Ain't No Messiah Here For Us Chickens

So on Christmas while folks were eating some of the animals that donated their feeding dish to be Baby Jesus' cradle, I got to thinking;  what is Christmas about for the animals?  They sacrifice more than their place settings.  Now their lives and even the integrity of their genetic codes are on the line.  Some of them give us hearts or bits of hearts so that we can continue playing golf and shopping.
Buck and the girls received cat food [ let's not get started on what goes into making cat food ] grapes, apples, mixed salad greens, dried fruits and plenty of nuts, but is that compensation for the ravaging havoc we inflict on them as a slave species?
The weather was nasty, a beak or two poked out for a sniff was as far as anyone would go.
Last winter, Buck lured his girls out to forage when it was bitter, icy and even if there was some snow, but now they have gotten used to a warm coop where food doesn't have to be worked for and greens get home delivery.  Today, I shoveled a path for them, put some treats on the ground and went away, assuming they'd come out eventually.  Hours went by, I could hear them in the coop jockeying for prime position in the nesting boxes - I heard Buck trying coax one or the other of them into giving him a little sugar.  Then I heard the "let's get ready to roost" chatter.
They are no different from anyone else in the winter who doesn't want to go out tearing up the slopes on slats or blades, or tennis rackets.  In the move toward more efficiency, or as my family would characterize it, laziness, Even chickens like to do what makes the most sense.  Why make work for themselves?  Only in chickens, it isn't considered a sin, therefore, no salvation is needed, and no Savior.......- unless you are a battery hen.

S.A.D. Chicken

In the very small, [but I am certain, festooned with multiple ridges] brain of Buck, the weather is my fault, and I must pay.
I have stepped up the bribes.
It has been rainy, or cold, or windy, so the coop got cleaned on the first nice day.  I was told in pecks of one syllable;
"The eggs are not your beeswax."
"Keep your hands off the feeding tray and don't touch the water dispenser." he advised.
"Get away from that door" he suggested.
Later after Buck was finished marching around getting all the girls in before dark I made the mistake of being too near their little door before he had roosted.  Ka-THUMP!  I heard as he leapt down, rushing for the door, planting a well aimed snap on the web of my hand.
He has been bad tempered lately.
I see a pattern here; he goes along for awhile, pretending not to notice me walking back and forth to the car, not turning an eye toward any red object I might have in hand until we have had a few days of rain.  The lack of sun acts on him like a depressant.
He becomes moody.
He broods on prior injustices.
He remembers he was once a proud velociraptor.
Though his brothers and comrades have been put to death - rolled in batter made from their children and run through the fryer, he has survived.  He is alive for a reason, and there are days when he takes up the flag of Avian Liberation in his beak with cold determination.
He will not listen to reason.
He is not swayed by grapes.
He will stop to eat them but then fortified with their sweet juice, remembers the task at hand.
The humans must pay.
Three of the New Girls - New Pearl, Stella and Golda don't understand that there is a revolution going on.  When I come out into their yard, they run over and stand very close to my shoes looking hopeful.  They allow me to scratch their stomachs, to pick them up - they have even been willing to sit on my shoulder.  Buck looks up in horror.  

Update......

In the 2 month hiatus there have been some changes.  Just as I was feeling smug and superior about having kept my chickens in one flock for as long as I had, I lost 2 in the space of a week.  I later found out that my neighbor who has a small flock about 1/2 of a mile away had lost several of hers to fisher cats.  The fishers had been prying the metal siding off her coop to get at her hens, and she dealt with it by moving the hens to a friend's house until the fisher went looking elsewhere for dinner.  She told me she had been unsuccessful in trapping the beast and asked if I had been losing chickens.  I would have appreciated the warning in advance, but as it was, I lost Mae and Pearl leaving Buck with 2 ladies.  I was going to see how that went, but then a friend [the one who landed me with Buck in the first place] told me about a man who wanted to cull his flock of some hens, and sucker that I am, figuring that taking care of Buck and 2 girls is no different from 6, went to the other side of the Merrimac river to collect 2 Delawares, 1 Buff Orphington and 1 barred Plymouth.  Very charming girls, beautiful and well kept, and introduced them to the coop.
This time I tried to be responsible and divided the coop w/some chicken wire so that the new girls could be viewed and criticized by the established hens without being picked on.  That worked the first night.
The second night I checked on them, and the Plymouth [Zebra] was muscling over the top of the fence to get closer to Buck, and Stella, one of the Delawares was squeezing around the edge through the tunnel of nesting boxes with the same purpose in mind.  Buck sat quietly on his perch eyes half closed, enjoying the attention.
Day 3, I gave up and tore out the netting while the chickens formed into a flock and roamed around the yard, ruining what was left of my perennials and pushing all the piles of raked leaves back on to the walk.
Buck had been docile during the time of only having 2 hens to bully and pester, but now with more he is busy running back and forth,  keeping them in line, making sure they stay together and making sure I understand that he is taking no nonsense from me.  The first couple of evenings, I was getting the chickens in, and he made it very clear to me that I was interfering.  He seemed to take it personally that I was telling him how to do his job, and once he turned and looked at me, unmistakably telling me so.  Then he bit my shoes, ignored me as he went back to work getting the girls in to the coop.
All the same, I have since then had an evening or two when I have had to pick up 'New Pearl' and 'Golda'  to put them in to the coop because they were standing around finishing up a cigarette and chatting as it was getting dark.
After 1 1/2 years I have realized that I am a slave to the chickens.  They have destroyed what yard I had, left fewmets all over the place and gnawed my herbs into oblivion, yet I still find them charming, and prefer their singing and chatter to  almost any gathering of humans.  Buck goes through periods of calm, and just when I relax and think he's mellowed, he lets me know what's what.... Then we have to play " Who's the Bitch?".

chicken jail

As the weather slides into seasonal change like an out of control car, I'm trying to grab every minute of every portion of every day that has something to recommend it.
The chickens feel the same.
They loiter longer than they should in the yard, and stay awake talking until it is completely dark.  The last few days I have had to be somewhere that made it impossible for me to get back here and close up the hen house, so my only choice has been to keep them in all day and bribe them with treats.  This morning I opened the door, and they all assumed the same posture.  Leaning their weight forward on their bodies, extending their necks and peering at me carefully with one eye.
"You've got to be kidding me"  they say.
"What could be more important than my need to ruin the landscape?"  they ask.
Buck tries to grab my face as I refresh their water and put down a bowl of lettuce and apples for them.
I am, however, wearing a helmet and visor, so all he gets is a sort of percussive feeling down his beak.  Not nearly as satisfying as warm flesh, I hope.
One recent dusk, I lost another hen, Mae who always roosted right next to Buck, [which goes to show that there's always some woman who will like any man, no matter how pushy he is] but the hens I still have always get as far away from him as possible.  I have started scattering some of the morning food under the edge of the coop so that they may have breakfast without that lout climbing all over them as they are buttering their toast.  The result, Barbie's feathers are coming back, as is her confidence.
I still have Pearl, my favorite, best chicken because though she is little, she beats out the others for resourcefulness and independence.
After a bit more than a year, my opinion is that keeping chickens in a medium security facility is disappointing.  This time of year brings out the motivation in the larger predators,  the raccoons [dwarf bears] have torn the doors off the shed in order to investigate empty jars and containers, somebody grabbed Mae, and must have been sharp about it, because I never heard a thing.  Aside from the chicken increasing their time pressed up against the side of the house, or perching on my bicycle on the porch, they have not expressed grief or opinions.
I don't know what's next, but I predict a bad tempered chicken coming out of the coop in the morning tomorrow if the weather reports are correct, and we have a nice day.  I'd better have a broom.

tyrant chicken.

Buck has been in the yard for over a year now, and rarely attacks me anymore.
The mark I have on my leg from his last gratuitous assault has faded nearly completely.  He has utterly destroyed the broom, though.  He can be standing around, gurgling and chuckling to his girls but if he sees that thing from the corner of his eye, his mental state blossoms from peace and contentment to rage and revenge.
Some months ago I tracked down Buck's previous owner who characterized him as an evil chicken who wouldn't allow anyone in the coop unless they had a broom for protection.  I find that if I have a broom, Buck is busy moving heaven to see that the broom stays away from the coop.

When I pull my car into the yard, Buck comes running excitedly over, hoping for a treat.  If I'm carrying a bag, he will attack it, but I'm pretty sure he's hoping to poke a hole is something that will then spill on the ground.  He calls the hens over in a congenial tone, which is not the warlike one he uses when he believes he's protecting them.
My daughter is still afraid of him, and won't go outside without the dog or me to stand between her and the dangerous beak.

Having firmly established his reputation as a force to be reckoned with, he is free to strut around the yard importantly and proclaim himself the master of all anyone surveys.
I know men like that.....

Chicken Purgatory

Bette had been coming out of the coop and wandering at the outer periphery of the flock.  Having lost her alpha status, she lost the heart to muscle in.  She avoided the others, and they acted in a way that drove her off by herself. What I probably should have done was what a friend suggested; taking her inside and turning her into a pet chicken instead of the co-housing members the others are.  I am allergic to chickens, however, and having a summer of battling my hysterical immune system, I was reluctant to invite another crisis.  Excuses.
Every night as the others went in to roost, I looked around for her.  She would not go in to the safety of the coop that she'd refused to leave for the first 10 days after her attack.  She was finding places further away from everyone and became harder to find.
Two nights ago, I couldn't find her.
Up to that point, she gave herself away by talking to herself before going to sleep.  As someone who spends possibly way too much time alone, I know that it is easy to start talking to one's selves out loud.  She could have been doing that.  She could have been saying prayers.
She could have been asking the great clawed and furry gods of death to come and finish the job.
She escaped them once, but life wasn't what it once was, and she was hostage to the region in between a good chicken's life and someone's digestive tract.
Some people who have had near death experiences say they no longer fear death, and that they were even reluctant to return to finish this life.
Last night I couldn't find her.  It was dusk, and the beak count was 5, and I circled the house and the yard hoping to hear her evening chatter, but no clucking was going on, no sound at all.
The remaining girls, now back to bridge club numbers have been treating her as though she were already gone for some time now.  Chickens seem to be able to enjoy what is going on, or wait patiently until it is over with.  They engage with their entire hearts and attention to the moment.  The main flock knew something was wrong with Bette, and that it wasn't going to turn around.
There are events which mark us, and for who knows how long, render us as carriers if it's grief, vessels if joy.
Grave illness changes us, profound disappointment, trauma - even a turn of great good luck.  People have been posting on FB how our thinking creates reality, but I recoil from that, it is too obvious to me that life creates us, and the spectrum of response we have to life is all we have to work with, and that spectrum has precious few answers.
For a grieving hen, it's a simple thing.  When you can't be part of the flock, you can be part of the food chain.

Chicken Catcher

In the Northern Latitudes, in the early days of rail travel, there was a shovel-like affair attached to the front of the engine called a cow-catcher.  It is this principle that I employ in persuading everyone that indeed, it is time to roost.  

Every so often the AA's decided to stay up late.  I have tried to find a correspondence between astrological cycles and this behaviour; no dice.  It might be meteorological.  I notice their conversations change with the barometer.

So, back to the chicken catching, I have a piece of the fence that I wrap around myself like an apron or long skirt of dubious couture to prevent more bruising of the type Buck might be in the mood to inflict if he sees no impediment to doing so. 

 If I turn the apron around, so that from the hen's side it's convex, it appears to them that they will be scooped up like the actors in Soylent Green, and they hurry up the ramp.

Buck is the only one I have to push along.  He side-steps, he trips over the obstacles in back of him that he cannot see. He protests.  He tries to get a piece of me.  

Once in, I hear him grumbling to his ladies, and their responses of sympathy ....rough translation: "Yes, dear.....".

I suspect they listen to his grievances only partially, knowing that it is politic to pretend to care about the tyrant's wounded ego, knowing when he has made his point, he will move on to other things.  "Yes, dear..."  

I know women like that.