Faberge Eggs

It's four in the afternoon, and practically dark outside.  In a minute I'll go to the chicken house and turn on the light, something I do at this time of the year in the hopes of encouraging the girls to lay.

When they hear me coming they make their way clucking up the little ramp and into the shed, one by one.  While they're settling in for the night I check the nests for eggs.  On good days there are two--one brown speckled with maroon dots, one a barely-there pink--but often there are none.

It's not like this all the time.  Last summer my eight hens averaged three or four eggs a day.  But now the days are short, the weather is cold, and the hens are moulting, shedding their old feathers and growing new ones, a process which puts extra demands on their bodies and causes them to temporarily stop laying.

But the main reason that they lay so few eggs is that my hens are four years old.  In chicken years, this means that they are perimenopausal.  It does not, however, mean that they are near death.  Chickens in stress-free environments, and my hens lead extremely serene and peaceful lives, can live a very long time.

During their non-productive years hens still consume--in addition to grass and bugs and garden waste in season--laying pellets ($16.99 a bag) and something called "scratch" ($6.99 a bag).  In winter, when there is snow on the ground and they get bored staying in their shed all day, I buy them the occasional fresh cabbage or squash ($2 a pound) to peck at, and a kind of poultry cake with extra protein which costs $7.99.  Hens do well in "deep litter," a thick layer of hay that keeps them warm in winter and later becomes the compost that keeps my garden growing, so I buy five or six bales of mulch hay a year, at $2 a bale.

 (Gu

est illustration by my granddaughter, VWT)

You can see where this is going, and I'm not even counting the cost of building the shed, the gallons of barn-red paint to make it match the house, the electricity to keep their water from freezing or the gas for the endless trips to the feed store.  I am not an accountant--accountants probably know better than to  keep chickens--but even I can tell that every one of those eggs I bring into the house rivals in extravagance the eggs that Carl Faberge made to amuse the Czarina at Easter (one sold a few years ago for $18.5 million).

Serious egg producers do not waste resources on perimenopausal hens.  Industrial egg farms slaughter their hens before their second birthday--a blessing for the birds, who are kept practically motionless in cages during their productive life.

I am hardly serious, or I would have gotten rid of my hens years ago.  But I know that I cannot just keep adding new chickens to my flock year after year.  I know that I cannot keep my eight hens forever.

I have it all figured out.  In the spring I will go to the feed store and buy half a dozen day-old pullets (at $2.50 each), which I will keep in the basement under a heat lamp and check on and cluck over every couple of hours for weeks.  The pullets will prosper under my watchful eye and begin to lay in the early fall.  At that time, I will make an appointment with the "chicken processor," and he will in less than half an hour transform my bright-eyed, friendly old hens into featherless, headless carcasses identical to the ones in the supermarket.

I will bring them home in the cooler and put them in the freezer, and for a while I won't want to think about them at all.  But eventually I will take them out a couple at a time, put them in the big pot along with some carrots, celery and onions and turn them into fabulous, life-sustaining chicken stock.  The meat, tasty but extremely tough, will go to the dogs.  And another chicken cycle will have begun.

(Guest illustration by my grandson, RFT)

Chicken Coop Upgrade

I read Temple Grandin's Animals Make Us Human recently.  You know Temple Grandin, the scientist responsible for making animal handling and slaughter facilities  more humane and less stressful for the cows and pigs that move through them.  She is also severely autistic, and an advocate for people with autism and their families.  And she is a major figure in my pantheon of contemporary saints.

In the book, she says that battery hens are the most abused animals on industrial farms:  crowded into tiny cages, fed unspeakably bad diets, and inhumanely slaughtered at barely two years of age.  And one of the worst stresses inflicted on these hens is that they are forced to lay their eggs in a brightly-lit room.  The hen, according to Grandin, when she is about to lay, has a deep-seated instinct to repair to a dark and hidden place, and when that instinct is frustrated, she suffers.

My own six hens lead comparatively idyllic lives, with plenty of indoor and outdoor space, deep hay to scratch in, and healthy, even delicious (to a chicken) food.  But until now they had been laying their eggs in a couple of hay-filled plastic milk crates that I casually stashed in a corner of their coop. There was nothing dark or hidden about these nests, and I was appalled that I had inflicted this unnecessary stress on my hens.

I pleaded their case to my in-house self-sufficiency enabler, and in a trice he built a lovely plywood roof that overhangs the nests, with a hinge to allow me to reach in and collect the eggs.

Now, while the outside world goes about its frantic business, a hen can hop up on the darkened nest, turn around several times, center herself, and do her thing as Nature intended.

An Egg, An Egg!

It is a perfect oval (what else?), tinted the lightest pinkish beige. I brought it in the house tonight and put it reverentially in the fridge. And heaved a sigh of relief that my hens—Do, Re, Mi, and Fa—are not sterile.

It's been almost three months since we brought Do et al. home as well-grown pullets, with the expectation that they would begin to lay within a month or so. They lived in their summer quarters—a portable coop inside a movable fence—and grew tall and broad and sleek on grass and bugs and laying mash.

These hens are Buff Orpingtons, large, golden, matronly-looking birds with a calm and friendly disposition. As summer faded into fall and no eggs appeared in the nest, I moved them into their winter quarters—a room adjacent to the goat room—hoping that they would feel more snug and cozy and would begin to lay.

That was a month ago. The hens got fatter and more gorgeous in a Gibson-Girl sort of way. They made lots of hen noises, ones that sounded to me like the egg-laying kind. Still, no eggs in the nest. Maybe, I thought, they are laying under the shed. That would truly be a disaster, as there is no way I could crawl under there looking for eggs. As a test, I confined them to their room for 24 hours. But the nest remained empty.

During this three-month egg drought, I was reduced to buying eggs in the supermarket. I would stand in front of the shelves of egg cartons and despair. There were the run-of-the-mill jumbo-sized eggs that sold for a pittance...if you didn't count the price paid by the hens, confined in a cage, barely kept alive by medicated feed, and spent by 18 months of age.

There were “all natural” brown eggs in nice transparent cartons. These cost more, but offered no guarantees as to the hens' quality of life. Neither did the even more expensive organic eggs: you can feed a hen manna straight from heaven and still keep her in a cage.

I opted for “cage free ” eggs, which means that the hens—hundreds of them—are kept loose in a building. There is not much more square-foot per bird space in these arrangements than there is in cages, but at least the hens can walk around and peck each other, which they do—wouldn't you if you had to live your life in a metro station at rush hour? For all I know these birds are fed ground-up rats—but at least they're not in cages.

Every time I cracked an egg for an omelette I thought of those hundreds, those thousands of hens milling around in their buildings, and the ear-splitting noise, and the smell....We didn't eat many eggs these last few months.

But now those days are over: one of our girls has reached puberty, and the others will soon follow. And if I know young hens, they will lay like a house on fire through the coldest, darkest days of winter, thankful for our leftovers and keeping everybody's spirits up with their companionable clucking.

Come over some time, and I'll make you an omelette.