Hubbell, Sue - A Country Year by Hubbell Sue

Author:Hubbell, Sue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

My chicken operation, I like to believe, is one of the few straightforward bits of farming that goes on at my place. But during the past weeks I have been trying to get the chickens organized to sleep inside the coop, and in doing so I’ve been forced to think like a chicken, which is not very straightforward at all.

The thirty chickens, give or take a few (especially take a few as coyote dinners), are a commercial strain of white Leghorns, egg-laying machines without the wit or attention to go broody. I sell their eggs back to the general store to cover the cost of their feed, have my own eggs for free and still have enough left over to keep Ermon’s family across the hollow supplied in exchange for work on my truck.

Leghorns are skinny little chickens, useless as slaughter birds after they have stopped laying well. Some of mine die of old age; others are picked off by coyotes, foxes, hawks, raccoons, opossums and owls. Being a chicken on this hilltop is a perilous business. Each spring I start a dozen new pullets to compensate for the depredations on the flock, and the ones that make it past the black rat snakes reach egg-laying maturity in about twenty weeks. I buy sexed day-old pullets and brood them in the cabin, where they are safe and warm and I can watch them. This past spring it was apparent after a week that the chicken sexer had made a mistake.

Chicken sexing must be a highly skilled profession. I picture the sexers sitting there in the hatcheries, day after day, hour after hour, upending newly hatched chicks and sorting out the pullets from the cockerels. Considering how alike baby chicks are, they must be good at it, for they seldom make a mistake. But even Homer nods, and this past spring one of the baby chicks started growing a tiny, bright-red comb, proving himself to be a cockerel.

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