The Mad Hen

A farmer has certain duties and responsibilities. He/she, having chosen to have livestock, has a duty to care for them properly, to make sure they have food and fresh water, a nice cosy place to live and a decent quality of life. In order to be a successful farmer, however, there are other duties too, things we don't like to talk about so much. For example, a hog farmer, however much she loves her pigs, still, at the end of the day, has to send those wonderful little characters off for slaughter, a dairy farmer has to remove the calf from its mother at a very young age and start artificially feeding it, and an egg producer has to cull the old unproductive birds.

We, at the Round House Farm, do pretty well with the care of our animals. No one could say they are in the least bit neglected. In fact, they get their breakfast and supper well before we do, most days. But it is the other aspect of livestock farming we have more trouble with. Sure, we did manage to send the piggy-wiggies off to end up in the freezer, but not without some qualms and regrets. The calf, though, is still, at 8 months of age, nursing from his mother, a situation we justify by saying that it means we only have to milk once a day. No, the real problem lies with the hens.

Laying hens are very productive in their first year of laying, often laying an egg every single day. By the second year it is down to one every second day, and by the third, well, it is whenever they feel like it. We don't run a battery hen production line. Our hens become a bit like pets- we name many of them and know their characters- and it is hard to say that just because they are not laying an optimum number of eggs that we are going to prematurely end their lives. But perhaps we carry it a bit too far.

Our friend, Jo-Ann had a few hens. One day last summer she called and said that one of the hens was being badly bullied by the others. Hens are like that. They are like nasty little kids in the playground. If one of their group shows a sign of weakness or the fatal flaw of being 'different', they begin to peck at it and pick on it. We all been there as kids, either at the giving or receiving end. Anyway, she suggested that we try her with our flock- as we have more birds and they are used to new ones coming in. It was a disaster for the poor little hen. Not only was she being pecked to death, but she was not used to going outside, so she would huddle in the hen house, miserably picking up a few crumbs of food. We will have to get rid of her, we thought. Let's see if she gets along with Peggy's hens. No luck. The pathetic little creature was becoming more and more bald, and Peggy didn't want the responsibility. So back she came to us.

We put her in the big barn, where, it being summer, no animals were living. We fed her inside, and she had her favourite spots to roost. She laid a few eggs and clucked around quite happily, coming out to greet us each time we came into the barn. She had access to the outside, but seldom ventured beyond the threshold, except the times she disappeared. No sign of her in the barn and it was dusk. I called. None of her usual hen noises. I went to look outside around the barn, thinking I might just find a pile of feathers, all that is left after some predator carried her off. I was just about to give up when I saw a silhouette in the distance, on the other side of the horse arena. She was sitting, huddled up, obviously lost. I tucked her under my arm and carried her back to the safety of the barn. This happened a couple more times in the course of the summer and each time we thought, she is just a very dumb bird. We took to calling her "Mad Hen", assuming she was agoraphobic as well as a bit mentally deficient.

This week we discovered a reason for all her problems. She has cataracts. One eye is very cloudy and she has no vision in it and the other is starting to go the same way. This explains why she never cleans up the food pellets that have spilt around her dish, why she gets lost outside and probably why the other hens picked on her. So here we have a half blind hen. Really we should do the proper farmer thing and end her life. I mean, what kind of farmer keeps an old blind hen? But we have grown very fond of her. She appears to be affectionate and interested in seeing people. She is not doing anyone any harm there, wandering around the barn. And now she has a buddy- one of the Light Sussex hens who Louise found outside the hen house looking very bedraggled and sorry for herself. They seem to get along quite well, though Mad Hen was a bit agitated at first, perhaps remembering her poor treatment from the other hens, perhaps just not wanting to share her safe haven with anyone else. So we will keep her for now, until her disability prevents her from enjoying her life, or until we get up the courage to do what a farmer really should do- get rid of the unproductive stock.

Rituals

Another grey day. The slush from last night's little snow squall remains on the ground, making walking over the icy driveway to the barn carrying buckets of water for Buttercup into an extreme sport. But it is February and Groundhog Day has come and gone. Before we know it, it will be mapling time and Westchester will have its annual pancake supper. Our seed group meets next weekend to order our seeds for the garden and we are planning our order of spring chickens- or chicks actually. All the familiar rituals of spring.

For the past 2-3 years a few of us have gotten together to order from the seed catalogues. Oh, the seed catalogues! Harbingers of spring. Glossy purveyors of hope. The glorious vegetables; the exotic foot long beans, Japanese radishes, okra, eggplant, 50 varieties of tomatoes, greens, celeriac, corn, -and the flowers; climbing, blossoming, hummingbird and butterfly attracting- our garden is going to be wonderful! (several months later, when the bugs and weeds have had their way, a very different reality will be recognized)

Now on to the fowl. This year we are ordering some heritage breeds of poultry. Our old hens are getting very old indeed. We worked out the other day that aside from the 2 young hens hatched this summer, the rest of our flock is over five years old. Considering commercial laying operations 'retire' their hens after one year, ours are very elderly indeed. In fact this winter, with 25 layers, we are lucky to find one egg in the nesting box each day. One of the most expensive eggs in the world. Time for new birds.

For years we have had some Araucana mixes from our friend Harris McCormick. Harris' birds are cute and sprightly, a mix of the Araucana and some kind of bantam. They lay lovely little blue eggs, mostly only in the summer, but we can put up with that. What is harder to take is the fact that they really don't like laying in the nesting boxes. No, they much prefer using clumps of weeds or grass. Many a time we have come across an attractive clutch of blue eggs nestled under a shrub, waiting for their mother to go broody and start sitting on them. Occasionally we are even slower finding them and the mother is half way through incubating them. Once we were even later than that and we lifted the broody hen to move her and her eggs to a safer place only to find several fluffy chicks and more eggs hatching. This renegade hatching of babies would not be such a problem, except we are really trying to end the bantamX line of birds, hoping to actually get some of the eggs our hens lay.

So this year we decided to do some research and buy some varieties of hens for their egg laying abilities and characters as well as their looks. So many options! We do want some more blue egg layers, but let's go for the purebreds. We'd like some of those Marans that lay very dark brown eggs, some Buff Orpingtons who are lovely, fat, gentle hens that lay well in the winter, some Chanteclers, the old Quebec breed, and... well, the list goes on. But our hen house is small, so decisions have to be made. Choose only a few of each and kill off the old girls, or... build a bigger hen house. Time will tell.

Then there are the turkeys. For the past couple of years we have raised a few turkeys. Kept a couple for ourselves and sold the rest to friends. Turkeys are great birds. They travel in a herd (flock, I suppose). They are curious and like to follow us around, or follow the dogs, cats, horses, whatever. And they are very easy to keep. They have been very popular and very tasty, but we haven't been very happy raising those big white birds that are used commercially. They have their beaks trimmed, which we are dead set against, are started on antibiotic laden food and as importantly, are kind of ugly. We want pretty ones, the old fashioned Pilgrim kind of turkeys. So we will order some of them. Minimum order 15. Oh well, we'll find space. The larger varieties of turkeys don't breed naturally but John Dynesveld says he knows how to do AI with turkeys and is trying to convince us to keep a breeding pair. We are not sure that is such a great idea, but are easily swayed so we may well end up with a permanent pair of turkeys.

For years now, I have thought how nice it would be to have a goose at Christmas. What could be more traditional? Louise has been very much opposed, remembering the attack geese her father kept some years ago. But with all this searching through hatcheries, we have found a nice variety of geese- the Embden. They are meant to be quite gentle and will eat all the grass on your lawn- no more lawn mowing- and Christmas dinner to boot. What more could a person want?

Spring is looking very promising.