once they get past the crepe myrtles, all bets are off as they race to the water bucket and the cat food on the shop porch. He does his duty and stands guard as they dirt bathe in the bushes or dig for bugs under the shrubbery.

I miss my other boys. And I miss the girls that we lost, too. But our flock is making a comeback, so stay tuned for hilarious tales of egg hunts when it’s not easter, spiders in my curly hair, and all things chicken.

When Every Day is Easter

When I think of Easter, I can’t help but reminisce of the wonderful Sundays I spent as a little girl. My mom would dress my sister and me in frilly Easter dresses that were purchased weeks in advance and had been hanging in her closet so that I, her very rambunctious ADHD child, wouldn’t have the opportunity to play dress-up. On Sunday morning, with freshley curled hair and (finally) wearing our frilly dresses, we proudly strutted our white lacy socks and shiny white patent leather Sunday Shoes.

But more than the frilly dresses and socks, moreso even than the shiny white shoes, was the basket loaded with goodies that sat waiting for us to find when we first awoke. Our baskets were the highlight of the day: plastic eggs loaded with candy, a chocolate bunny and a larger stuffed bunny. As delightful as everything was, there was one thing I loathed – the hard-boiled decorated eggs.

Don’t misunderstand me. I LOVED decorating them the day before. I loved the way the colors blended and the way no two eggs ever came out the same. I just couldn’t stand eating them, and that was mandatory! That old phrase “finders keepers” applies here. At some point between morning service and lunch, my older brothers and my dad would hide the eggs for my sister and me to find. But once you found the egg and put it in your basket, it was yours for later, non-negotiable. You don’t waste food!

Now, many years later, I relish the thought of beautifully decorated eggs. This Easter season is a fresh reminder of how hard my hens work to provide us with the fresh food for our table, and, with the warmer weather after our snow-polcalypse, my girls are back in business. They are laying eggs faster than we can consume or sell, but there’s just one glitch: They seldom lay in the same spot regularly, those little hussies!

Every evening, as my husband and I tuck them safely away in the coop, we dig through shavings, look behind boards, and under every bush (which is risky in snake country!). The places these girls lay eggs never cease to amaze us. We’ve found eggs in the rarely-used burn barrel, inside flower pots, inside the barn sink, and even in the wood pile.

Every day is our own personal Easter egg hunt! Now if only I had a frilly dress…

Which Came First?

One of the most long standing riddles about chickens is the proverbial, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” For me, it was most definitely the chick(en). I should actually say the chicks. Eight of them. Eight adorable, noisy little balls of downy fluff that took up residence in a feed trough in my daughter’s bedroom.

I had wanted chickens for years, but having a small backyard flock wasn’t permitted in our HOA community. So, once my husband and I relocated, chicken fever hit and hit hard! There were always the obvious reasons why raising chickens wasn’t a good idea: the cost of feed, the cost of the coop and the precious footprint a coop would consume in our small backyard, the noise, the smell… the list goes on. But once the chicken fever has hit, none of that matters. It’s almost like my brain wouldn’t listen to reason. All it could hear was the tiny little peeps.

It happened. My husband was at a job site several hours away (and wouldn’t be home for days!) when our local Tractor Supply started their yearly Chick Days! sale. Minimum purchase of four. City maximum allowance of eight. Eight – the magic number, the number my husband came home to. Eight, the number of chicks he found while following the suspicious chirping sounds and the glow of the red brooder lamp emanating eerily from our daughter’s room.

He still gives me grief for having chickens in the house, but I remind him they were babies. In a brooder. Contained. It’s not like I was letting them free-range through the living room. The wild journey to becoming the crazy chicken lady began four years ago. Chicken math is real, people! Four plus four does NOT equal eight. Four years later and the original number has been taken over like the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Eight turned into ten (shh! don’t tell the health and code enforcement officer!), and ten turned into … 52! Fifty-two fluffy feathered fannys flouncing up and down our pasture chasing us for treats.

Welcome to the hen party, Mother Cluckers!