Julie Zickefoose: Nature Artist & Writer
Chicken Fever
Here's what I want: Chickens. I've always wanted chickens. But chickens, like horses, need special housing, more specifically a coop and a pen, and that's why, in part, I've never had them. Well, when I was a freshman in college, I did raise a lovely Leghorn chick, one I'd kidnapped from a lab where it was about to undergo experiments on its eyes. I saw the tiny pink comb emerging from the cocoa-brown stripes on its little head, and I couldn't bear to think of its going under the knife. I asked the professor if I might have it, and he assented. Being newly hatched, it imprinted on me as its mother, and followed me wherever I went, a chicken in Harvard Yard. Thinking back on it, I believe that I, with my overalls, tailbone-length hair, and chicken, was admitted to that institution for comic relief. Later I would add roller skates to the mix, but by then the chicken was long gone.
I raised it until it was a lanky, freely pooping adolescent rooster. My suitemates were nonplussed; he lived in our common room and was pleasant enough as long as I kept his papers fresh. Then he began to croon and moan, and I knew midnight crowing could not be far behind. Before he found his voice, I would have to find him a real home, and I was determined that it not be a laboratory. I asked around the administrative offices until I found a woman with a weekend farm in New Hampshire. She told me that her flock rooster was getting old and that this one would do nicely. What a relief. I packed him into a cardboard box and left him with her on a Friday afternoon. Having a harem sure beats donating your lenses to science.
Chicken fever reached a pitch by the time the county fair rolled around in September. I couldn't bear to look at the white meat chickens, with their huge breast muscles and stocky legs. Like the turkeys, they looked maladapted, overweight and miserable. No, I stared at the show bantams in their tiny cages like a car fanatic at an auto show, taking in every detail, every finely penciled feather and glossy hackle. The silver Sebright laid me low. M.C. Escher couldn't have invented a more beautiful chicken. Every silvery-white feather was rimmed in glossy black, creating a lacy pattern over its body, flowing over and defining its compact curves…rhapsody.
Most people, I suspect, want chickens for one of two things: meat or eggs. The question of offing my chickens for meat would, for me, be akin to murder. Once you've named something, raised it from a chick, how do you…I know that sounds silly to anyone who's been raised on a farm, but I'm after their souls, their aesthetics, not their drumsticks. I could eat their eggs, I know, and since we run through about a dozen and a half a week (thank you, Dr. Atkins!), I could probably rationalize investing in a flock by saying we need the eggs. Eggs. South American Araucanas lay glossy eggs in amazing shades of jade and seafoam. Martha Stewart claims her interior decorating colors were inspired by the eggs her flock lays. I believe it.
Signs began to appear to me, signs that told me it was time to build a coop. I opened my USA Today, only to find an article crowing, "City Slickers Click with Backyard Cluckers." Ah. Definitely a sign. Bill brought a book home from work, titled Extraordinary Chickens. It's at my bedside. Porno for chicken fanatics. Even my dear high school English teacher, who made me into a writer, egged me on. "There is something comforting about chickens," she wrote, "roaming about, making soothing noises as if they just discovered some wonderful thing, right there in the dirt they scratched up -- quite oblivious to the horrors outside of their realm. I think they'll fit right in."
I solicited advice from an old friend from high school, who knows my tendency toward tenderness. "When I had chickens, one of them outsmarted me. He used reverse psychology on me. Whenever I went out to catch one to whack for dinner instead of running away he would come right up to me. I would always pass him over and go chop another one. It finally came down to him and two females. I figured I'd keep the male, since he was so nice, and pick one of the females for his bride. I carefully scrutinized the females. One of them had a crooked foot. Whap! That was all for her. So the male and his lucky girlfriend hung around the barn and got bigger and bigger and bigger."
Bigger and bigger, and older and older, I thought. The other hurdle, besides the coop and pen hurdle, that I haven't figured out how to cross is the aging hen factor. I know that I'll get attached to these birds, as my friend Nell in Connecticut did to hers. When I lived in Connecticut, I did a lot of songbird rehabilitation, and Nell used to bring me wild birds that her barn cats had roughed up. Sometimes I'd have to put a bird down if it was too badly injured to rehabilitate. Nell took note of that. One day she showed up in my driveway with a trunk full of old laying hens. "I wondered if you'd put my old hens down for me. I'm attached to them, and they aren't laying any more, but I can't bear to kill them." I stared at her in silence, thinking about what to say. "That," I said, "is why I don't have chickens." I sent her off to the pharmacy for ether, and advised her to kill her own darn old chickens.
I know why I want chickens. I figured it out on my son Liam's second day of preschool. Bill drove away with both kids, for once, in the car and school-bound, and I was alone with the silence of a house, all to myself. It was heaven, but it was too quiet. This revelation took me completely by surprise, but I knew it was real. I needed something else to care for. The orchids and greenhouse and bonsais and gardens and aquarium and fishpond and macaw and bird feeders and hummingbirds and house and husband and (momentarily absent) kids just weren't enough.
I'm waiting for the fever to pass. When my daughter Phoebe started first grade, I suddenly wanted a retired racing greyhound. Now, a racing greyhound on our place makes about as much sense as a pet giraffe. Deer, rabbits, woodchucks, chipmunks, raccoons, opossums, skunks—they all waltz through our front yard like they own the place, and a sight-hunting hound like that would leave a dog-shaped hole in the front screen door lighting out after them, and never be seen again. If I could ever catch it, I'd be left with walking the fool thing on a lead, when we've got 80 acres for any dog with a crumb of sense to wander at will. But it had to be a racing greyhound, or nothing. Suffice it to say I got over it, mostly. I stay away from the greyhound web sites, especially the one that plays "Someone to Watch Over Me" as you scroll tearfully down the photo gallery of otherwise-doomed hounds up for adoption.
Now it's chickens. I've always wanted chickens. 
