June 11
Our chickens are aging. One day in March, Sarah went out to feed them and collect the eggs. She handed me the egg basket while she took her boots off in the entryway.
"It feels pretty light," I observed. “How many eggs did we get?” “Sixteen,” she replied. “Sixteen eggs out of twenty-five chickens?” I said. “Someone’s not pulling their weight. Maybe some of them need to be retired?” “It’s still cold,” Sarah reminded me. “But some of the hens are over two years old. They might have stopped laying. Once it warms up, we can separate them one at a time and see whether they’re laying or not.” “Okay,” I agreed. Hens don’t lay as much in cold weather and short days. Even keeping the lights on all evening—judiciously replaced with CFLs to save on expenses—and even with heat lamps going all night, we never get as many eggs in the winter as in summer. “It’s been warm for a couple of weeks,” I point out to Sarah today. “Do you think it’s time to see which chickens are laying?” “I guess so,” Sarah agrees, reluctantly. We both know what that means: the hens that don't lay will become dinner. There are a couple of exceptions: the "pet" hens that Sarah has become particularly fond of. There are three of these, and I accept that they'll live out their lives until they die of old age.
“We’ll need to separate them one at a time," Sarah says. "Can you help me set up the dog crate?” We get the crate out of the storage shed: a wire box about four feet long, two feet wide, and three feet tall. Sarah puts a ceramic dog dish in for food, a quart-sized water dispenser, and straw for bedding. Then she catches one of the older hens and puts her in the crate. Our chickens are of the Delaware breed: white bodies with black markings. They’re a dual-purpose breed, theoretically good for both laying and eating. But we don’t eat them very often. I find them a bit tougher and gamier than a store-bought bird, perhaps because the factory chickens are confined to cages for their entire lives. Factory birds never build up muscle tone, and never have the chance to graze for wild greens, bugs, and small rodents. Our Delawares are fine in a crock pot with tomato sauce or marinated in orange juice. But they don’t make good fried chicken—especially from a two-year-old retired laying hen. One hen looks pretty much like another. Though each has her own personality, we wouldn’t be able to tell most of them apart without some kind of markings. We put plastic bands around the hens’ legs when they mature to identify them. The different colors indicate the year they were born as well identifying the individual bird: blue for two years ago, orange for last year, white for this year. The hen Sarah pulled out was blue-white-blue, a two-year-old bird. She’s a good natured hen, and I hope she still lays. I don’t like retiring any of our birds, but the good-natured ones are even harder than the mean ones.
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