Made by Hand (14 page)

I suddenly thought of the fence slats from the gate. The wood was weathered and gray, but it was rot-free and straight. I used a trash can as a workbench, pulled out the jigsaw, and cut the slats to length. To fasten the plywood and slats to the shack’s framing, I used coated drywall screws, which are guaranteed not to rust. (I prefer screws to nails because I don’t like the loud noise a hammer makes, and it seems to me that wood always works its way loose from nails.)

With the siding out of the way, it was time to paint the shed. The previous homeowners had left a five-gallon bucket of brilliant white semigloss interior/exterior paint, and it was about two-thirds full. It seemed a little thicker than it should be, probably because it was getting on in years and had started to coagulate, but I diluted it with water. Jane, who had become intensely curious about the chicken coop, insisted on helping me paint as soon as she saw me with the brush and bucket. I put her to work on the back. She got about half the paint on the coop; the rest went on her hair and clothes. She got bored after painting a small scrawly patch. I had to wipe her down before she went back in the house.

As I painted the beams and the siding, it became clear to me that a lot of the original lumber that was on the shack, especially the plywood, was rotten, and that no amount of paint was going to make it better. I had to replace those spots with solid wood. This ended up being one of the most time-consuming parts of the job.

It took almost the entire summer to finish the coop. I didn’t work on it every day, but I spent at least a couple of hours a few times a week on it—finishing the paint job, adding the wire screen, building the enclosure where the chickens would sleep, and making the little inclined ramp they would use to climb into the enclosure to sleep. But far from finding it drudgery, I enjoyed the time I spent working on the coop. I often got lost in a museum of memories. There was no telling where my mind would wander—an afternoon as an eight-year-old stringing up a wire-and-tin-can telephone between my bedroom window and the kid’s next door; seeing one of the guys in my college dorm sitting cross-legged on the concrete plaza by himself in the middle of a rainstorm; standing on a deserted street in Japan more than twenty years ago and having my arm pinched by a very old homeless couple who were fascinated by the way Carla and I looked. Memories that I’d long forgotten were somehow dredged up by the activity of making the coop. I never tried to direct my thoughts; I just let them parade through my mind. One of my favorite cartoonists, Seth (he goes by his first name only), wrote an essay for the Canadian magazine
The Walrus
about his similar experience when he draws cartoons:

I wonder if one of the main reasons people garden, or knit, or retire to their garages and basements to tinker, is because they enjoy this unusual state of consciousness. Some people might be able to achieve it by meditating, but using your hands seems to do the trick, too.

I finished the coop at the end of August. In September, I got a phone call from a clerk at my local post office. She told me that a box containing live chicks had arrived and was waiting for pickup. I’d ordered them a couple of weeks earlier from MyPetChicken .com, which had sent them by overnight mail from Oregon. At the time I got the call, I was two thousand miles away, giving a talk about blogging and online media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, so I immediately called Carla at home and asked her to pick up the box. The kids weren’t in school that day, so the three of them went to the post office.

Roughly the size of a shoebox, the package was surprisingly small, considering that it had been home to six birds during their trip from Portland to Los Angeles. The half-dozen Barred Plymouth Rock chicks were peeping loudly inside. When my wife opened the box, the tiny two-day-old chicks were huddled together in a nest of straw. Before I’d left for Illinois, I’d prepared a large cardboard box in the room next to my office with pine shavings, an infrared heat lamp, a watering station, and a chick feeder. Carla and the kids placed the chicks in their new home and called to tell me they looked fine. They were no doubt hungry and thirsty, but they weren’t in danger of starving or dying of thirst: Chicks are born with enough nutrients and moisture in their system to keep them going for forty-eight hours without suffering. Carla dipped the beak of each chick into the water to teach it where to get a drink, and within moments they were all happily eating and drinking.

For the next several weeks, I took frequent work breaks, pulling a chair up next to the box to observe the chickens. I built a perch for them out of bamboo screwed to blocks of wood. When I set the perch down in the box, the chicks skittered to the far end of the box, huddling so tightly together they looked like a single ball of feathers. After a few seconds, they started stretching their necks out to get a better look at the invader I’d introduced into their sanctuary. A moment later, as their curiosity overtook their fear, they crept toward the perch. One brave chick, reminding me of the australopithecine in the monolith-encounter scene from
2001: A Space Odyssey,
walked over and pecked it. This emboldened the others, which scuttled over in a pack to investigate. By the end of the day, they were hopping on and off the perch without fear.

At six weeks, my hens still weren’t close to being full grown, but the twenty-five pounds of chick starter feed they’d eaten had turned them into healthy teenagers. They were ready to be moved to their coop. First, though, I had to line its concrete floor with litter. I didn’t relish the thought of mucking out the chicken coop every couple of weeks—in fact, it was one of the things that had previously discouraged me from getting chickens. I was already the designated crap remover of the family: The task of regularly cleaning our cats’ litterboxes and our guinea pig’s cage had somehow fallen on my shoulders. Now it looked like I was going to be the one who shoveled piles of chicken poop, too.

When I complained about the prospect to my friend Kelly Coyne (coauthor of
The Urban Homestead
with her partner, Erik Knutzen), she told me I ought to practice the “deep litter system.” Kelly and Erik adhere to the appealing urban-homesteading notion that “work makes work” and that the best way to deal with a problem is to set it up so that it takes care of itself. Deep litter is just such an example. The idea is to cover the coop’s floor with about twelve inches of bedding material (like wood shavings) and let the chickens scratch their manure deep under the surface; there tiny microbes break it down and convert it into nutritious chemicals and minerals, which the chickens ingest as they peck around for the bugs that are attracted to the droppings. Other than the need to add new bedding material once in a while, this ecosystem is nearly maintenance free. The smell isn’t really a problem, because the bedding absorbs moisture from the chicken droppings, so they dry up quickly. After a year, you can shovel it out and use the stuff as garden fertilizer.

Deep litter isn’t a new idea. The April 1, 1909, issue of a magazine called
Gleanings in Bee Culture
ran an advertisement that praised the deep-litter system as “a wonderful new discovery that will revolutionize poultry-keeping: A ‘system’ whereby you need not feed, nor clean out the pens oftener than once a month, and yet the results will be far beyond any other method.
Only one dollar for the great secret.
” It goes on to offer some extracts from the booklet to explain how it works, but not in enough detail, of course, to keep the curious poultry farmer from sending in his dollar for the secret.

On the last day of November I let the chickens out of the coop to run around freely for the first time. I was surprised by how quickly they took to it. As soon as I opened the door they bolted out and started scratching in the grass and dirt, grazing on different tree and bush leaves, weeds, blossoms, and blades of grass. They stretched out in the sun and gave themselves dust baths. How amazing that this behavior was already encoded in them! How do they know which things are good to eat, I wondered? Jane and I set up a couple of chairs in the backyard and watched them for two hours in the afternoon sun. When the sky turned to dusk, the chickens lined up and walked back into the coop and up the inclined ramp into their cozy sleeping compartment.

About a week later, Jane asked if we could dress the chickens in different outfits so we could tell them apart. As much as I wished we could, I knew the chickens wouldn’t like it. Instead, I retrieved the brightly colored plastic cable ties I kept in my toolbox. Sarina held the chickens while I banded their legs with the ties, each chicken with a different color. This allowed us to note the personality differences between the birds. For instance, black-banded Ethel and pink-banded Rosie were friendly to people, and bolder than the other birds. They were more apt to wander away from the flock to seek out tasty bugs and leaves. Orange Jordan and blue Darla were the shy ones, running away from us if we came near. Yellow Daisy was the flock’s security guard. Whenever a squirrel came close, she’d make a warning cluck, sending the rest of the birds into high alert. At Daisy’s signal they’d freeze and stretch their necks to get a good look at the squirrel. When it moved far enough away, they’d go back to their business. (Later, when they got bigger, the chickens would chase the squirrels, sending them running up the nearest tree.)

In his book
Living with Chickens: Everything You Need to Know to Raise Your Own Backyard Flock
, Jay Rossier writes that before he started keeping chickens, he thought of them as “stupid, fearful, and aggressive. They are full of sharp points from their beaks to their toes and move in a distinctly jagged way, jerking their heads more like a reptile than a bird.” After spending time with his flock, he changed his tune, describing them as “stately, dignified, and industrious creatures.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Rossier’s assessment of chickens, but I also happen to find their reptilian behavior very interesting. In 2007 I was delighted to read that scientists who had discovered bits of collagen in a sixty-eight-million-year-old
Tyrannosaurus rex
femur concluded that its protein sequences more closely matched those of a chicken than any other living creature’s. The sequence similarity between a chicken and a
T. rex
is 58 percent, meaning it’s very likely the forty-foot-long dinosaur evolved into the three-pound critters scratching for rollie pollies in my backyard. In fact chickens still have a gene for growing saber-shaped, reptilian teeth. In 2006 a researcher was studying a mutant chicken embryo and noticed formations on the beak that looked liked alligator teeth. Fortunately for us humans, chicks that form these razor-sharp weapons never make it past the embryo stage; otherwise chickens would be dangerous!

Chickens, true to their
T. rex
lineage, are voracious eaters. Besides weeds, grass, and leaves, they go after bugs with gusto. Before we had chickens, our yard was full of snails. We lived in fear of black widow spiders, which lurked under every piece of outdoor furniture. Once I reached for the valve handle on our gas barbecue and almost touched one. (Spiders apparently like the smell of the odorant added to propane, I was told by our pool serviceman, who said he always finds spiders in the air-intake vents of gas pool heaters.) Subsequent to my brush with venom, I found and killed nine black widows in a single day. When I told Carla, she called an exterminator service and they started spraying around our house once a month.

We canceled the exterminator about a month before we got our chickens, because we didn’t want to poison them. Fortunately, they made short work of the black widows and of all the other bugs on our property as well. They were even able to jump several inches into the air to snatch flies. Once we let our chickens loose in the yard, we never saw a single spider, snail, slug, grasshopper, cricket, or beetle again. Not spraying for bugs saved us $50 a month. And the chickens’ bug diet provided them with a great source of protein and omega-3 fatty acids, which meant their eggs were good for us, too.

Our lawn started getting much greener. The fertilizer the birds deposit all over the lawn plays a role in that, but I also think they eat grubs that damage the grass. For instance, for years our side lawn was plagued by two big dead spots, which grew larger and larger over time. Nothing I tried—extra watering, aerating, fertilizing, seeding—seemed to help. But once we introduced the chickens, clumps of dark green grass began growing in the spots. Someone told me that our lawn troubles had been caused by the grubs of the fig-eater beetle, which also happen to gorge on the delicious figs growing on our tree. If this is true, and the chickens are responsible for making my lawn greener
and
increasing my fig harvest, then they deserve a medal.

The birds were making our lives better in so many ways that it came as a surprise when they started laying eggs, even though eggs were the main reason we had wanted chickens in the first place. At first, we weren’t even very eager to eat them. It didn’t help that the first few were either asymmetrical or missing their shells. But even after the eggs started to look normal, it took a while for everyone in the family to feel OK about eating something that came out of our pets’ bodies. It felt a bit like drinking milk from your cat.