Club Poulet

(Today's StoryADay.org prompt was to write a story with "a market" in mind. Julie Duffy, who administers the site, noted later that this was not the prompt she had intended to post, but I have been thinking about getting back into the work-submitting groove with more regularity so it worked for me. For now, my "submission" is to this blog as well as to the Exercise and Health blog I maintain at movingyourbody.wordpress.com. I would like to start publishing pieces about our adventures in backyard farming, however, so I will look for and consider a new home for a revised version of this story.)

The sixteen chickens who reside in our backyard woke up this morning to a changed landscape. Overnight, Club Poulet -- my nickname for the 10,000 square foot free-range space -- was moved. Gone was much of the dried grassless space that the first flock of four hens and the subsequent set of four hens and rooster had scratched over the past year. In its place was new grass, violets, an old garden full of catnip, mint, dried-out lavender, and forgotten spring bulbs, and the prized commodity of all: a compost bin.
My husband Jim and I plotted our strategy Friday morning. Our initial plan was to wake up at 4 a.m. Saturday to pull up the fence. But we are not morning people so we decided to make our move at sunset as the hens were retiring for the night.

The meaning of the fence, and the significance of the flock makes more sense with a little background.
Jim used to be a nuclear engineer in the Navy. He asked to be relieved of his duties in 2004, two or three days after President Bush was re-elected. He asked me to marry him a month later. Nine years later, the two of us are still married and are living in an 1840s house on three acres of land, not in the tropical climes of Hawai'i where we initially met but in the frigid cold winters and hot humid summers of upstate New York.

It was always my dream to grow food, but my gardening successes were modest, at best. After Jim and I met, he seemed to decide that his mission in life was not to do the engineering work on aircraft carriers before retiring with beer and a fishing pole on his lakefront property in Otter Tail County, Minnesota, but to follow me wherever my career took me and to make my pipe dreams into realities.
It was his idea to get chickens. It was my intention to protest the idea and render it impossible. But Jim is a persistent man, if nothing else, and he knows how to build coalitions with local farmers. Before long, he had worn me down, and four hens -- named Henny, Penny, Clucky, and Lucky -- were residing in a hastily fixed-up coop in our backyard.
He did agree to start with full-grown hens, largely because we feared our four friendly but hunter-spirited cats would consider baby chicks appropriate prey.
I named the hens, by the way. Whimsically after storybook characters. Jim changed the spelling of Clucky's name to Klucky but otherwise the monikers stuck.
We brought the hens home at dusk on March 31, 2012. When Jim went to feed them the next morning, he discovered that one of them had laid an egg. Any reservations that I had about keeping hens in my background melted with that simple act.

The four hens quickly established a reputation for being neighborhood terrorists. Despite the fact that we live in a right-to-farm community and are in an area deemed rural, we have neighbors who are our friends to the left and right of us. The neighbors to our left also raise hens, and, in fact, welcomed us to the neighborhood in March 2011 with a gift of two dozen eggs -- fuel that fed Jim's fodder to raise hens of our own. The neighbor to our right is a handsome, sixty-year-old Harley Davidson riding widower who prizes his golf course lawn. The hens were welcomed by both, until they started eating the neighboring hens food and scratching up the widower's lawn. When chicken excrement, prized by us for its fertilizing capabilities, ended up on the widower's front steps, the ultimatum was delivered: "I don't mind you having your chickens, but I don't want them in my yard."
We were caught in a dilemma. As city folks transplanted to the rural northeast, we believed in the concept of free range. We subscribed to numerous anti-cruelty e-mail lists and Facebook pages, and while we were never vegetarians, we ardently opposed factory-farm meat. We believed that animals raised with love, compassion, and kindness would have rich full lives and that when the time came to transform them into meat, they could be slaughtered in a painless and compassionate way, and that their meat would taste better, be healthier, and be more appreciated by the consumer, as a result.
But what did free range mean? How does one balance love, compassion and kindness toward animals against an interest in maintaining neighborhood peace? And, even as the four hens were pestering our neighbors, they also were overwhelming us. They uprooted freshly planted onion sets in a matter of minutes. They pecked at our smaller two cats and hissed at the larger ones. And when Jim tried to transplant asparagus crowns, they threatened to tear apart the fragile roots in the crowns.
So we concluded that we could keep our ideals and lose our hopes to grow our own food as well as our neighborhood friends.
Club Poulet became our compromise. We bought four lengths of 100-foot wired fencing material and about twenty metal stakes. While the hens were still sleeping, we surrounded the coop with the wire and hammered in the stakes, giving their five-pound bodies plenty of run space and bringing much peace to our lives.

Henny, Penny, Klucky, and Lucky thrived in Club Poulet over the next several months. Jim and I enjoyed a plentiful supply of freshly laid eggs, and when I traveled for business, I began to fear that I would suffer protein deficiencies because the institutional breakfasts of bacon and mass-produced eggs simply were not palatable enough for me to eat.
In the meantime, the handsome Harley Davidson riding widower began to regard Club Poulet as a site akin to a chicken's Ritz Carlton. One of his friends was a chicken farmer who raised dozens of birds for eggs and for meat. Sometime in August, ten of them abruptly stopped laying eggs, and his answer was to kick them out of their coop.
"We'll take them," declared Jim.
"Yes," I agreed, not thinking about the consequences that would ensue.
The ten birds actually included a rooster. The flock took to roosting on the chicken farmer's patio deck, and would depart for free-ranging expeditions each morning in the woods that surrounded his home, leaving traces of their presence behind. The farmer began complaining of the residual excrement. Even as he did so, he noticed that the flock was shrinking. Foxes, coyotes, fishers, and weasels prowl the woods of this part of New York and birds with no coop to retreat to quickly become easy prey. These predators need to eat, of course, but their table manners are not dainty, to put it mildly. Now the farmer was faced with a triad of problems: hens that would not lay eggs; birds that spattered his deck with excrement; and wildlife that left behind carcasses along with the scat of their own.
When the widower mentioned our Ritz Carlton, the farmer was only too happy to separate from them. We arrived at his farm just as darkness was descending and, with his help, quietly scooped the four remaining hens and the rooster into the cat carriers we had stashed in our car.
Driving home, we noticed a stench. A smell that seemed a bit like spoiled chicken meat.
The next morning, one of the new hens laid an egg, and eagerly we tested it. Quickly, I spat it out. It tasted, well, a bit like spoiled  meat.
Research and queries to farmers, backyard chicken experts, our chicken-rearing next door neighbor, and the town vet confirmed our fears. One or more of the new hens had contracted either a bacterial infection, a virus, or both. Since we had not known not to integrate two different flocks immediately, it was likely that the disease (or diseases) had spread among the entire flock.

For the next two weeks, Jim and I lived on a sleepless regimen. Before the rooster crowed at the brink of dawn, we were in the coop, administering doses of a probiotic, an antibiotic, and a vitamin C booster to each bird. The medications had to be force fed, more or less, down the hatch. We repeated the regime when the birds had settled down for the night. Because it was early September, this meant that we were delivered the morning medication at 4:30 a.m. and the evening medication at about 9:30 p.m., leaving us very little time in the interim for sleep.
We survived, and so did the hens. Well, most of them. One from the original flock, Penny, contracted a cold and after wheezing for about 24 hours died. The rooster -- whom we had named 'Aina, after a cat from Hawai'i who had such a melodious meow that we used to call him the Town Crier -- half-carried and half-dragged her out of the coop in order to protect the rest of the flock.
In the new flock, the hens whom we had named Vera, Angie, Gina and Irene for reasons that might not be appropriate to explain to a general audience slowly got well, except for Vera who initially improved slowly, then started to slip. After a night of sequestering her in the barn and sitting with her administering reiki on her feathered body, we came to embrace another lesson in the meaning of Love, Compassion, and Kindness to animals. Letting her suffer in pain was not doing her any favors. I was away at work when Jim wrapped her up in a blanket and with tears choking his voice, told Vera he loved her. He turned her upside down, looked into her eyes, and quickly slit her throat with a sharp knife. His research had told him that this was the fastest, least painful way to slaughter a chicken in distress.

After Vera and Penny left, the older hens and newer hens seemed to come together, merging into a single flock. 'Aina the rooster oversaw the integration and seemed tacitly to accept the alpha-hen role played by Lucky, the biggest and perhaps oldest hen of the earlier flock. Through the day, the seven birds would scratch the ground, eat grubs, bugs, and worms; and feed on the mash and yogurt treats that Jim provided them. As night fell, 'Aina and Lucky would enter the coop together, position themselves on opposite ends of the roosting pole, and wait for the other hens to come in and crowd up against them.
All seemed well in Club Poulet until the fateful afternoon in early October. Jim came home from an errand in the country, and discovered that parts of Lucky were strewn all over the ground while the other hens and 'Aina were hiding deep in a bush. Scat around the fence provided a clue. A fisher had found its way into the chickens' Ritz Carlton and had gone after the hen that presumably had moved the slowest. So it seemed that free-range was not too different from Club Poulet. For wildlife, it could be a free-for-all.
The lesson learned, we kept as much of a watch on the hens as we could and thanked our cats for being good hunters in their own rights. The cats and chickens had found that they could co-habitate in Club Poulet because one of the attractors of the space was that it drew a number of birds. Chicken feed, snacks of yogurt and chopped up collard green stems will do that. The cats let the hens and 'Aina know they were friends, and happily lay in wait for the smaller birds and mice to arrive. The rodent control helped us as much as it helped the hens.

Winter passed, and Jim used his skills of charm and persistence to convince me that we could expand the flock to include an additional ten hens. They arrived in April just as the ground was thawing, and have been learning their way around Club Poulet.
But one of the roles that chickens play in the game of sustainable farming is to prepare previously un-farmable land for future planting. They do this simply by living on the land, scratching it up, eating the grubs and bugs that would infest vegetable crops, and leaving behind the excrement that ultimately provides some of the best natural fertilizer to soil. In the lesson book of treating animals with love, compassion, and kindness is a treatise on returning favors. At some point, land on which chickens range no longer holds the nutrients the birds need to thrive. So one needs to move them, which is why the landscape of Club Poulet changed for the chickens overnight.
If Club Poulet was the Ritz Carlton before, it might be Buckingham Palace now. Jim is grateful because he has several hundred fewer square feet of grass to mow, and both of us are looking forward to raking up the dirt in the old space that the chickens scratched up and allowing it a chance at a rebirth, of sorts. Two years from now, we will repeat the ritual, and in accordance with the principles of treating animals with love, compassion, and kindness, the landscape for the chickens once again will change.