Everything I Need To Know I Learned in the Coop

[robert_allen]

I live with three chickens; layer hens to use the barnyard parlance. I also live with a daughter teetering on the cliff edge of womanhood. The hens and the daughter, Emily, are a team. She understands and uses "hen speech" and is periodically found perched on the arm of the couch. The hens willingly stay in her arms for hours or are content to go on field trips to the woods with Emily as their guide. Frank Perdue is their common enemy.

Emily has researched chickens with the diligence of a scientist. She inspects their vents (the egg laying orifice), analyzes their excrement, records behavior, and has consumed what little material has been written about chickens. I like having Emily spend time with the "ladies." They are industrious, social, and take good care of themselves and each other. They will screech out a call that we have come to understand means "I've lost the other hens!" Emily then carries the lost hen to the others and all is quiet again. They seem to need the presence of one another even though most of their time is spent beak to ground looking for tasty grubs. They particularly enjoy physical contact with one another at night. When we close the coop door at dusk the hens are clumped together so that they resemble one very large hen. When one of the hens finds an especially nice patch of bare ground, just right for a dust a bath, we hear her call the others as if inviting them for a dip in her hot tub.

Our yard is a poultry paradise. The "ladies" have a variety of fresh food from yard and woods, freedom from predators, warmth in winter, shade in summer, and companionship. They eat organic feed and are given nothing to produce unnaturally plump breasts. We are happy with what they give us: fresh eggs, fertilizer for the garden, and insect control.

Our hens are getting older, entering their menopause years. Their combs have lost their red color, their vents are dry, and their egg production has just about stopped. Our coop became a metaphor for our present culture as we faced the question of what to do with older, nonproductive members of our little chicken society. Killing Emily's beloved hens was out of the question, so euthanizing or the dinner table were not options. Instead, we have chosen to let the hens live out their natural lives.

"So, have any of your hens become a rooster yet?" a friend and former hen keeper asked Emily. For months Emily had reported that one of her hens, Layla, was growing spurs, crowing, and getting her hackles up. My husband and I assumed this information was the product of a fertile imagination but we underestimated Emily's observation skills and what she calls chickenology. "Indeed," our friend assured us, "older hens can actually take on some physical and behavioral characteristics of an absent rooster." We shouldn't have been so surprised. As hormonal differences decline, androgyny, both physical and psychological, of our own species is evident in the later years. In our culture, which does not honor this stage of life, we seem to try to ignore an older woman's facial hair or an older man's pendulous pectorals or more nurturing attitude.

There is nothing like the taste of a fresh egg. Because we were used to those neon orange bulls-eyes of protein, we needed younger hens. Also, we thought it would be great fun to raise baby chicks. So on Emily's birthday, we found ourselves at the post office being handed an absurdly small, violently peeping cardboard box. The post office employees seemed all too happy to be rid of the noise. It was difficult to control ourselves but we waited until we were home to open the box. Inside were mere handfuls of indignant fluff, rather put off at having been in such close quarters for the flight from the hatchery in Iowa.

We now have eleven adolescent hens that were baby chicks for a nanosecond. In four weeks they were almost fully feathered, the fluff replaced by silky feathers. Nature has endowed our chickens, as all other birds, with a highly evolved flight apparatus, which is not only beautiful but provides warmth, camouflage, and waterproofing. The feathers as well as the chicks themselves grew at an astonishing, logarithmic rate.

The same can be said for our daughter. Her legs sprout out of her pant legs like the roots of a plant searching for water. Gestures, expressions, and temperament change on an hourly basis. I certainly don't want to medicalize a natural process, but being a mother I allow myself to worry about her physical and psychological development. In our breast-conscious culture, I wonder what her self-image will be. I take myself on a guilt trip when I think of the estrogen mimicking compounds that I'm told are everywhere from the breast milk she drank to the dental sealants that are on her teeth. Could these substances be speeding up her developmental process or worse? Could I have done more to protect her from these dangers? I see her striving for independence, seeking some distance from home, but I secretly hope that, like the hens, she won't fly too far away. I want to slow things down but I can't capture even a second. There is no adolescence pause button or, better still, instant replay. I can only be awake today and look forward to the person I will meet tomorrow.

I can't slow down my own timetable either. As I near the end of my egg producing years, I get my hackles up more often, I have spurs on my heels, and the less said about my wattles the better. Like the hens, I find that I need the company of other females of my own species as I reevaluate what it means to be female. Yes, I'm a supporter of a little-known movement to install hens in every woman's backyard. Our crone chickens, bonded in nature's cycles, as I aspire to be, are mid-life docents.

Today, as the young hens are getting ready to start laying eggs, one of our older hens is molting. Old, tattered feathers fall out and are replaced by silky, iridescent plumage. It is an elegant process of renewal and symbolic generativity.

[goodpeoplegives]

Thanks nice story.