Fowl fare!

While I read contest results, here's a little something for you! It's by blog reader Karl Henwood.

    My family got chickens when I was maybe eight. We actually lived deep in suburbia where the home owners association explicitly forbid the keeping of poultry, so it was very much an act of wild rebellion. Also, while my mom had grown up on a farm, she hadn't kept any hens for about 30 years and certainly not as pets. That lead to a certain amount of trial and error in mastering the art of the backyard chicken, and by far the most embarrassing moment came in the second year of the project.

    The first four hens we got presented no issues. An Australorp, a Barred Rock, and two Buff Orpingtons gleefully settled into a life of annihilating the lawn and complaining constantly as it the way of their kind. We had eggs, there wasn't a spider on the back of the house below 24 inches, and life was good. We gave eggs to our friends, our neighbors, and especially Willy the postman who greatly missed fresh eggs since he'd grown up on a farm in rural Mississippi where fresh eggs were one of the few real niceties available.

    But then, at the start of the second year, my sister learned about these cool chickens called Ameracuanas that laid green or blue eggs. Mom agreed to expand the flock, so we went to the local hatchery and purchased two chicks from the bin marked "hens." My sister named them Veronica and Betty after the characters from the Archie comic. Since one of our mature hens had gone broody a couple days before we stuffed the chicks under her in the dead of night. Chickens not being great at math, she happily overlooked the fact that she'd only been incubating her eggs for 72 hours and settled into raising her new babies.

    But after a few weeks we noticed that Betty wasn't behaving quite right. Or looking quite right. She was bigger than Ronnie, and angrier, and her comb was much taller, and she was growing such splendid feathers... So we asked the hatchery, and they said the chicken-sexing process was more an art than a science so it was entirely possible we'd gotten a rooster by mistake. This development was greeted with great anxiety by my sister and I; we could get away with hens, but if a rooster started crowing from our back yard the home owners association was going to figure out our terrible secret pretty damn quick. Plus Betty was quite a sociable chicken, always game to sit on your lap and eat snacks or just get petted. There were moments when I could almost imagine a sort of chickenish affection behind those googly eyes instead of just ravenous hunger and frustration.

    So we watched and waited, dread growing along with Betty's comb and plumage. By the fifth month Betty was looking a lot like this majestic beast.

    It was getting hard to deny that we needed to find him a new home. But he wasn't crowing and mom was fond of him too, and she still wasn't willing to concede that he might not be just a very fancy hen. So she decided to get a second opinion. The next Saturday when Willy came by with the mail, my sister and I ran out and begged him to tell us if he thought our chicken was a boy or a girl. He obligingly parked his truck and followed us into the back yard, where my mom gave him the run down on the situation.

    Then, just as mom finished, Betty marched around the corner from the chicken coop, let out the first full throated COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO of his life, jumped on the back of one of the hens, and commenced mating.

    Even twenty five years later, having seen the spectrum of human experience from the horrific to the sublime, I still have not seen an expression of pity to match the one on Willy's face as he said, "Ma'am, I'm pretty sure that's a rooster."

    So He-Betty was relocated to a farm out in the country, a real one with a flock of chickens already living in the barn. There he met the current rooster of the flock, a Bantam who was maybe 1/10th his size. However, Bantams being what they are, the smaller bird also had the personality of Hitler crossed with Jack The Ripper, so He-Betty spent the rest of his live living in fear of arbitrary beatings from a critter barely larger than a pigeon.