“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 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 was carrying two dozen farm fresh eggs as I stepped up onto the train at Featherston station.
It’s not what most people carry during their morning commute, but when you live in the country and work in the city as I do, you start doing strange things.
For example, just the other week I took a bell pepper plant (called a ‘capsicum’ here in Kiwiland) to the office. It’s now growing beautifully in a pot next to my desk. Perhaps I’m on a slippery slope. Soon I’ll be taking in live chickens and setting up chicken runs in the meeting rooms.
Old Man Henry is our geriatric rooster. He is mangy and decrepit. The feathers on his head are just quill stubble. He’s half blind, bow-legged, and he pauses strangely after every step.
Old Man Henry
On certain misty mornings, when the light is right, he looks as though he’s stepped out of some twisted chicken fancier’s version of Dawn of the Dead.
Yet this unlikely old man is a Nobel Peace Prize winner among poultry. And it is by peacekeeping that he earns his keep.
When I brought home our first two young chickens nine months ago – the sisters Henrietta and Ethel – I had no plans to get a rooster.
I didn’t want to deal with baby chicks hatching left and right, and I had nightmarish visions of cracking open an egg for breakfast to find a half-formed fetus inside.
Aussie Bronwyn and I stood outside the chicken coop. In one hand she held a long pole with a round net on the end, and in the other hand she held a jar of Vaseline.
Lavendar araucana: Natasha and Francoise
She was limping a little from a recent knee surgery, and I felt bad asking her to walk across the top paddock to our chickens.
“I’m fine. I’m fine,” she said, throwing back her shoulders. “Now, let’s get those chooks!” She smiled broadly, as though ready for a battle of epic proportions.
Little did I know what an epic battle it would eventually turn out to be.
I’m still not quite used to the chicken routine. There were no farm-fresh eggs in my life growing up in suburban Detroit. I never had chickens on the back porch overlooking the alley in my Chicago apartment.
He ra mokopuna - fine winter day
So last Saturday it was already 10.30 am by the time I remembered to feed the chickens. It’s like I had a temporary brain blip, and for a moment I forgot I was living on a farm in New Zealand.
It was not going to be a normal morning, at least not as far as the chickens were concerned. And it was only going to get weirder as the morning progressed.
In the refrigerator there was a special treat for the chooks, and when I went to get it Rick said, “You’re so late. By they time you get out there, they’ll be dead.”
I laughed and took out the small plastic container. “Don’t be horrible.”
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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