On Chickens

On Chickens John Poch The chickens were to be slaughtered. My dad had finaUy understood that these were most unprofitable creatures.The eggs I gathered each morning were, in my father's words, "the most expensive eggs in Northwestern Pennsylvania." To keep them healthy, we had to buy chicken feed, straw, ground corn, and ground oyster sheUs. (The calcium from the oysters gives the eggs a thicker sheU). I didn't think the chickens would actuaUy eat the oyster sheUs, but they did.We had to take time to repair the coop, the roosts, and the fence, to feed and water the chickens morning and night, to prevent the weasels and foxes from their sporadic raids, and to cUp the chickens' wings so they wouldn't roost in the black walnut trees.They might drop their eggs from the branches and that would be no good. Keeping a few dozen hens and one rooster entails less than keeping horses or even cows, but there was always something else to know about poultry. After dinner, I would take the table scraps out to the edge of the pen and dump them onto the ground. The chickens made much eager clucking on my approach each evening and then a mad dash for the spillage of whatever had come offour plates. It was ajoyous occasion every time. I felt like a god of sorts. I even tossed leftover chicken into the pen, which I didn't like to give them, but I didn't want to bother separating it from the other scraps. I'd heard somewhere they get diseases from eating their own, which made sense to me. I thought, your own kind should be treated with some sort of dignity , lest a plague befaU the offending party.You're not supposed to give them watermelon either, as they supposedly wiU get their heads soaked with the juice and then they'U peck each other's heads and one ofthem can get hurt. But in the summer I gave our chickens watermelon rind aU the time. How could they not like watermelon as much as I liked it? 44 John Poch45 In the mornings, when I went out and filled their water cans and feeders , they would plunge into the feed as ifthey'd been starved for weeks. One ofthe things I could never get over was the way they'd wolf down the feed so fast that they'd get it aU in and around their beaks which would make them sneeze. Sneeze and eat, sneeze and eat. Their little heads shook in a violent little ecstasy. Take it easy I'd say. Take it easy. The chickens were specificaUy my chore. Sometimes, I would get to school and feel eggs inside my pockets that I'd forgotten to wash and shelve in the refrigerator.You have to wash them because they have dung on them halfthe time. I'd sneak them into my desk so at recess I wouldn't smash them when I was tackling or being tackled on the playground. Then I'd sneak them back into my coat before I went home. In the winter, I had to carry pails of hot water to the coop in order to melt the frozen crust that had formed on the watering cans from the day before.We had metal waterers whose lids froze to the bases when it was cold enough. I remember seeing ceramic waterers in antique shops where my mom used to take us. It seemed funny to me that people would put these things on display in their homes, on nice furniture or on kitchen countertops . Occasionally, I saw them set out this way.You couldn't reaUy use them for anything else, except for their real purpose. My siblings and I alternated different chores: horses, turkeys, cows, dogs and cats, gardening, dishes, sweeping, taking out the trash and burning it, mowing what seemed like acres oflawn with a push-mower, shoveUng a long driveway of snow in the winter. But I pretty much always had the chickens as my chore, regardless of whatever else I did. My dad often reminded me that he took care...