I Need The Eggs: Trials and Life With Backyard Chickens

We've had laying hens for years now.  It started as whimsy: A woman I worked with, Helen, started to raise chickens and goats and rabbits to make extra money for herself and her little girls.  She was a strong woman.  She was raising these girls on her own and did not make a lot of money.  Her life seemed chaotic but terrific too.  The selling of livestock -- sort of a small animal for hobbyist operation -- seemed illogical and a bit nutty, which I loved, and so I bought some hens.  I admired her simply for taking the plunge.  

I do not farm and had no reason to buy the birds but for friendship. I do have a big barn and a nice big yard and field, but that's no excuse for coming home with a box full of small chickens, two galvanized pails, heat lamps, feed, feeding troughs, watering troughs and hay.  My wife, Jackie, refrained from comment (she is English).  She simply walked away.  For eight or more years now she has ignored the flock.  

The life cycle of a chicken is simple: chick, peeper, pullet (or cockerel), hen (or rooster), supper (or soup). My friend sold me Bantam peepers.

Peepers are small, not many weeks old. They peep, obviously, and school like fish as they run around their quarters in the barn. Bantam's fly more than larger chicken breeds and Bantam peepers roost as high as they can, tucking as tightly as possible against the ceiling of a coop. Our coop at the time sat in a corner of a cavernous second story of our old barn.  Peepers crowd together and sit on each other.  They know they are alone in the world and find great comfort in piling on top of each other, huddling, hugging.

Our barn, I’m told, dates from the 1840s. Its clapboards are worn and gray, its windows long blown-out. It has three tall stories with a cavernous middle, and it is now mostly vacant. The posts sit in the ground and there is no floor, just dirt.  The elements flood in.  It will cave in one day if I don't work to stop it.  But that's a different story.

Anyway, the second floor, at least a corner of it, was a perfect place for a large, warm coop. The size of most living rooms, that second story coop held roosts and nooks and crannies and was full of light and air. 

I've since moved the coop to the first floor.  The barn is getting too old to have us walking around the second floor.  Falling through the barn floor while hauling fifty pound bags of feed is not my idea of a good way to go.

During the day we let the birds out.  They are free to roam, and scratch their way over our lawn and the wilderness and brambles around the house.  They all but graze, like a herd of feathered, winged sheep.  But each night they return to their roost, secure from the world. One could set a clock to their commitment to being home as day turns toward night. If they could think about it (which they don’t), I believe they’d like the barn and the coop.

Watching the birds grow is always fun. Our son Callum, then just small, would stand stark still for minutes – hours to a wee one – and watch the flock peep and eat and scratch the floor. To watch Callum watch the birds, to see him stand so still for so long, was a wonder in its own right.  

Some developments we didn’t expect. Roosters. Two of them. Spurs on their legs and wattles under their chins. They had tall feathers called sickles that rise from their main tails, creating a sense of height and strength that is all bluff. With strong lungs, they crowed at all hours of the night and morning – not just at dawn, shattering a poultry myth.


My learning about raising poultry began that first fall, when one of the birds hurt its leg and developed a limp, raising a fundamental farm question: To meat or to mend? Ambivalence can be bad for a bird.

I called a vet who I know. 


“I’ve got a bird with a bad leg. Should I bring it in or just kill it?”

Silence for a minute on the phone.

“Dave, it’s a chicken.”

Agonizing still, I bundled up the bird early one morning and gently put it in a cat carrier. I drove it to a farm close by. I grew up in a town that was mostly farms, and I knew that a vet’s opinion was one thing but a farmer’s opinion was different. A young farmhand stepped from the barn as I walked up, and I asked what he would do.

“Is it getting food and water where it is?” he asked. It was. “Don’t do a thing,” he said. 
“Wait and see.” He looked at me and paused. “It’s a chicken.”

The bird recovered and  towered over the others.  He was no bantam. A proud Colombian Wyandotte.  And she turned out to be a he, one of the boys, certainly high in the pecking order, by all appearances happy to be alive. Of course, no one needs two roosters and we should have killed one but we didn't, even though we eat chicken at least once a week. So he stayed, taking up space and feed and crowing through the night.


That first flock of five hens and two roosters lasted a few years. They waited each morning for us to open the coop door, and then flew down from the second floor of the barn to scratch at the dirt and bits of left over snow below. Sometimes they would be in the driveway when I drove home from work, scattering like mice when I pulled in. 


We have covered many generations since that first flock.  We do not raise bantams any more -- the kids wanted to be able to collect and sell big brown eggs -- and usually have five to ten ladies and one boy to keep the flock going.  We've lost birds to fox, raccoon, fisher and dog.  


And until writing this, I never really thought about why I am raising chickens. The simple goal of keeping the group watered during a cold winter adds an hour to each day. The feed is expensive. Cleaning the coop is not, to say the least, fun. Given the time and effort, the way I figure it, we’re paying about three dollars an egg to keep these birds. There’s plenty to think about without them, balancing family and work and friends.


There is something simple and direct about raising chickens that makes it worthwhile. We give them a clean, well-lit space, room to roam, food and water. They give us a handful of eggs, with thick, hard, calcium-rich shells the color of a dusty barn floor.  I had the joy of watching my little boy and then his sister, when they were still very young, cup pale blue Bantam eggs in their tiny hands. Now, about five generations of chickens later, they have learned a bit about life and death and caring for things through the birds.


Woody Allen tells a joke to end one of his films, 'Annie Hall.' A man visits a psychiatrist. His wife thinks she’s a chicken. The doctor tells the man to bring her in, offering to help. The man says, “That’s the problem, Doctor. I need the eggs.”


Raising chickens might make no sense, but that could be the point. Whatever happens in the house or at work or in the world, there’s still the need to feed and water the birds and muck out the coop. And I need the eggs.


David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio