The low this morning is 14 degrees. With the wind factored in, it’s a chilly 4 degrees outside when I bundle up and go to care for the chickens at the far south end of our property. We’ve had at least a foot and a half of snow in the past few days, so it’s safe to say that the morning is exciting. I admit to making the chickens wait until after I’ve had coffee. Being out in sub-freezing temperatures without caffeine is just too awful to even consider.
When we bought this property, it came with a small horse stall and enclosure, about the size of a minivan. Before we adopted this flock, we turned the stall into their coop, running thick tree branches across the space for the chickens to roost on, and giving them a few nest boxes for laying. In anticipation of winter, we lined the coop with folded tarps for insulation, and have been adding more and more wood shavings and shredded paper to the floor. All in all, I think we did a good job of it. The chickens seem happy with it, and with thirteen of them to the space, it’s enough to keep them warm during these chilly days and nights.
I hadn’t expected to turn into a man who has a flock of birds to care for, but here it is. I find caring for them very soothing and meditative, even in the cold or the rain. There’s not much expectation of affection from chickens, or at least most of the ones we have here. The dinosaur in them is strong, that’s for certain. We have a couple that seem genuinely glad to see us when we come up to care for them, and so we obviously have our favorites. Mostly though, the majority of the flock watch us with their bird/lizard eyes, waiting to see if we’re going to toss them anything to eat, or if we’re going to lose our balance and fall down and be devoured ourselves before we can get up again.
Like I said: dinosaurs.
It isn’t technically winter yet, but the sun is setting about 4 in the afternoon now, and it’s dark until 5:30am or so. Chickens don’t want to lay eggs in the dark, so these birds are mainly freeloaders these days. We don’t have electricity run to the coop, so there are no lights after sundown. Perhaps in the future we’ll set something up closer to the house, at least in extension cord range, but for now, these birds live by the hours that nature gives them.
In the spring, I was dumping buckets of wood shavings into their run, from the neighbors’ land next door. They are having a house built, and gave us the okay to take as much of the shavings that we wanted, which we used to lay down in the run, to make a carpet of it over the mud that was everywhere back then (the horse that had lived here before had stamped every bit of greenery to death, and it had yet to make a comeback at that point in our chicken history). Somehow, I had scooped up a little red salamander in one of my buckets, and he plopped out along with the bark amongst the chickens. One of our gray ladies was on him faster than I would have thought she was capable of, and the salamander had time for one or two twitches in her beak before he was down her gullet, slurp slurp.
Dinosaurs.
I wouldn’t say that growing up in San Francisco had done much to train me in the ways of keeping birds. My father had a little green parrot for a while, but a bird in a cage is much different from a baker’s dozen that wander loose across the property (not in the snow, though. The birds have no interest in leaving the shoveled bits of the run when there’s snow on the ground). Back in The City, we had gulls and pigeons, but that was about the extent of my interaction with our avian friends (although there are parrots which live on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, did you know? The original members of the flock were escapees from cages in town, and from there they now number a couple of hundred birds).
Jailbreak dinosaurs.
Shawshank dinosaurs.
Beady-eyed little feathered, beaked, and taloned dinosaurs.