“What?!” I was horrified. “We can’t simply cull all of our chickens because they couldn’t learn how to use the chicken feeder!”
For the past few months, we’d been hearing stories from our neighbor Aussie Bronwyn about how easy her life was with her ‘Grandpa’s Feeder’ – how she didn’t have to go out and feed her chooks every day, how the sparrows never ate the feed anymore, and how even her clever young hatchlings had learned how to use the feeder.
I was walking blissfully across the top paddock towards the chicken coop one morning, our little valley flooded with golden light, when I came face to face with the most spine-tingling, nightmarish vision you could possibly imagine.
A swarm of sparrows in the chicken run.
City people think sparrows are cute and harmless, but country people know the truth.
I fell to my knees and screamed in anguish. “Damn you, evil spawn of Sataaan!”
I should have known that something was wrong when our geriatric rooster, Old Man Henry, started sleeping in the nesting box.
At first Rick and I just figured it was cold and that he’d go back to his low senior citizen’s perch in the spring.
But when I found Henry sleeping smack dab on top of three eggs, we knew something was not quite right.
From then on, Henry was always on the eggs. Every morning I found myself in the odd situation of having to reach under the rooster to gather the eggs from the nesting box.
Old Man Henry is blind, bow-legged, and pauses strangely after every step. On certain misty mornings he looks like some twisted chicken fancier’s version of Dawn of the Dead.
But he’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner among poultry, and it is by peacekeeping that he earns his keep.
I had just hopped back over the fence after visiting Kiwi Bronwyn and Jim when I saw Rick walking towards the chicken coop. He had a shovel in one hand and an axe in the other.
The evening light was bright on the far hills, but the paddock we were in was drenched in shadows.
I knew what Rick wanted to do. In fact, I’d agreed to it a couple of weeks earlier, but all of a sudden I had reservations. I certainly hadn’t expected to be doing it now, on a peaceful Monday evening after visiting the neighbors. I wasn’t prepared.
We have a new sheep at our place. We call her Sweetie because she really is sweet. But she has a little problem.
She arrived about three months ago when Hamish, the stock agent, brought about 20 new sheep to graze in our paddocks. “One’s a pet sheep,” he said. “Belongs to my sister. That one’s never going to the butcher.”
At first the new sheep were down in the paddock beyond the driveway and the row of gum trees. I didn’t see them much. But after a while Hamish moved them into the paddock where the chicken run is. That’s when I got to know them.
In the three weeks leading up to our Thanksgiving party, I checked Ethel every day to make sure she was still sitting on those six precious, mail-ordered eggs.
When she stepped on one egg and broke it, we were suddenly down to five.
And then, around two weeks into the 21-day incubation period, our dominant hen Henrietta did something which complicated everything.
I was standing at the kitchen sink and looking out the back window when I first saw our chickens sneaking into the backyard. I froze.
The Forbidden Zone
They were headed straight for The Forbidden Zone.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that chickens untended get up to no good. Anyone who keeps chickens knows this. Given the chance, they’ll make a bee line towards the most freshly planted, unfenced patch of garden only to begin wreaking havoc with all the wild abandon of drunken sailors in a bar fight.
When we first got our young hens, we kept them in the chicken run for months on end. They were small and there are feral cats and stoats around, so it was for their own good. But when they were big enough to start laying, and when they began laying consistently in the nesting box, Rick and I decided they were old enough to be granted the occasional shore leave.
As I approached the chook house early in the morning with a bucket of chicken feed and a flashlight, I heard something flapping around over in the chicken run.
Native NZ short-tailed bat - image from Department of Conservation
I couldn’t see a thing in the dark, but the sound reminded me of what we used to hear at night in the trees during summer vacation in Northern Michigan. Bats.
Was there a bat in our chicken run?
I’ve never seen bats in New Zealand like I used to see in Michigan, although I know bats are the only native land mammals here, so they do exist.
I just wanted blue eggs. That’s the reason I’m out here in the dark this morning, as a bone-chilling autumn rain pelts me furiously on all sides. I’m carrying a red bucket in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
The girls in a line-up
I trudge forward. Already it’s 6:15am. I have to be in the shower by 6:30 to get ready for work. I have to be quick.
Six months before, I decided I wanted chickens. But not just any chickens. I’d read about a breed called Araucana – an old South American breed that lays pale blue eggs.
Blue eggs! How fantastic! I imagined a bowl of farm-fresh, blue eggs on the kitchen counter as I chopped veggies for omelettes on a Sunday morning.
I never thought about the dark, cold mornings of fall and winter, or the icy rains.
'Moon over Martinborough' is Jared Gulian's award-winning storytelling blog about being an expat American city boy on a tiny olive farm in rural New Zealand.
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