New Year Chickens

I have read that the first bird you see in the new year is the theme that year will take.  I do not remember what the first bird I saw this year was. It is now the sixth month of the year, and my memory of something so fleeting is long gone.  It was probably my chickens, as I went out into the cold to feed them their morning meal.

I had all four of my chickens then.

I am down to only one chicken now.  Her name is Big Mama, and she is the oldest and obviously the most wily of all of my chickens. She has managed to escape the predator that has slowly taken away the other three—Salsa, Sunny, and Buffy. Each was taken one at a time by some creature that had no regard for the meal that it was making.

The first night, Sunny was the victim.  I found her in the back of the pen, her head and neck eaten, the rest of her body left in the cold, winter air. Her body was still pliable and warm, she hadn’t been dead long. I put her in a plastic bag and put the bag in the garbage, angry at the world.  She hadn’t even gotten the chance to lay eggs.

Next was Buffy.  She’d laid two eggs in her life before the critter got to her. Her head and neck were gone, too. She was in the same place as Sunny had been the night before, feathers scattered about her body haphazardly. I had to leave her there, because I had to go to work. When I came back from work later that day, her body was stiff and cold from rigor mortis. She went into the garbage back like a cold chicken-popsicle, straight up and down, legs hanging out of the bag as it was a little too short for her entire body.

We shored up the coop and locked the remaining two chickens up at night.  For two weeks, the problem seemed to be solved.  Both chickens were healthy, albeit not very happy.  They both stopped laying for about four days from the stress of losing their sister hens. They began to lay again, and though I wasn’t happy with only two eggs a day, that’s all I was going to get, so I had to be content with it.

Then Salsa went missing.

Unlike Sunny and Buffy, her body was not laying at the back of the pen, she was just gone. No chicken, no eggs, no nothing.

“I saw a chicken on the top of the fence of the pen trying to get out,” my husband told me. “Maybe she’s in the yard.”

This type of escape artistry has happened before, so it would not be unheard of to have a chicken perched in one of the rhododendron bushes that flank the chicken pen. I looked through the bushes, calling softly for her. I found no sign of any chickens.

“Why didn’t you put her back in the pen?” I asked.

“It was raining really hard,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to catch her in the rain.”

He wouldn’t have been able to catch her in the sun, either. They’re fast little runners. The chickens, when they escape, come back to the pen on their own when they are hungry enough and I open the door for them.

“Don’t worry,” my husband told me. “I’m sure she’ll show up.”

No sooner had he said then, then our dog, Sweetie Belle, appeared at the back door with Salsa in her soft mouth, her tail wagging happily at her find.  Salsa’s head and neck were eaten down to the bone, the rest of her body still intact as she lay flaccidly in the English Springer Spaniel’s jaws.

My husband laughed. “I know it isn’t funny,” he said. “But it is kind of funny.”

I didn’t think it was funny.

I praised the dog for the good girl that she was for fetching the bird for us. She gave it up happily. When she wasn’t looking, I put Salsa in a plastic bag and snuck her down to the garbage by the side of the house. I didn’t want the dog to think I was snubbing her gift.

“I’m surprised that something got her, with that hard rain we were getting,” my husband commented.  I was surprised too, because the rain had been pouring down the night before. It was a pretty determined critter to brave the weather for a chicken, that’s for sure.

So now I’m down to one chicken, one egg a day. Not nearly enough. Big Mama must be lonely, and will be until I can get chicks in the spring to grow into more chickens to keep her company.

What theme this could mean for me for the new year is in question.  Is it that I shouldn’t brood, like a hen does over her eggs which will never hatch for lack of a rooster?  Worrying about events that may or may not happen keeps one stuck, much like the hen that stuck sitting on her eggs. Nothing moves forward when one broods about things.

Or, like the chickens, am I just scratching the surface of my life?  With their talons, they dig into the dirt, nature’s cultivators, finding seeds, worms, grubs, and bugs. But the scratching is not very deep. It is only on a surface level. Those creatures and seeds that are buried deeper in the soil escape the chicken’s persistent beak.  Do I, too, need to dig deeper into the issues of my life, find the seeds and creatures that lie buried beneath the surface? Is something incubating in the soil of my psyche that needs to see the light of day?

Chickens are bound to the earth, unable to take to the air and fly like many of their birdy brethren. Perhaps the theme for this year is for me to stay grounded, something that I often have trouble doing. By staying grounded, we are able to react more positively to the world around us, especially when it is chaotic, inconvenient, or difficult. It allows us to think more clearly and have less regrets about the rich life that we live. I could always use more of that.

Thanks, chickens.