What the Chicken Knows by Sy Montgomery

Author:Sy Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2024-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

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None of our roosters stayed for long. The gentlemanly, long-tailed Lakenvelders, always pictures of vigorous health, dropped dead from their perches within days of each other before their second birthday. Gretchen told us this is not uncommon. Roosters’ constitutions are quite different from those of hens, right down to a marked difference in respiration: a hen breathes thirty to thirty-five times a minute; a rooster only eighteen to twenty times. Apparently their different physiologies make the males more likely to drop dead, a phenomenon we named Sudden Rooster Death Syndrome.

The other roosters, we had to ship off. A farmer a few towns over was glad to take them and assured us they weren’t destined for the pot. “He’s a good ’un!” he said, holding one of them upside down by his feet. The farmer raised exotic chickens and needed roosters for his many hens.

The Ladies, frankly, seemed somewhat relieved. Though they had appreciated their roosters’ food calls alerting them to particularly juicy worms or hidden treasure in the compost pile, there was a cost: the regular annoyance of someone jumping on your clean back with his dirty, scaly feet and biting your comb with his beak—whether you felt like it or not. Sometimes our hens would squawk in annoyance.

Free of roosters, the flock seemed more composed, cohesive, and affectionate. The peace of the henhouse was restored—a feminist utopia.

But even our gentle Ladies have a strange and sometimes disturbing side to their souls. A Speckled Sussex whom the girls named Pickles—the only hen who enjoyed this particular food—revealed to me that the Chicken Universe, though in many ways the sweet soul of domesticity, is inhabited by aliens.

Pickles was a special needs chicken. The moment she arrived as a fuzzy chick we saw she had a bump at the top of her head the size of a small pimple. We soon discerned, with growing dismay, that she had a tiny hole in her skull and that the pimple was filled with cerebrospinal fluid. But she seemed otherwise healthy and normal.

As Pickles shed her baby down for feathers, we began to realize she was a little slow. She seemed to be the last one to notice a food call, for instance, and when the other chickens would come running, she usually brought up the rear. She didn’t react normally to loud noises or quick motions: unwisely, she accompanied Howard when he was sawing wood, her neck, I thought, perilously near the blade. Pickles had a tendency to wander off on her own, though not in the spirit of adventure. She always seemed a little lost.

At first, we didn’t realize that Pickles couldn’t peck straight. When we put down feed, there was usually enough of it that if a hen pecked anywhere within a half-foot radius, she’d hit something to eat. Only later, when we would offer Pickles a small, single morsel from our hand—a tiny ball of pie dough, a piece of carrot—did we perceive her problem. She’d consistently peck about two inches to the right of it, entirely missing the treat.

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