Category Archives: death

Ah, spring.  The temperatures have finally climbed above the finger-numbing range so I took it upon myself to off a few supernumerary roosters on Sunday.

It seems that March through June is such a fraught time around the place, so much so that I awake at night with worries of “did I do that already?  ohgah when am I going to find the time to do X time-intensive, necessary farm task?” and it’s tasks like killing roosters that I put off and put off again and again.  Usually, things need to rise to near crisis level (read:  they’ve begun fighting) for me to really jump into action.  Let’s face it:  Chores like cleaning out the chicken coop or putting up a new fence, however distasteful, beat chicken killing any day.  But it’s come to that with these birds.  Spring means rooster testosterone flows just as readily as chlorophyll in the grass or lutenizing hormone in the egg chickens.

Life became a lot more cushy for this farmgirl when I found a local butcher to do in my critters for me.  Fifteen chickens takes him two hours, whereas five chickens nearly kills me and shoots my whole day (it takes me four hours, plus recovery for my feather-plucking fingers).  At $2.50 a bird, it beats the heck out of what I bill an hour, and even math-averse me can see that Mike’s skills, though cheap, are priceless.  But I won’t bring him these eight-month-old little bantam roosters.  It’s not worth his time!

Me, on Sunday

Two of the birds went to the freezer, but the last went into a wonderful mild soup called Cock-a-leekie…it’s a Scottish dish.  It’s traditionally prepared with the losing roo in a cockfight, actually!  Perhaps this boy didn’t lose a cockfight, but he lost the game of numbers…a farm only needs a tiny number of roosters.  Caput kaput, which makes me snort.

Cock-a-Leekie:  I harvest a good pound or more each of leeks and carrots out of the outdoor garden, grab a huge hank of thyme from the herb garden and scrounge up celery leaves, parsley, scallions and chervil from the greenhouse.  The rooster, gutted, headless and footless, is in a heavy pot with hot salted water to cover; I start braising him at the barest boil while I prepare the veggies and herbs.  After about an hour, I take the meat off the carcass, pan-sear the leeks and a handful of pearled barley in some butter and then put the leek/barley mixture, meat, bouquet garni (thyme, chervil, parsley tied w/ string), chopped carrots and celery back in the broth pot to cook another hour or so until the carrots are softened…adding spices to taste.  Traditionally served with prunes, this soup is sweet enough without them thanks to the winter-grown leeks and carrots, methinks.  Thanks, little annoying rooster!

From the Class of 2010:  Peaches (left, a roo) and Eagle (right, a pullet)

The wind is coming in strong puffs, and it’s bringing with it the smell of the lake.  I’m not too happy about the task at hand.   I am dry-plucking a chicken.  A half-grown chicken, actually, a half-grown bantam…that’s practically no chicken at all as he probably only weighs a pound, a pound and a half.  Four and twenty of them, yes, might just fit in a pie:  I am holding him by his legs and I believe I have eaten bigger frog’s legs in my lifetime.

I had to put the guy out of his misery, you see.  His foot had gotten stuck in the little fence surrounding our back yard garden, and his compatriots had pecked him into a stupor.  I seriously doubted he’d recover from his head wound.

Poor guy.  I know I am either grimacing or am biting my lip; I try to just relax and do what is needed before my husband and daughter get home.  Poultry deaths aren’t easy, unless they’re expected.

It’s been a year of lots of birth and little death around here this year.  Six turkey poults followed the original seventeen of this spring.  (We kept three.)  Twenty-eight chicks have hatched under various chicken mothers; of them, eight of those cute bantam babies died when their idiot bantam mother decided she needed her nest up on top of a box, and the chicks couldn’t reach it, dying of exposure in a 60-degree night.  I walked in to the goat shed in the morning gloom and thought, who left these kleenex lying around, when it was little bantam bodies I was seeing on the straw.  And then this little death in my hand:  we’re left with twenty.  Plus the twenty-five meat birds (Freedom Rangers, much overrated) and the five girls whose egg-eating habits have sealed their freezer fate…as you can see, exponentially, the poultry population explodes every summer here.  And it recedes in the fall.

We’re keeping two laying hens out of the twenty home-hatched babies that remain.  There are three female bantam chicks who might live another year too, depending on how generous I am feeling.  All the home-grown chicks are amazingly colorful, but all the bantams have their father’s boring white plumage.  With all of them, I stare and think “Who’s yer ma,” hearkening back to one of the putative definitions of Hoosier (i.e., one of the thing Indiana residents said in days of yore was this direct question of your parentage:  who’s your ma, who’s your pa, who’s your folks?, who’syer, hoosier).  Daddy is definitely known:  he’s our handsome Black Sex Link boy Mary Ellen, and he’s lent speckles to every baby.  All the chicks are named and cared for by our daughter, which is why I was hurrying in my grisly task.

Plucked, gutted, de-headed, de-footed; this little creature is reduced to nearly nothing.  He’s crowed his last croaking adolescent crow.  I pluck the last of his down off his waxy skin, hose him off and bag him up for the fridge.

Don’t mess with her

It’s a good thing that Ruby is in with the chickens!

The dog was whining terribly, and as I couldn’t really hear anything over the music I was playing, I let her out…to see a hawk in the chicken run, fighting with our hen turkey.

Ruby got the upper hand, I have not a clue how.  The hawk was terribly injured, so I put it out of its misery.

Ruby is fine, though flustered.

Don’t blame me for this one, says Little Edie

On Monday morning, my calendar flashed my appointments for the week.  “What in the WORLD could I possibly have scheduled for 7:00am on Wednesday morning?” was my bleary-eyed question to myself.

Here’s what the calendar said:  “7:00 a.m. Chicks 12 weeks”

Ah.  It’s much more clear now.  The meat birds are ready to be butchered.

And boy howdy are they!  Unlike the last two batches of meat birds that I have raised, these feathered friends are actually CROWING in the morning.  It’s past time, it would seem like, for them to be freezer fare.  What a big task ahead for me:  I received 52 chicks in the mail the first week of June.  Eleven of these creatures were exempt from butchering, as they’re the new crop of laying hens (plus rooster).  Chicken Patty gets a husband and at least two sister-wives, so there go another 3 chickens.  And then there’s the turkey baby, and then there’s the 5 goslings, who are now full-sized geese.  Thirty-eight chickens, one turkey, and five geese.

help!

I happened to be on a post-movie panel discussion last month with the woman who runs our Eat Local listserve.  She came out to the farm and graciously took three of my new laying hen chicks, plus extra rooster, off my hands, as she had decided Speckled Sussex was what she wanted to concentrate on for her own dual-purpose birds, but (sadly) a raccoon ate all but two of hers.  So we were doing the Chicken Talk thing, and I asked her how often she made it out to my neck of the woods (she lives closer to Kalamazoo, about 45 minutes east of me) and she said “every time I need to butcher the chickens.”

Apparently, the guy in town with the sign on his lawn that advertises deer processing is an all-around butcher, and he charges $2.50 a chicken, and $7.00 for geese.

Part of the reason I am doing this whole poultry-ranching thing is to have a complete connection with the entirety of what goes into our meals.  Butchering the birds is a part of that, albeit a not terribly pleasant part; I do it alone, as my husband wants no part of it but the eating, and all my friends are not exactly…the types of folks who get into this kind of thing.  To do all those birds would take every weekend day from now until October.  But:  $2.50 a bird!

I checked out the guy’s facilities, chatted with him for a while, and have made another calendar date regarding the chickens.  But this time the date won’t surprise me.

Turkey girls love playing King of the Hill.  Earl of course just likes to show off his stuff “to the ladies.”

To keep up accreditation in our field, we architects must attend seminars that address certain areas of our profession.  The majority of the credits we need are in the area of “Health, Safety, and Welfare,” a general category meant to keep our knowledge current so our buildings don’t collapse and kill people.  (Granted, these seminars are usually bone-dry boring affairs run by building products manufacturers to sell their products, so attending these seminars is not, for me, an irony-free affair.)  Anyway!  I think of this phrase often now that I sideline in animal husbandry.  If you’re going to take on the responsibility of having animals, anything you do must benefit their health, their safety, and their welfare.

Coop construction, July 2006

I am so glad we built the Taj Mahal of chicken coops, really I am.  Never intended to house more than a dozen or so birds, our coop could easily accommodate another dozen, but I am glad it does not.  Why?  This cold weather is why.  Those girls are going nowhere.  Even if I do leave the door open and shovel them paths to tread in their yard, it’s just too cold for them outside.  They are (and will remain for the foreseeable future) cooped up.

Cooped up, and bored.  Sorry, girls.  I do try to bring them treats a couple of times a day, and I do need to freshen their water, which freezes.  (In their boredom they flipped and pecked the heated dogbowl I set in there; fearing barbecued chicken, I removed the bowl, and now schlep water often.)  During the day I turn a 40 watt light on for them too; it’s on for about 10 hours.  They’d started laying again (whew!) around Christmas before the light went on so I don’t think I am overstimulating them to produce, and the light is too faint to really warm the place up.

Secretary of the Department of Chicken Homeland Security: yours truly, July 2006

Our pellet gun has gone a long way to defend the Chicken Homeland.  A good strong fence over and above the chicken run would help too with aerial threats but it’s not in the cards if I have my Daisy handy.  Last year I strung deer netting over the run and awoke one morning to find a hawk INSIDE the run.  What the…?  The girls were in the coop as is the usual overnight situation but I had the hawk to deal with.  Tom and daughter were out of town.  What to do?  As usual when defending the Chicken Homeland my adrenaline kicks into high gear and I ran outside in fuzzy slippers and bathrobe with the nearest weapon I could find:  a cast-iron skillet.  It was not the hawk’s best day.

The geese and turkeys have their own pen and shed, and I have to chase them all into the shed every night.  Sometimes the geese adamantly refuse to go into it and I let them stay out.  Considering they don’t really sleep at night (they doze most of the day, in turns) being in the shed is no fun for them.  We’ve had no threats to the Greater Poultry Homeland, though.

Now that we’re getting a goat or two, plans are changing.  Dogs are the greatest threat to goats, dogs and their wild coyote cousins.  Again, the goat(s) will be cooped up at night in their own shed inside a sturdily-built fence.  Considering that goats are great as poison ivy and brush eradicators, we’ll use electrified fencing to give them access to day browse.

So, yeah, you’ve got to do a bit to keep your critters safe, secure, happy and healthy.  Owning them, though, is so rewarding that the daily details of addressing their needs are really much more of a pleasure than a burden.  Skillet days excepted, of course!

Lucky girls:  six of our last round of meat chickens have had an extended life on Death Row.  How could this be, you ask.  Have they not run out of appeals?  Did the governor issue a stay of execution?  What could be the reason, as these girls are now 16 weeks old or so and are quite large enough to be considered freezer fare.  Well, I confess I have simply been busy.

I have been quite pleased with this last batch of meat birds.  As per fellow bloggers’ suggestions, I tried Privett Hatchery in New Mexico and got the turkeys, geese and slow-growing Cornish X chickens at the end of June.  Here I admit that despite my best-laid plans (and $100) I am not much of a fan of The Chicken Tractor.  Confinement is confinement.  Therefore, Round 2 of the Meat Chickens (a smaller batch of 16 birds) got to live in relative freedom* within the chicken yard with the egg birds.  They ate a mix of grower and regular feed, got access to dirt baths, grass, bugs, their own mini-vineyard of grapes, got to fly up on the coop’s perches at night, had fun dodging raindrops by running into the Chicken Condo, and in general got along as members of low standing in the egg birds’ pecking order.  For me, it was a much more amenable situation:  I did not worry about them at night, I didn’t need to move the tractor daily, and the birds were happy doing chicken-y things.

It helped that the genetics of this particular batch of birds worked better in a chicken yard than in true confinement.  I had three sad birds from the first batch who never grew as rapidly or as well as the first 20-ish, and I had them live with the egg birds, too, but these big-breasted babies were so misshapen and had such leg problems that I needed to lift them over the threshold of the coop morning and evening.  The threshold is a whopping 7″ off the ground so it shows how truly effed-up Cornish X broilers have been bred.  Listen:  I am still a bleeding heart at heart, and each chicken’s life is precious to me.  I cannot in good conscience let any animal in my care suffer a life of horror or hurt, and these poor birds’ inability to even jump off the ground bothered me profoundly.  How could they ever have escaped a predator, I wondered.

Anyway, it is time for the last six to go.  We’ll see how many chickens we still have in the freezer at the beginning of next year’s chick ordering season.  Having never done this before (hell, I didn’t even eat meat until a year ago) I have no clue if I have over- or underestimated the needs of my family and friends.  Next year’s Meat Birds might not be so numerous, or even, necessarily, birds bred to just be meat birds.  We might just try breeding our own, and intend to start with a batch of relatively rare meat/egg birds: the Chantecler.

* Re: confinement.  The chicken yard (50’x80′) is a rather porous affair.  There are two holes in the fence and the chickens can get out but mostly choose not to:  the egg birds and guineas walk out in the early evening for a bug/grass dinner, and the meat birds, being timid, stick by the pond, or at the chicken yard’s perimeter.  Everyone knows there are hawks about and that it’s safer in the yard than not.  As long as they get their needs met (shade, shelter, dirtbaths, water, plentiful food, a dark nest) they are all quite happy staying within the yard.

I never claimed to be handsome

We got our four guineas last spring. As usual, though I wanted three birds, Tom brought home four. They are really hard to tell apart. I should say they WERE really hard to tell apart, as the largest bird has definitely embraced his inner testosterone. I have named him Himself.

He is a terror.

What was a very peaceful chicken yard has now become a very unhappy place. The other three guineas mostly ignore Himself, but all six chickens are now continuously on alert. There is so much stress in there! I feel awful, because when they could free-range, at least they could run away from that horny dude. I think of those poor female members of that nutjob Mormon sect in Texas, they of the 400 children who need new homes right now before they too become “spiritually married” to the male members of the sect…the only true parallel I can draw is neither my chickens nor those children had a choice. But someone must intervene.

Himself, I bid you adieu. I just hope you taste better than you act.