Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Since I have gotten chickens again, I feel invited to be out in the yard,  As I tear out a couple of years worth of black raspberries, horsetail, grapes, invasive roses, autumn olive and pretty much every other weed that is happy to choke out the things I selected to plant over the years, I think of the saying many hands make light work.  In this case, it is many beaks.  The chickens follow me around cheerfully, carefully examining everything I pull up and call to each other as they find things of interest; grapes, chickweed, fallen apples, peaches that are worthless to anyone but chickens and of course, bugs.
Chickens are carnivores, so getting "grain fed" chicken or chickens who are layers but don't ever get to forage means less healthy chickens.  The eggs my girls donate are the best I have ever known.  The shells are hard.  The inner membrane doesn't break easily.  The yolks are a rich yellow/orange, the whites hold together- the consistency of jellyfish.
It comforts me to have them follow me around, asking questions, offering opinions, gossiping about the cat, and probably me, but never by name, because they don't want to hurt my feelings.  
It is good to come home and have someone happy to see me, as the chickens always are.  If I'm not careful they will go for walks with me, which, considering the predator level around here might not be such a great idea.
When I go across the road to do anything, they look up from flipping leaves and offering opinions on the quality of caterpillar, and run over to where I am, surround me and look up expectantly.  "got any grapes?''
Sometimes, they consent to being picked up and put on my shoulder, where they can fly down to the ground again.  I know they consent because after they land they come back for a second time, like a child being asked to be tossed into the air again. And again....
It is an act of hope to have a garden in times as uncertain and perilous as these.  Ripping out the snarly invasion of plants that like the soil the way it is, I hold a vision of another year.  I expect the world to still be a place where a garden is a possibility, where the woods will be lively enough that I will be hanging old cd's on strings, scrounging materials for a greenhouse and selecting seeds over the winter.  It means I am seeing a life connected to life, honoring death, decay failure; blossoming, fruiting and maybe seeding if I can get seeds that Monsanto has not messed with.  It means I believe my chickens will make it through a winter here and not all get carried off by someone with hungry babies to feed.
The Buddhists say that hope is a trick like regret.
Though they dance together, only one of them can fly.

no men

Failing the presence of a rooster to lead them around the yard pointing out the dead mice, struggling insects and a patch of violets not yet ripped out by the roots the girls stay together, and stick close to the house.
This is the first batch of hens who are interested in spending the entire day either under the house or roosting on frames in the cellar.  They will ascend to their coop, but will not go down the stairs in the morning, so I guess I'd better come up with a more attractive ramp.   They look at me as though I had asked them to balance on a narrow ledge in stilettos, which is a fair assessment.  A set of steps I found at the dump is their ramp, and it is probably a little too much to deal with first thing in the morning.  Unlike hens of days passed, they have avoided the garden, which to be fair has been allowed to get overgrown with every weed in the Northeast except the edible ones, and looks like a place predators might be lying in wait.
My mother was a terrific gardener;  I tend to get rashes and lose interest, but some transit of the great celestial beings caught me in their vortex today and I thought if I can't have a garden this year, I can at least get it set up for the next.  After I had ripped out enough space to attract interest, the hens came and joined me, happily scratching around for snacks, and I remembered that being in the yard with chickens is a joy.
 I love having people around who are glad to see me, and chickens always are. They are easily bribed with grapes and whole wheat bread, and the alpha always runs over and asks to be picked up.  At least, I choose to interpret it that way, she runs over and crouches, seems to like being scratched under the wings, and I'm sorry if she is disappointed by being picked up to sit on my shoulder for a second before flying back to her kind, but it's the best I can do.
At night, I used to do a beak check when I had a big coop, but this one is tiny and even though there is enough room for them to spread out over the 2 perches, they clump together in a tight knot and I have to reach in and count bodies to make sure no independent thinker is sleeping in the hay bales under the house.
The girls sing to each other, it reminds me of middle school when the only good thing was singing and though I haven't learned the verses yet, I can join in on the chorus.

fourth day....

Last night I went out to check on the girls, to make sure they had gone to roost, and they had, but had decided that access to the perches in the wire dog crate were better than clumping together safely in the plastic one.
I decided to chance it, because in the past, it has taken the local street gangs about a week before they noticed that I had chickens in the yard, and they tend to hunt less in the pouring rain.
My irresponsibility worked out, there were still 6 girls this morning, and so I let them out to forage, but they immediately headed for the forsythia and went to sleep in it.
A friend of mine who was a middle school teacher told me once that every class had a completely different group personality, and I am finding it to be true of groups of chickens too.  This bunch of hens is more low key than I expected.  They landed in the yard and have accepted everything without protest and have exhibited a general lack of adventurous spirit.  In the past, I have had fliers, escape artists and explorers, but these are thoughtful, companionable and quiet.  There might be more conversation when I find a rooster.
They are convincing me that they are to be named after authors instead of goddesses.... Jane, Charlotte, Emily, Alice, Maya Margaret and Zadie.

Chickens, part 3

3 nights of new chickens, who are both smarter and more insistent than they looked when riding home in the box.
First night, they slept in a crate on the front porch,
but I had forgotten how messy and smelly chickens can be in a closed room.
Next day I moved them outside, hoping to get them used to where their coop will be when I put it together, added a plastic dog crate to the wire one so that they could have a safe place to sleep and more room to spread out.
Day 3 I let them out to wander the yard a bit, they headed directly for the porch and mooned about in a rhododendron bush in front of it all day.
Today it is raining, and they are under tarps and umbrellas in the makeshit coop, this is going to be the story for about another 10 days.
It hasn't taken long for them to associate me with food.  I am realizing how incompetent having animals that depend on regularity makes me feel.
and as for names, well, they are probably going to be named for goddesses.

Chic Insomnia

So, I put the heat lamp into the coop and an hour later it was off, dead, no explanation.  The weather report was gleefully predicting overnight weather to compete with ice9, so alternatives had to be put in place.   I thought of going up to the storage space and hauling out the giant dog crate.  I thought if I put it in the cellar and could persuade them to stay there for the night, they'd be more comfortable but they are very suspicious of the cellar.  It must look to them like a place chickens go and don't come back.
What I did have was a gro light, so I replaced the burnt out heat bulb with that, and the girls immediately perked up and started an excited conversation among themselves, interrupting each other, losing their train of thought, changing the subject, shouting one another down.
Well. [I thought] at least they won't freeze to death....
The next morning they were awake and staring off into the distance like Hari Krishna devotees.
There were extra eggs in the bin, though.
Off to the hardware store to buy another heat lamp and an exterior grade fixture.  Worry about chickens being burned to death while captive were put at bay by the salesman who used to share his yard with chickens himself, and was too nice and gentle a  person for me to admit to having inadvertently murdered babychicks a couple of summers ago using a heat lamp.  I left with my reputation in tact and set up the light in the coop.
This worked, I woke up a few times in the night to look out my window to make sure there hadn't been a conflagration during the night, and this morning all was ticket-boo.
I went down to check on their water, and they had fouled it more than usual pushing each other around for the privilege of roosting on top of the heated container.  The were happy to see me though, and one jumped up on my arm, sat down and did not wish to leave.  I will assume, knowing how Avian Americans regard us featherless types as a nod to my body warmth and nothing more.

Freezer Burn

I suppose it is the sun that makes the girls feel as though it is worth putting a beak outside the coop, that and how tired they are of each other all ready and it's only January 7th.  "Two more months of inside living" I tell them, and they fix me with an unmoving avian gaze.  "brwaaaa...."  they mutter amongst themselves as though they think I don't know what they mean.
I bought a new heater for the coop this year; the one from years past made an interesting noise accompanied by a flash followed by some flickering before the cord melted at the point where it plugged into the exterior grade extension cord.
The new heater does not work.
The temperatures are predicted to be -30 or so tonight, I don't remember if that includes windchill, but who cares?  It's too damned cold, and I woke up every hour last night wondering if I was going to find chickens gone tits up in the morning.
They were happy to see me, surged around asking for treats, glad of the leftover rice, tactfully hiding the bits of cabbage under other bits of cabbage and making cheerful sounds.
How they can do this is beyond my understanding.  I just want to swath myself in electric blankets and sit somewhere with a nice book where nobody will ask me any questions for about a year.  Well... at least until it warms up a bit.
Remembering the painful and horrifying experience of killing baby chickens with a heat lamp, I was worried about putting one up again, but it's that or frozen chickens, so I'm hoping it is far enough away from them to not be a hazard, but enough to take the worst chill off for these Reds who are supposed to be winter hardy.  That might mean winter, but I don't think it means the kind of winters we are having lately, or this particular week.  The Avian Americans don't complain much or for long, but that doesn't mean they don't suffer.  My hope for this week is that they can get through it without tragedy as well as discomfort.

Cold Chicken

It is too much to hope for a mild winter after the last few days, and counting our blessings here that we are not in Buffalo [ just a little schadenfreude going on…] with a 5' snow fall and more to come.  Here it has just been damned cold, too damned cold for just before Thanksgiving, and the hens' first winter.  Maeve, Magda, Martha, Minerva, Morgan & Mary don't know what any of this means yet, having only hatched out of a nice warm nest 6 months ago, but Mista Woosta is coming up on his 3rd round, so his behavior might be understandable.
A cold, grey and nasty morning, frozen everything and the girls are still motivated to turn over any leaf possible to see if there's something they missed yesterday, he comes out briefly has a look around, nails a hen or two and goes back to the perch until the sun has thawed the air out a little more.
By noon, the girls are racing around, being followed at a stately pace by their not very motivated caretaker.
 If there's enough sun, they will clump together under a tree, being indistinguishable from the leaves and rouse themselves only if they see me, whom they have come to associate with the kinds of food they can't find on their own.
Candy bars, ice cream, cake and other specialties.
The heater in the coop has died, and I'm hoping the new one gets here soon.  Though I am told that chickens can take it, I can't sit here in a warm house knowing I have birds who are re-enacting Jane Eyre only a few feet away.