Chicken and Egg - Janice Cole [21]
I finally found Cleo quivering in a corner, where she gratefully let me close my hand around her to carry her away. The cats watched with interest as I brushed her off and gently placed her in the safety of the plastic tub.
The chicks ate ravenously and grew quickly, seeming to double in size week by week. Obviously, what goes in needs to come out, and the pine shavings used for bedding needed constant changing. At first I took to my new barnyard chores with the enthusiasm of the newly converted. But the chores quickly grew tiresome—a never-ending cycle. The baby chicks rapidly grew feathers and wings and practiced flying in the limited space of their hangar. The brooder was definitely becoming too small. They were ready to be outdoors, but the weather refused to warm up.
I had read about someone who rigged up a teeter-totter in their brooder to keep their chicks entertained, but their brooder was the size of a kiddy swimming pool. Mine was the size of a double kitchen sink. I tried adding a few small toys, such as balls, but they weren’t amused. What did amuse them was water.
The simple watering device in the brooder was designed for small chicks; it was a plastic bottle that sat upside down on a wider base. The base was small, so tiny chicks couldn’t crawl in, get wet, or even drown. Now that they were bigger, however, my chicks found they could move the tube and knock it over. It became a game they played every night.
I stoically did my chores daily, cleaning, mucking, and feeding endlessly, but I also started referring to them under my breath as “those damn dirty chicks.” I’m not a stoic person by nature, so putting on a stiff upper lip was getting me down.
To top it off, I began suspecting that Marty was beginning to enjoy the girls. He went out of his way to act uninterested, but while I was in another room, I’d hear him talking baby talk to the chicks. I should have been glad, but maybe I didn’t really want to share the girls, now that I’d had them to myself. Or maybe it was because he also started checking up on me, as in, “Did you feed the girls today?” or “Do you think their heat is too high?” And the worst, “Isn’t it about time to change their bedding?” Paranoia started in as I thought, “He truly wanted these chickens and only pretended not to because he just didn’t want the extra work.” I felt like the Little Red Hen, my favorite story when I was growing up. No one wanted to help her grow the wheat and bake the bread, but everyone wanted to eat it. “Guess who will be first up when the eggs start rolling out?” I muttered to myself.
It soon became evident why chickens do not make good house pets. They were ready to start running outside, but unfortunately, the weather wouldn’t cooperate. As a born-and-bred Northerner who loves the changing seasons, I began to envy those in warmer climates. Once-a-day cleanings were no longer enough, and our house was starting to smell like a barnyard. They weren’t going to produce eggs for another three to four months. Maybe I should have gone for the ready-to-lay hens.
Raising chicks is a little like raising kids; if can you get them into adulthood unscathed, you’ve done a good job. But, as with raising children, most of the time you don’t know what you’re doing, so you do what you can and hope for the best. To everyone’s relief, the girls finally moved outside in May. They were no longer baby chicks; they’d grown into gangling teenagers called pullets and were settling nicely into their coop and the surrounding yard. My reluctant partner began more openly enjoying them from a distance as we sat on the deck in the evenings with a couple of glasses of wine, watching