In the Coop & Around the World—March 29, 2020
Chicken Hoarding
I’ve seen several reports recently, including this one in the New York Times, of chicken hoarding. It’s the same phenomenon that has emptied grocery store shelves of toilet paper only this one involves a living, peeping commodity that can’t just be stacked at the back of a storage closet. According to the Times article, my usual chick supplier, Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa, has had its entire chick inventory wiped out through the next four weeks (though when I double checked the Murray McMurray website, many of the more common breed seemed to still be available). If you are one of those people snapping up chicks, I do sort of get it. You’ve been thinking about delving into backyard chickens on and off for a while now. And suddenly you’re stuck at home and eggs have become impossible to get – and when you can find them, the price has gone up quite a bit. Maybe your cousin has chickens and she’s having eggs for breakfast every morning. And you go on-line and discover that you can order baby chicks with a few keystrokes. And they’ll get shipped right to your locality courtesy of the US Postal Service. So, this is the time, right?
Like I said, I sort of understand. But please do this before you order those chicks: Make sure you realize what you’re committing to! You’ll be getting small living creatures, and you’re going to be responsible for them for the rest of their lives. Don’t be like the woman in the New York Times article who posted to an on-line chicken forum that she couldn’t understand why her baby chicks were dying one-by-one. It turns out that she was clueless that her babies needed to have a heat source! They were dying from the cold! I was oh-no-ing out loud when I was reading about this cruel ignorance. It was actually more like “OH NOOOOO!” So please spend some time learning about chickens before you do those keystrokes and set the whole thing in motion! How? See below.
Resources for Chicken Keeping – And My Favorite Chicken Bloggers
There is, no doubt, a Facebook group of backyard chicken keepers in your area. A simple query in the search box at the top of the page on Facebook will probably find it for you. Not on Facebook? There’s also a national online forum for backyard chicken keepers at Backyard Chickens . Remember that chicken forums, like all groups and forums, contain large numbers of participants with a range of backgrounds, knowledge, and opinion. They’re a great place to connect with other chicken-keepers - but take offered advice within the context of who’s offering it.
There are books! The book I recommend for everybody is Gail Damerow’s “The Chicken Encyclopedia.” It covers everything you need to know about raising chickens, conveniently laid out in alphabetical order. Gail also blogs about chickens and other related topics at Gail Damerow’s Blog . And speaking of blogs – they’re another excellent resource. For instance, well…there’s me. I suggest you take a look at my post on getting baby chicks: “Getting Your Ducks in a Row for Raising Baby Chicks.”
Other blogs? Here are my favorites in no particular order: Kathy Shea Mormino, The Chicken Chick, has consulted with a host of chicken experts and written about practically every chicken-related topic you can think of. And all that knowledge is stored right there on her blog, waiting for you to delve in. Deborah Neyens, blogs about gardening and raising hens in the suburbs of Cedar Rapids, Iowa at Counting My Chickens and suggests that you’ll find useful information on her blog regardless of if “you live in an apartment with a sunny windowsill just big enough for pot of edible greens or a house with plenty of room for a garden.” I suggest that if you are interested in chickens or gardening or cooking, regardless of where you live, you’ll be inspired by the information on her blog. Crystal Sands blogs at Pajamas, Books, and Chickens and writes from rural Maine about chickens, gardening and farming. And life. And simplicity. And peace. And beauty. And kindness. And she writes so brilliantly! Melissa Caughey blogs at Tilly’s Nest from her home on Cape Cod where she keeps chickens and bees and maintains a large garden. Her blog contains a plethora of useful chicken info – ranging from chicken first-aid, to nutrition, to moulting, to raising chicks.
So, there you go. Click on a few links and go to town!
Thoughts On a Fisher
A couple of weeks ago, I put down the newspaper that I always peruse while eating breakfast and glanced through my porch window. There was still a pretty continuous snow cover then, and I noticed an animal silhouetted against the snow moving through the woods at the foot of the hill about 150 yards from the house. It was not close, but because the animal was dark and the background was white, and because it was moving, it was not hard to keep an eye on it. At first, I thought it was a racoon, but after I’d watched for a while, it was pretty obviously not shaped like or moving anything like a raccoon. I quickly realized that I was observing the very first fisher I’d ever seen in the wild. Last week I confirmed I wasn’t hallucinating when I saw it again – and this time my wife, Kathy, saw it, too.
Fishers are woodland predators about the size of a large cat. As a matter of fact, the colloquial name for fishers is “fisher cats.” They don’t really look at all like cats, though. They’re really more like an overgrown weasel – and they are, in fact, in the weasel family. They mostly live in Canada and are fairly rare in the US. The National Park Service website informs us that they occur in the northern parts of the Rockies and Appalachians – information the fisher I was viewing out my window apparently was not familiar with. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources allows that fishers have sometimes been spotted in areas of Minnesota, including the river valleys in the southeastern part of the state. My wife and I and all the Hipster Hens live on an acreage near the St. Croix River, a pristine, protected river that forms a long section of the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin – perfect fisher habitat according to the Minnesota DNR. We share our acreage with any number of wild critters, but we didn’t know we were sharing it with a creature so rare.
A fisher (but not my fisher) NPS photo by Emily Brouwer
I was just a little elated that I had this somewhat unique animal living nearby, but was also more than a little worried. The problem: Fishers are predators. Chickens are prey. Backyard Chickens describes the problem very graphically: “Fishers are vicious predators who will raid chicken coops and kill numerous chickens in one attack. They may also try to remove some of them from the coop. They will eat the neck and head and may have the breast of the bird opened up as well.”
I know there are those folks who would immediately react to a fisher siting by reaching into the closet for their trusty Winchester or by heading out to grab one of the traps hanging in the barn. That’s not me. I realize that I’ve chosen to live in a place that is occupied by wild animals. They lived here long before I arrived. Some of them eat plants and are likely to go after my garden. Others eat animals and are a danger to my flock. While that’s the natural order of things, I get annoyed when I discover a row of spinach mowed down overnight by deer. And while it’s never happened, I would be devastated to discover that any of my chickens had been slaughtered. I do my absolute best to protect the one acre containing chickens and garden – the rest of the acreage I leave to the wild animals. To protect my gardens from plant munchers, I keep them close to the house and spray copious amounts of repellent. That strategy mostly works. And to protect the Hipster Hens from chicken munchers, I don’t ever allow them to free range beyond the one-acre limit. When I’m home, they’re strolling around a half-acre chicken run, and when I’m gone, they’re in the hen pen with its wire roof, and perimeter of buried wire. I have never lost a chicken to a predator. I’m knocking fiercely on my wooden desk right now.
I’ve written about predators once before after an incident with raccoons. My philosophy has not changed from what I expressed then. The wild animals that live in the natural world around us are born, pass through the sum of their experiences and die practically unknown to us. But their invisibility to us doesn’t make these wild ones any less valid or in any way diminish their existence or the part they play in the natural structure of things. Each of them, the Desiderata tells us, like each of us, is a child of the universe. Each of them, like each of us, has a right to be here.
It is difficult to make sense of a world where it’s necessary for some sentient and feeling creatures to be killed by other creatures, also sentient and feeling, so that the consumers might eat the consumed and continue to live. And it is difficult to make sense of a world where my chickens have to shelter in place to stay safe from fishers even as I have to shelter in place to stay safe from entities so tiny as to be invisible - that nevertheless want to make me sick so that they might survive. It is difficult to make sense of this world. So, all we can do is protect ourselves, our loved ones, and the creatures in our care as best we can as we remember that the universe, confusing as it seems to us, continues to unfold as it should.
