For The Birds

If the blog has been quiet lately, the house has not.

Two weeks ago we purchased twenty-seven chicks in several breeds (New Hampshire Red, Rhode Island Red, Plymouth Barred Rock, Americauna, Jersey Black Giant, Golden Laced Wyandott, Buff Orpington) from a local feed store. If I planned to heat and tend to four chicks, a flock could not take many more resources, I reckoned. A half dozen will be our laying hens, a half-dozen hens we'll sell, and the roosters will go to pot.

Most of my friends said, "Oh, baby chicks! How fun." I wondered.

We brought said chicks home and quickly discovered that they needed more space than what we'd planned for. We collected refrigerator boxes, duct tape, masking tape, kitchen shears and a half dozen kids who appeared to have smelled our recent additions and then turned up "coincidentally."

Picture the building party that ensued while children cuddled stacked chicks and offered them a view from the living room windows. Imagine the Chick Hotel that emerged, two-story in parts complete with ladders and arched doorways. I can only imagine the effort myself. I think we adults were hiding in the kitchen where it was safe.

On the first nights, we kept the heat lamp on as instructed. Seda, who sleeps on the futon in the living room, found herself sleeping in the henhouse. The girls (okay, so it's hopeful) stayed up all night to party. Goodness knows what they found to talk about. Seda never slept.

On the third night, I switched beds with Seda, turned off the heat lamp, and stoked a fire in the wood stove until temperatures soared. I was up every couple of hours to check the babies and add wood. It's now two weeks later, our wood pile has much diminished, and I've given up chasing them all back onto the heating pad in their designated sleeping quarters.

For all that, they are cute. At the moment, awkward and partly feathered, the bulk of them sleep with necks laid long and faces flat against the newspaper. One young rooster already knows his place and never appears to sleep, but keeps vigil with a half-bald head and wary eye over the downy brood. I admit I am charmed. His work ethic surpasses my own.

What have I learned? I know now that I will not ever again set out to create an orphanage for chicks. They came into the world too early, and our sun cannot sustain them motherless. Determined, they peck at pictures of asparagus from the Safeway ads in their bedding and "dust bath" against smoothe cardboard. I cannot feed them a natural diet such as they would be offered in the chicken yard with a mother hen, and have instead substituted granular chick starter with some dried nettles. I've just started adding fresh greens.

I did not purchase medicated chick starter, because I did not want them to take in medicine for ailments they did not feel. And yet, this medication could mitigate the unnatural season and environment that I have contributed to. Their manure is on newspapers. Do I want this on my compost pile? Urban recycling with agri-waste -- garbage and gold. How can I integrate myself more gracefully into the cosmopolitan permaculture? What is fair to my babies now?

I pick up each, stroke and speak to them gently as I change their papers three times a day. I offer my attention as much as I can amidst the drumming, keyboards and wrestling of my own lively brood. I focus my care to their well-being and open my heart to the sadness that is mine in having perpetuated such an unnatural, though conventional, method of raising up chicks. "What can I do for you now?" I ask.

I can promise you this: next time, it will be different. Next year, I'm calling up Rent-a-Rooster and pollinating my homebound hens right here so they can lay, sit, and deliver what they are called to bring forth. I will let you, my then-grown flock, warm and feed them through the summer that they may be ready to lay the following spring.

My footprint is never small enough. What was I thinking? I am not a hen.