June 8th, 2009

Farming It Out

Steph and I have officially jumped on the city chicken bandwagon.

Some Raleigh residents who keep chickens host an annual tour of their coops called “Henside the Beltline.” We went this year, and seeing how people were set-up and how quiet and non-stinky it is when you just keep a few egg-layers made the endeavor seem within our grasp.

When I started grocery shopping for myself years ago, I came to realization that I had no idea how most of the things I ate were made. This did not mesh well with my DIY belief-system. This is why, as soon as I found myself on a piece of land where I could do as I pleased, I started growing vegetables. It’s also why we’re venturing into chicken land. (That, and the fact that fresh eggs from non-commercial chickens taste approximately 2000 times better than what you get at the supermarket. Plus, in a nice bit of — ahem — synergy, chicken manure is excellent fertilizer for the garden.)

So I spent the last two weekends building a small hutch and run, and researching our available options.

Raising some cute little chicks would have been fun and probably similar to injesting large doses of anti-depressants each time we got to handle them, but you can’t determine the sex of a chick. (Unless you can find someone with a clutch of specific crossbreeds known as “sex-links” where males come out of the egg one color and females another. Sorry, newly-acquired knowledge about poultry causing me to digress.) I didn’t like the 50-50 chances of ending up with a noisy, aggressive rooster. I also didn’t like the unpredictability of how many chickens we’d actually end up with.

In talking to various people who keep them about their experiences I’ve come to the conclusion that chickens are the most inherently-doomed life form on the planet. Apparently, even when they have food and water and proper housing, they just up and die all the time. When a raccoon or a fox or a hillbilly with a hatchet gets the opportunity to put in some face-time with an unassuming fowl, it’s like they receive a magic boost in IQ, allowing them to understand the mechanics of gate latches and stretched fencing. (Thanks to Lilly, I have now seen a carnivore in the throws of “chickenmania.” Lilly’s not the brightest animal, so, even with a bump, her level of intellegence probably won’t get her on the other side of the wire. Still, she wants in. Very, very badly.) And the ease with which even a housecat can eradicate a small flock seems to suggest that these birds just sort of stand there and let themselves get gobbled up. (Then again, if your brain was the size of a watch battery, I guess you would too.) And there are all kinds of diseases and parasites that love their chicken. These predators, as well as genetic defects, kill baby chickens in particular at an astounding rate.

We wanted three chickens, and built the shelter to house this many. If we had gotten three chicks we might have ended up with one chicken. Or we could have played the odds, bought 10 chicks and ended up with 10 chickens.

Thus we opted to get “pullets” or basically adolescent females. They’re a little more expensive, as someone has had to put in the time and effort to guide them through infancy, but, for us, they were the only option. I went and picked up our brood at a breeder on Saturday.

Here they are, in all of their splendor:

This is our largest/most mature chicken, a red sex-link that I’ve named “Gladys.” Supposedly she’s of laying age (around nine months old) but I haven’t spotted any eggs yet. As you can see, she has a chipped beak, which I think might be because she spends most of her time ramming her “nose” into the other two gals whenever they get near her. That “pecking order” thing? Not just a figure of speech.

This one is Steph’s to name. She was out of town this weekend and said she needed to see the thing before she could name it. Kate, Kevin, and I put our heads together and came up with the temporary name “Chicken.com.” She’s about 14 weeks old and is another type of crossbreed known as a “golden comet.”

Bliss has joint-custody of this one. She also got naming rights and chose the moniker “Martha Stewart.” She’s an 11-week-old Buff Orpington. This type starts laying relatively late, so it could be seven or eight months before we’re making quiche courtesy of her.

Finally, here’s a wider shot of the whole deal.

I’m sure I’ll have more to report as our new pets get acclimated to their surroundings and we figure out exactly what rearing these animals entails. Stay tuned!

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June 2nd, 2009

Leaves of Three, Let It Bleed

Sometime during the summer of 2004 Steph and I went to a cook-out and did a lot of standing around near a heavily-wooded area in sandals. A few days later we discovered that our feet had been infected with red bugs, or, as they are affectionately known in many parts of the US, “chiggers,” or perhaps you know them by their scientific name Satanus Intinybugformus.

Here’s a scientifically-accurate rendering of what they look like:

Ok, yes, this illustration says “the gout” at the bottom. A while back a friend of mine had the misfortune of developing “the gout” and, in doing some research on the subject, he came across this album-cover-or-ironic-t-shirt-worthy visual depiction. Gout, I have no doubt, is worse than chiggers. Still, based on my experience, this is the image could just as easily represent the latter affliction.

I’d dealt with bee and fire ant stings; flea, tick, and mosquito bites; and even a case of scabies before chiggers, but none of these could prepare me for them. It was a traumatizing ordeal on many levels, yet I’m currently drawing on the strength and wisdom I acquired during that experience, as I now have the worst case of poison ivy I’ve had in my life. It’s all over my forearms and calves. I have no idea how I came into contact with it, though there are instances of the plant on the perimeter of our backyard.

The most annoying thing about those tiny bugs and this common fauna — other than the constant skin irritation — is that you can prevent them from infecting you by giving the compromised area a good scrubbing before you break out in hives. Of course, when does it even cross your mind that that you’ve been infected? When you break out in hives. All I can do at this point, they¹ tell me, is “let it run its course” and “don’t scratch.” That’s actually why I’m typing right now. Gotta keep the fingers busy. I really don’t want to scratch.

During The Chigging of Aught-Four, Steph showed remarkable will-power with her case. Meanwhile I was a complete and total slave to the itch. The result, it turned out, of constantly dragging my fingernails over my rash, were bloody open sores littering the tops of my feet. (I’m a repulsive human being, by the way. Have we discussed this before?) After my fingernails were worn to uselessness I should have given it a rest. Instead I went sculking around the house, or Steph’s apartment, searching for guitar picks, sandpaper, or garden implements that could do the job even more effectively. After about two weeks Steph took to physically assaulting me — from dope slaps to full-fledged shoulder punches — every time I so much as glanced at my lower extremities. This may seem like an excessive reaction, but at that point I had left permanent reddish-brown stains on her floor, the coffee table where I propped my feet up, and every pair of sheets she owned, on account of my chig-mata. And Steph’s skin problems? They’d all but disappeared.

So Steph taught me a thing or two that summer. Though one could argue that I might just react more strongly to red bugs and that I spent a lot more time nearer the forest where we contracted them and that, c’mon, my feet are huge. They’re like water skis, which would give chiggers a lot more surface area to attack.

Yes, one could argue these fine points. But it wouldn’t change the fact that it was six months before one could play kickball again.

¹ Oprah Wikipedia

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