Chicken and Egg - Janice Cole [31]
Cleo came next. She’d grown into a gentle, sweet little girl who still loved to be cuddled. Her coloring had changed as she grew, and she had lost the sophisticated Egyptian look, but she was still quite regal, with golden feathers accented with black. She was usually the odd girl out of the tight clique formed by Roxanne and Lulu, but she didn’t seem to mind as she dutifully took her place two steps behind the other two.
Crazy Lulu was still the difficult chick—kind of like having a teenager, except worse. She thought her job was to annoy me. When treats were given out, Lulu let me know that she would rather starve than come close and risk being petted or caught. I had thoughts about giving her away because she was such a nuisance. As I watched the girls gobble their layer feed and breakfast treat of yogurt, it was hard to believe these grown chickens were once the day-old peeps that fit into the palm of my hand when I brought them home that Saturday in March.
Petunia, our older cat, took to the chicks with a youthful enthusiasm. She was enthralled with the new creatures that had invaded her turf and watched them intently. When the chickens finally moved outside, Petunia joined in their fun. She’d run to the corner of the yard, where they stood scratching and pecking, and she’d stand in the group munching blades of grass. She kept to the edge of the flock, presumably knowing she was last in the pecking order. When they moved, she moved. When something distracted the group and off they ran in unison toward the opposite side of the yard, there went Petunia, holding up the rear.
Even when she grew tired and stopped running with the chicks, she still came to sit next to me when Cleo was in my lap. I felt quite honored as I petted Petunia the cat with one hand and Cleo the chick with the other.
* * *
That first summer was the year of the great chicken migration. The chickens were vagabonds, never staying in the same place for more than a week. They didn’t travel far, just from one end of the yard to the other, along with their coop, but that summer they experienced life from many vantage points.
The chicks’ journey started when the coop became a chicken tractor. The image of chickens driving a tractor—mowing, tilling, and planting—of course is over the top. But there is some basis in truth when you see the effect a chicken coop can have on a yard. A chicken tractor, also known as an ark, is much more low-tech than its name implies; it’s merely a mobile coop or grazing pen without a floor. The chickens peck and scratch, thereby tilling the ground; eat the bugs and weeds; and recycle it all back in the form of fertilizer. When the chickens finish with one area, you simply move them to another, and quite soon everything has been weeded, debugged, and fertilized. The hens are protected and happy and the yard is enriched. Or so the theory goes.
At the time I thought I was simply moving the coop. It wasn’t until much later that I found out I was in the forefront of the chicken movement and what I had was a chicken tractor. And the chickens were driving.
My chickens migrated like wildebeests all summer long. The nifty little plastic Eglu has an attached run that’s open to the ground, and the entire unit can be easily moved—or at least Omlet, the coop company, so claims. Each weekend, after the weekly coop cleaning, I’d drag the whole thing to the other end of the yard looking for a stable and level area on which to set it down. Everything looks different when you lie on your stomach to get a chick’s perspective. Except for the cleaning, the backbreaking hauling, and the twisted run that had to be stomped back in place each time, the system worked great—for the first couple of weeks.
I frankly admit my decision to turn the chickens into migratory birds had nothing to do with the well-being of the chicks. It had everything to do with the lawn. I worried that if the coop stayed