I have long shown myself incapable of resisting any little whif of conformity. And so it is that on Thursday I drove to Amherst Farm Supply to pick up chicks: six buff orpingtons to be exact. Keeping chickens is quite of the moment. Here’s a picture of red hot chick on chick action.
Well a few of the chicks are on top of each other. I’ve got a red heat lamp on them because chicks like it hot. OK enough with that stupid pun.
I really do feel as though I’ve given in to a trend, but the truth is I’ve been wanting to add livestock to my garden for a very long time. The prospect has been daunting because I felt it meant that I would always be tied to my house as livestock needs to be cared for. A year or so ago my neighbors got a few chickens and we’ve been swapping animal care duties for a while. I realized that caring for 3 or 4 chickens and a few cats is not like handling 100 chickens, several pigs and some dairy cows. Chickens are relatively easy. At least that’s been my experience chicken sitting.
So I decided to get chickens. I can be a little impulsive about many things, but I really felt this needed some research. Instead of doing that, I looked at a few websites then impulsively chose to order buff orpingtons. Buff is the color — roughly yellow. Orpingtons are dual purpose birds; they’re pretty good layers and also pretty meaty. I ordered sexed birds, so they’re supposed to all be pullets. I get the feeling the magic of sexing birds at 1 day is prone to error, so I may have a cockerel or two. They will give me my money back but at roughly 2.50 a bird, that’s slim consolation. Roosters aren’t allowed in the city of northampton, and they don’t exactly fly under the radar — so to speak.
In the case of an error, I wanted a bird that someone would be happy to raise for a month or two then serve for dinner. Furthermore, hens generally only lay eggs well for two or three years. Then what you have is pets. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do it, but I want to give them to someone who can eat them. Thus, I chose dual purpose birds.
One little mistake in my planning:
It looks as though somebody may like these chickens.
As with all agricultural adventures, many things are out of my control. The chicks were supposed to arrive Friday 5/13. On Thursday at 3:15 I got a call saying that I needed to pick up my chicks by 4:30. I was in Amherst at work and my bike was my transport. I had to ride home, get the smog spewer and head to Amherst — in an hour and fifteen minutes. Fat chance. I called and the folks at Amherst Farm Supply were understanding, but told me to get a move on. I got there ten minutes late, but my chicks were waiting. They had what looked to be several thousand friends for company.
One of our first tasks was to give chicken lessons. First anatomy:
This is the end where poop comes out.
Next, how to hold your chick:
The younger of our indigent boarders can barely control himself, he loves them so much. Visions of Lenny:
Am I up to this challenge? Are the chickens? We’ll see.
What is outrageous is how quickly they grow. We received one day old chicks. They hadn’t been fed or watered and were pretty bony when we got them. After some lessons, they started eating and drinking up a storm. They threw empties out of their brooder all night and I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I put my foot down when they ordered wings.
But back to the growth, by morning they were clearly larger and fluffier. By tonight (48 hours old or less) they had feathers coming in. The boss has mentioned that chickens are kind of stupid several times. I don’t disagree, but compared to human infants they’re quite amazing: they walk, eat, peep, drink, poop and peck. Essentially they do everything they will ever do already. Eventually they’ll lay eggs, but other than that they’re born ready to go.
We are much more complicated creatures and are born more helpless than nearly any other organism. Our heads are too damned big and we have to be born early (I don’t think there’s a single woman who would really say that after nine months, but infants really aren’t ready compared to say foals or whale calves).
Now time to put on the dork hat. Humans and chickens both have a little over 20,000 genes. We have a genome that is much larger, but much of that doesn’t contain genes. Furthermore sixty percent of chicken genes have corresponding genes in humans. This is really astonishing. The human and chicken evolutionary lines diverged before dinosaurs ~ roughly 310 million years ago. Yet we still share 60% of our genes. We undoubtedly shared as much with the dinosaurs because chickens ( and all birds ) evolved from dinosaurs.
I wonder if T. Rex babies were this cute?
