What My Chickens Gave Me For Christmas

I was telling a friend recently how every year I give the Hipster Hens the same Christmas gift. On Christmas morning, I hang a couple of cabbages in the coops. The cabbage tetherball game gets underway as soon as I’ve got the cabbages up and the fun continues until they’re completely gone. I don’t think the hens mind getting the same present year after year. As a matter of fact, I’d like to think that they’ve come to expect it, and perhaps we can even call it a holiday tradition.

Then my friend asked if I was disappointed that the chickens didn’t get me anything for Christmas. That brought me up short for a moment, but after a little reflection, I realized that the chickens do give me gifts, and those gifts last through the entire year. My flock has enriched my life. Having these birds that depend on me, that I worry about, that I constantly plan for and that are never far from my mind regardless of where I am or what I am doing, has changed me. The post-Hipster Hen Randy is just not the same guy as the pre-chicken one—and it’s all good! And the hens teach me! Some people travel to the mountaintops of Tibet looking for their guru. I posit that one’s guru is where one looks for him. And in my case my gurus have feathers and live down in the coop. Here are a few of the life lessons they have given me.

Chickens are smart and complicated. Until I got chickens I had no idea that chickens, as flock animals, would have such a complex social structure, that each chicken would have its own unique personality, that each chicken would recognize each of the other chickens in the flock as a distinct personality, each with her own quirks and idiosyncrasies, that each chicken would know where she belonged in the social hierarchy and would strive to improve her lot, that chickens have a intricate language of vocalizations and visual cues to the point that they literally “talk” to each other. Once I learned this about my chickens, I realized that I was audience to a unique chronical playing out every day in the coop just for me. And this continuing story in the coop was really a microcosm of the same story that we humans play out daily on a larger stage.

Conflict. The pecking order is a real thing and there are winners and losers. Snowball the Silkie Rooster was one of my original chickens and was the only Silkie in a group of 25 chicks. Silkies tend to sleep on the ground rather than on a roost, but Snowball roosted. All the other chickens that he knew roosted, so he just did what the others were doing, even though it may have felt wrong to him. Eventually Snowball stayed on the roost all the time, night and day. Because, unfortunately, Snowball was the odd man out, and was on the very bottom of the pecking order. Whenever he was off the roost, he inevitably would be chased and aggressively pecked. It reached a point where I would have to lift him off the roost and put him by the water fount so he could drink while I stood guard, and then I would hand-feed him as he sat in my lap. It was because of this sweet little rooster that I built Coop 2, where he went to live with some of the other coop outcasts. Snowball became the leader of this intrepid little band that included a shy and nervous little Polish hen, an old lame Orpington, a blind Cream Legbar, and a few others. Snowball has moved on to that great coop in the sky, but Coop 2 continues, and his legacy lives on.

Romance. Emile the Cochin Rooster is getting old, but he works really hard in his role as head rooster. Sometimes in the summertime the flock scatters. There’s one group of hens waaay at the far end of the big run, and there’s another group in the shade by the coop door. And Emile has to run back and forth in order to keep track of everybody. And there’s a hill. And he’s just not as spry as he used to be! It’s not easy! But he still does his cute little courtship dance for the hens – I call it “The Emile Shuffle.” And he still finds all the choice tidbits of scratch grain and offers them to his favorite hens. Often when he approaches one of the hens with romantic intent, she just rolls her eyes and saunters away. But he loves all of them anyway. He really does! He’s attacked me more than once when he thought I might be doing harm to his girls. The fact that I’m about a bazillion times bigger than he is has never deterred him. And I know that if a predator were ever to attack the flock, while the hens ran away Emile would be running toward the predator to protect his ladies. He would lay down his life for them. If that’s not love, then I don’t know what is.

Friendship. I’ve had numerous instances of bonded pairs in the flock. One example was Maran and Carmen Maranda the Marans hens that joined the flock with a group of six chicks I got in 2014. These two hens were inseparable. They were probably somewhere in the middle of the pecking order, but preferred to hang out together and not interact with the other hens. Carmen was a huge bruising hen, and the other hens knew that Carmen didn’t fool around with faux pecks to reinforce social rank. Any hen that pecked Carmen could expect a full-scale retaliation and could expect to lose some feathers. And Carmen would react in the same full-blown fashion to any hen that pecked Maran. For the most part, the other hens left Carmen and Maran alone and Carmen and Maran did their own thing. Most days the entire flock would travel around the run together, except for Carmen and Maran who would be pecking and scratching happily in an entirely different spot. This spring, Maran developed a rapidly growing abdominal tumor. She got sicker and weaker every day and it was only a matter of time before the lower ranking chickens started to pick on her so they could move up in the pecking order. Carmen, of course, tried to protect her, but I eventually intervened and separated Maran to a pen in one corner of the coop. Carmen stood vigil on the other side of the door, day and night, for a week. I opened the door at the end of the week after Maran had passed. Only then did Carmen leave her post. She stayed aloof from the flock for about three weeks and then she died. No doubt from a broken heart.

Motherhood. In April of 2016 I got some baby Cream Legbar chicks and I really hoped I could raise them with a broody hen. About a month before their arrival, Courtney the white Silkie hen went broody. Hens normally sit on eggs for 21 days before they hatch, so asking this little hen to nest for more than a month before her babies arrived was asking a lot. But with great hope I made Courtney a nice private, dark nest and gave her a bunch of really nice golf balls to sit on. The month passed and Courtney brooded those golf balls with every ounce of her little Silkie being. Finally came the fateful moment when I arrived home with the box of Legbar chicks. Would Courtney accept them? I scooped the golf balls from the nest and replaced them with the peeping baby chicks. I shouldn’t have worried about Courtney. She immediately spread her wings over the babies, began clucking softly, and preening their fluff with her beak. She didn’t even seem surprised. The chicks stopped peeping and cuddled in. She was a wonderful mom to those chicks, and while she’s gone now, the four Cream Legbar hens and I remember her with love.

Love. Melissa Caughey, who blogs about chickens over at “Tilly’s Nest” sums up love most eloquently in her book, “How To Speak Chicken”: “I never expected that I would be friends with a chicken, but that is the wonderful thing about life’s journey…The most important part of the journey is the people and animals we meet…Love is a universal language, and anyone who loves chickens knows that they speak it, too.”

So, that’s their gift. The Hipster Hens teach me and enrich my life every single day of the year. And, of course, they give me eggs, too.