Mean Girls 2

The reign of terror continues in my backyard. Of course it does. Chicks thrive on drama.

Left to right: Maran, Rhode Island Red, and two Buff Orpingtons.

It's been two weeks since I integrated my ten week old pullets with my existing flock of one year old laying hens, and I first understood with drastic certainty what exactly the term "Pecking Order" meant. As with popular teenage girls there was absolutely no maternal instinct from the Queen Bees to the Wannabes; my redhead, a gorgeous, slender Rhode Island Red that had previously been my favorite chick quickly transformed herself into my most despised as she showed her true, vile colors, snatching one of the new girls bald headed and leaving her in a bloody heap.

You think you can sleep on my roost and just walk into my coop like you own this piece? This is MY HOUSE! MY HOUSE!

I had read extensively about techniques to integrate new pullets into an existing flock (see chapter one of the Mean Girls Saga) but I was utterly unprepared for exactly how vicious the Queen Bees were going to be, and how committed they were going to be to continuing their enduring reign of terror. For the first weekend I kept my newly integrated flock (a black and white Maran, Rhode Island Red, and brown and gold Welsummer, with two blonde Buff Orpington pullets) in a large fenced off portion of the back yard, probably three times the amount of space they had access to in their range, with plenty of greens and flowers from the garden, sunflower seeds, extra food and scratch, and all the caterpillars I could find. Even with all this entertainment to keep them busy--a virtual ASB smorgasbord of spirit week activities!--the Queen Bees continued to torment the new girls mercilessly. The pullets huddled miserably in corners around the yard behind potted plants and between fence posts, anywhere they could squeeze themselves in that the other hens couldn't get to them. The smaller of the two Orp pullets took to just squawking in despair, digging herself a belly hole and hiding her head.

I can't see you, you're not there, this is my happy place. THIS IS MY HAPPY PLACE!

The bigger of the two teenagers every once in a while would go for some food or water and one or the other of the big chicks would peck her mercilessly back into her corner and peck at her head while she shrieked in terror.

Yeah. It was a little disconcerting. 

Worse was night time. The big chicks refused to allow the littles onto the roosts and drove them, screaming into the space under the feeder. For the entire weekend I woke up in a cold sweat at 5 a.m., hurrying down to the coop to try to beat the sun and the chickens' internal alarm clock to the next installment of "Saw VII--Feathers and Blood". If I was slow I'd come down to the coop shaking off its supports as the big hens kicked the living crap out of the little ones. I'd let the big ones out of the coop into the yard. The Rhode Island Red would linger inside the coop, violently teaching the little ones painful lessons, about, you know. Living, or breathing the same air, moving, continuing to exist...

Did I SAY she could drink out of the waterer that I. DRINK FROM? 

The littles took to hiding in the relative safety of the nest box, where they would continually be brutalized by the older hens but at least they could stay out of sight and mind for most of the day. When I went to check on them on the third day both of the littles had free bleeding wounds on the back of their heads and over their beaks and the bigger of the two baby chicks was missing huge patches of her feathers. When the littles did emerge from the coop it was because one of my three formerly beautiful, gentle, beloved cooing adult hens would transform into a brutal, cruel and merciless sadist, sauntering up into the coop to drive the littles out where the other two were waiting in a horrifying gauntlet. The ringleader, almost always the Rhode Island Red, would drive the baby chicks down the line and the other two would viciously peck her until she made it past them into a corner; but with them blocking her exit, she'd have no choice but to run past them again into the abattoir, where the Redhead was waiting to turn her around and make her run back in again under the knife-sharp beaks. When the little chicks weren't out the big ones LITERALLY SHARPENED THEIR BEAKS on the concrete.

Not only was the Rode Island Red asserting her dominance over the little chicks, she had taken to letting us know that she was the boss over EVERYTHING, including me. When I broke up one of their gang fights she stalked over to me aggressively and angrily pecked at me. I reached down to thump her on the head but she dodged and pecked my foot hard enough to draw blood. 

You just did what?! Oh, no, sweetie. It just got a whole lot easier to talk about culling. 

I knew there was a pecking order being reset and the birds had to figure it out; but it was only as I started another day listening to the bone-chilling Screaming of the Chicks that realized just how little information there was in the books I'd read about chicken care on integrating new pullets into an existing flock--all variations on the same theme. "Little chicks will have a hard time of it, there's no way around it." Uh...ok. But how many days do I have to listen to them screaming? Two? Twenty? The rest of my life? WHEN? The books were silent on the timeline. 

My books failing me, I remembered a friend who also had chickens, and who I recalled had put down one hen for (killing?) another in the flock; it occurred to me it might have been during flock integration. He had a ton of great suggestions including something cool called a Flock Block, basically a suet cake filled with seeds and treats to keep the big chicks busy; but I had already spent a week throwing out everything I could think of into the chicken yard and it hadn't stopped the Queen Bees from thrashing the little guys into quivering messes. He did say though that if the little chicks were bleeding, the other chickens would respond to the color red and wouldn't be able to resist pecking at it; and he suggested trying to isolate the ringleader to see if that would force her to have to get back into the pecking order herself. 

It was hard to isolate the little chicks, knowing they'd have to start their horrors all over again once I integrated them again, but time to heal and grow bigger seemed like an okay temporary plan. In the morning I let the big hens out of the coop and then closed the coop door behind them, sealing the little chicks safely inside. That night I let them all out to free range but isolated the Rhode Island Red. She was frantic, running back and forth inside her enclosure furiously pecking at the wire and squawking indignantly. Her little pal the black and white Maran immediately took up the mantle of the Queeniest Bee and started harassing the little chicks on her behalf, going so far as to lunge at me while I was locking the run. I knocked her out of the way with a nudge and she looked up at me balefully, but backed off. In her little isolation box the Rhode Island Red watched it all with malevolent intelligence, plotting and planning, watching and waiting. That night, we waited for full dark before letting the hens into their coop (chickens have a powerful roosting instinct that drives them toward high shelter when dusk falls and become frantic when they're denied it), and when we finally did let them inside, they went in quietly . We only heard a single alarmed squawk from one of the littles and then everything was still except for their sweet cooing. 

Could it be that easy? Isolate the ringleader and take away her power? God. They should make a movie out of this...

Well, it wasn't quite that easy. It took almost two weeks for the little guys to fully heal their open wounds, and the feathers are just starting to come back on the little girl that was snatched bald, leaving her head looking a little scabrous. But this week for the first time, although the little chicks still took care to stay well out of the way of the big ones, the little chicks actually ventured out into the main area; partook of some of the greens I'd thrown down for the whole flock; walked around in the sunshine; generally lived with some semblance of normalcy. The Rhode Island Red is still the boss bitch but she's reclaimed a healthy respect for humans and after being ungently disciplined for her naughty pecking behaviors she stays out of our way; while the other two adult hens are even more submissive to us, dropping down into a squatting position and spreading their wings when we approach. For the most part they ignore the littles and bedtime is a quiet affair, no more knock down, drag out chick fights. We even managed, finally, to get the big hens to stay on the roosts when we set the little ones up there with them. If you're keeping track, that was one week of failure, two weeks of recuperation, and one week of growing pains to a sort of uneasy truce. No one's bleeding, and I only occasionally have to close my windows because they're screaming at each other. 

Yay, success. No one's dead. 

Mean Girls

Just as for irritatingly thin-yet-buxum teen-aged mean girls with Youtube-tutorial makeup contouring and physics-defying short skirts, "Pecking Order" is a very real concept for hens.

We all lay slightly different colored eggs. 

When we first got our (feathered) chicks, they immediately started sorting out who was going to be queen bee and who was going to most likely develop an eating disorder and credit card debt in an attempt to impress the other two. Our Rhode Island Red quickly emerged as the boss bitch of our backyard clique and she kept the other two sharply in line with sharp pecks to the throat and, I assume, more than one well-placed passive aggressive burn to the self-esteem as they were all foraging during the day.

"I don't hate you because you're fat. You're fat because I hate you."

Whatever. They worked it out. The other two quickly ceded dominance to the red-head, as must we all at some point in our lives, and seemed relatively happy at having secured their places in the social order despite having to wear the same outfits day in and day out. My own backyard version of the Plastics ruled their empty high school, unchallenged, in perfect harmony, bullying sparrows and teasing them about their weight while keeping them from the choice grubs.

Until the new girls arrived.

Unfortunately, even Rapunzel-golden blondes are no match for an angry redhead.

My chicken bible, "A Chicken in Every Yard," cautions that when adding new chicks to the existing flock, as in high school, they are virtually assured to have a hard time of it. A single chick should never be introduced on her own and even in pairs they should be old enough to hold their own before coming into contact with the existing flock. Obviously.

Hi! It's almost certain I'll by crying by the end of 7th period. 

When I picked up the new chicks for this year I made sure to get a pair (I would have gotten three but zoning restrictions in San Diego restrict homeowners of our size lot to a total of five hens). When they outgrew their brooder I moved them into an enormous cardboard box and into the garage, and waited for them to get big enough to hold their own--whatever that would turn out to mean--so I could move them into the main coop. 

The new chicks, a pair of beautiful blonde Buff Orpingtons, grew quickly but sort of topped out their teen-aged pullet size at around six weeks and didn't seem to be getting any bigger. Meanwhile I felt increasingly guilty for cooping them up in a cardboard box with no windows and no access to the sky, like an endless standardized test; so I moved the little chicks out into a separated section of the run during the day. "A Chicken in Every Yard" had said that some people find success in integrating the new flock with the old by giving them a good look at each other every day, but keeping the little ones safe inside a gated area. 

Please don't criticize me, I can still hear you through the bars.

I spent about a month on this doomed plan even though it came with the caveat from Every Yard's authors: we find this strategy to be expensive and ultimately ineffective. Ultimately, at some point the chicks have to sort it out themselves with no adult supervision.

"Damn. Chickens. Let's stay on this side of the island."

That point came after I moved the little chicks box outside once the weather turned warm and sunny, hoping to give them some fresh air when they were confined, and of course, as it must, it immediately rained. The cardboard box was damp and drooping and really not suitable for the little chicks to sleep in any more. "Every Yard" suggested waiting until the chicks were at least eight weeks, and preferably ten to twelve weeks old, and by the calendar my little chicks were two days away from their ten week birthday; but I worried that they were still so small, only half the size of the adult hens. Still, I didn't have another cardboard box and the existing one was just not healthy for them any more, so I took the plunge. 

I waited until nightfall and the adult hens had put themselves to bed on the roosts, as suggested, to gather up the little guys and gently put them on the roost where they would drowsily assimilate with the older flock while they slept. That was the idea. Hens are almost comatose once the sun goes down and their powerful roosting instinct drives them to seek the highest ground possible inside shelter and conk out, Ambien-style. I had often found my hens roosting on the top step of their little ladder if they didn't have access to get inside the coop, and they were like little feathered toddlers up past their bedtimes--just limp little un-resisting bodies that you could gently put into bed without waking them. I felt pretty confident with my ninja nighttime commando slumber party plan.

Yeah, no.

As soon as I opened the coop door with the little blonde chicks in my hands, the redhead woke out of a sound sleep, slasher-film-killer-come-back-from-the-dead-style, and leapt down, literally biting the hand that feeds her, namely mine, and then driving the freshmen out of her domain like an enraged prom queen. I thumped her on the head and went to go retrieve my little cowering pullets, and the redhead jumped out of the coop, nighttime terrors be damned, to follow us. "Knock it off!" I scolded her sternly, like the high school teacher I am, and picked her up and threw her back into the coop. I retrieved my little chicks but the redhead had jumped down out of the coop again, now flanked by the highlighted brunette Welsummer and the raven-tressed Maran, in a West Side Story triangle formation, ready to take me and my dedication to equal opportunity roost space on. 

For God's sake.

Okay. New strategy. I put down my pullets and gathered up the adult hens and threw them into their coop, shutting the door behind them so they couldn't get out. I went and got the pullets and craftily opened the nest box, through which I could see all of my hens sassily already settling themselves onto their roosts, satisfied after a thorough bullying. Normally I find my hens quite beautiful but they have never seemed so ugly than in that moment. I ungently shoved the Maran over from where she had settled herself in the very center of the nearest roost, and put the little chicks on the roost next to her. 

Sigh.

The redhead screamed with rage and leapt from one roost to the other and drove the little chicks down. One of the blondes jumped past me and out of the nest box, screaming and with feathers flying like a pulled out weave. The other one cowered on top of the waterer. The redhead, seemingly satisfied with the submission of the one on the waterer, ignored her and came after the one I was trying to prevent from escaping. Even with a thump on the head the redhead was undeterred and kept coming after her until the little blonde wiggled past me and found a spot on top of the feeder. The two little pullets squatted, terrified, in their corners, and the redhead stared them down with her baleful orange eye; but ultimately sashayed her way back into the coop and took her rightful place at the top of the roost. Goddammit, you little self-important alpha...

Hesitantly I closed the nesting box. The sound of the box shutting seemed to set the girls off again and I immediately heard the sound of a knock down drag-out cat fight. I jerked the nesting box open again to make sure the little chicks were still alive; they must have tried to get off their super low perches and hop up onto the roosts with the adults once the light was gone, because the redhead was chasing them around the coop and viciously backstabbing them. They finally made their way back to their little corners and she left them each alone, after a parting peck. I closed the nesting box again and the scene was repeated again, violently shaking the entire coop as the occupants screamed and shrieked at each other. My inner child started crying omigod she's KILLING THEM in there! but what steel I have developed as a pansy-assed urban farmer pressed back--they're birds. They will figure it out. At some point, they need to figure it out. 

I closed the nest box and locked it, and walked away.

I woke up at the crack of dawn this morning to let them out of the coop and scatter some treats on the ground while they free ranged with as much space as possible; the idea being that if they all had access to busy work , with their heads down next to each other, they would let the aggressions drop. As soon as I opened the coop door one of the blondes came shrieking out in terror with the redhead hot on her heels. The redhead chased her into the enclosed run and mercilessly back-stabbed her all around it before I could open up all the gates and let them free into the backyard, but once I got everyone into the open spaces they settled into their normal pattern of digging for bugs and pecking at blades of grass. Yes, the blonde pullets were again cowering, math-club-like, in the corner of the yard, and every time they ventured over into the sunflower seeds I had scattered the adults chased them out; but over the next hour they sort of found their own space and the adults largely ignored them. Once the adults had gotten bored scratching at what I'd thrown down, they wandered off to other areas and the little ones got to pick up what was left. 

"A Chicken In Every Yard" says that the pecking order of two integrating flocks can be completely upset, with the new hens assimilating into the clique in the bottom, middle, and sometimes even taking the boss bitch spot of the lead hen. I'm crossing my fingers that one of my little mild-mannered blonde nerds rises like a phoenix to throw off her glasses, shed her baggy clothes, and take down that redhead in an epic battle of wills that leaves her shattered, unhappy, and questioning everything about herself. 

I have confidence. 

(For more mean chicks, read "Mean Girls 2".)

Peeps--Axis of Evil? Or Subliminal Message to Pick Up Chicks?

I realized today that Peeps, that quasi-food monstrosity that multiplies like Tribbles all over the check stands every spring, might actually be more than just an electric pink sin against nature.

Try me, lady. I wish you would. I WISH. YOU. WOULD. 

In general, the traditions behind the mountain of goo that ends up in our Easter basket have very little to do with religion and a lot to do with symbols of spring. Jelly beans were actually sent to soldiers during the Civil War, but it wasn't until sometime in the 1930's, that their egg-like shape linked them to Easter. Eggs?--well, any fowl-connected peasant family would have been well acquainted with the egg as a very real symbol of life and rebirth, not to mention springtime, since chickens don't lay regularly during the winter because of the shortened days. As for rabbits? Well. Some sources say that the hare is a symbol of Eostre, goddess of spring, but my favorite story is one I came across where Eostre found a bird dying of the cold, and to save it, transformed it into a hare with fur for warmth. Except the hare still laid eggs like a bird. Which...then became the Santa Claus of Easter, policing little girls and boys with--what, black jelly beans if they were naughty? Carrot shaped bags of Reese's pieces if they were good? And Peeps...well, you decide whether those are a punishment or a reward. 

Peeps season, though, is more than just "eat fake marshmallow and hope it's stale enough to be palatable"; it coincides with real life actual chick season. While it's true you can get chicks almost year round, it takes from four to six months (sometimes longer, depending on the breed) to start laying; and, again, winter's shortened days often coincide with a decrease in egg production. Chickens also lay the most in their first year, with a marked tapering off after about a year to 18 months when they molt. Blah blah blah if you want a decent number of eggs in the first and only good year you need to get chicks around Eastertime. 

What if you do want chicks in your life, but you still have residual guilt over the drawer full of dead Tamagatchi you let starve to death in the bottom of your backpack?

I'm still here, and sentient, you bastard.

The good news is that real chicks take even less work than a Tamagatchi and are so stinking cute you'll want to go look at them every day, which should remind you to feed, water, and otherwise take care of them. They also, rather than just beeping or faintly vibrating, actually peep to remind you to not let them starve to death. Really, skill level: Parakeet.

Here's what you need:

-25 lb bag of chick feed for every two chicks. Lucky you, most feed stores give away two chicks for every 25 lb bag at this time of year! The cost of the chicks themselves is the least of your worries. You literally could not buy a stuffed animal version of these chicks for any less than the chicks themselves. Most feed stores only sell the most reliable egg layers because that's what urban farmers want them for, so you can really go wrong but you're looking for: Americauna (sometimes called Easter Eggers, since they lay blue green eggs); Rhode Island Reds (super prolific medium egg layers); Australorp or Orpington (great layers of large eggs); Barred Rock, Wyandotte, Welsummer. Marans aren't the most prolific (mine was the last to start laying and gives four a week) but Maran eggs are considered a delicacy among some French chefs, who will cook with nothing else. 

-Waterer. Yep. It can be a dish. They will knock it over all the time though and kick litter and poop in it. Best is a tall quart jar waterer with a little trough around it made for chicks. Plastic is cheap and durable enough if you only plan to have one batch of chicks. Galvanized steel for an extra five bucks is an investment for future broods. Be warned: even if the chicks were already drinking from the exact same waterer they are sometimes so silly you will have to show them how to drink. Dunk their little beaks in the water until you see them chirrup up a few drops. You'll need to change this and wash it out every day, and check it twice a day since chicks love to kick litter into their water source. 

-Feeder. Same thing. A dish, a plastic feeder with several little stations, or a galvanized steel one 

for durability. Fill it when it's empty. 

-Pine shavings to use as litter. It's sometimes listed as hamster bedding, but the feed store should have it in big cheap bags. Put down a handful every week on top of the first initial layer. Pull out any that gets wet from the water source and throw into the garden. If it stinks, add more. Change completely when chicks are old enough to go outside (five weeks). 

-Heat lamp with a red Pyrex bulb for the first five weeks. Depending on your climate and when you get the chicks you may only need the heat lamp for four weeks. A good rule of thumb is if the chicks 

huddle under the lamp, they're too cold and you should lower it closer to them; if they consistently 

hang out at the opposite end of the brooder, they it's too warm and either raise it or turn it off if 

they're getting close to a month old. 

-Brooder. There's a ton of expensive options but really if you have a spare bathroom, a bathtub is perfect. Put in the drain stopper and put down a layer of shavings. Make sure you keep the toilet seat down, as little guys are ingenious about jumping up on top of the waterer or feeder and out of the tub. 

-Large tall box of some kind (cardboard is fine) for the four or five week old chicks to live in once the bathtub becomes easily escapable. If you have a coop already (and it's warm enough outside) they will be ready to move outside no earlier than five weeks; if you don't have a coop you'll be thinking of where they are ultimately going to live! A little unused playhouse can work, a shed, etc as long as the chickens can be locked in at night and safe from clever predators with finger-like hands (I'm looking at you, raccoons). You can find decent deals on Craigslist or Costco but be prepared to pay in the $500 range; you can build something yourself for that much or cheaper that suits your specific needs if you're handy.

I couldn't find any history on when the tradition of putting live chicks and ducklings in Easter baskets began, though stories I've heard come from my mom's generation when they were children. During the Depression regular households would have added chickens to help sustain the family, so it makes sense that parents might have added spring chicks that would ultimately be added to the family flock to Easter baskets.

The tradition endures in several places around the country--Pinterest crazed mommies drew attention from PETA when live chicks dyed in bright colors started showing up in Easter baskets in 2012. At the feed store where I got my chicks, there's a big sign warning the casual Easter chick-buyer that baby chicks are live animals and not recommended as toys for children--whether it actually happens anymore or it's an urban myth like the razor blades in the Halloween candy, it's hard to say. But I realized on Sunday how lucky I was to have chicks this year, and how a little package of yellow Peeps in my Easter basket next year just might remind me of stroking the fuzzy tummies of the little fluffy yellow live versions. 

The Chick Life

So, you know, my neighbors now walk by my house and just interact with me in neighborly ways, like we live in 1950's Minnehaha or something, and I don't entirely know what to do with it. I get the feeling sometimes that my neighbors have been watching each other watch me, and deciding whether or not to receive my flock of chickens in the spirit with which they were added to my household--that Barbara Kingsolverian aesthetic of eating whole foods, eating locally, reducing fossil fuels, enriching the topsoil, composting waste, preserving heritage breeds--and not the hillbilly hicktown yard full of tires scenario a bunch of plywood and chicken wire can evoke. Obviously my mental portrait of myself and my chickens--me, floating around in my fitted waist 1950's organza dress, perfect for 1950's Minnehaha suburbia, laughing melodically as I curate my flock of exquisite fowl with their delicately patterned plumage, transforming humble patches of wild clover into golden-yolked pods of pure, ethereal nourishment--is not always and entirely in sync with reality.

Sometimes there are pencil skirts.

But for the most part my neighbors seem to have decided that chickens are "so hot right now". Everybody that stops to talk has thought about having chickens of their own and wants to know how you go about it. It doesn't hurt that it's almost Easter and there are literally chicks in the pet store that you could take home and put in a basket, Ala 1950's Minnehaha. And why shouldn't you? chickens are awesome. Besides the obvious, get eggs without driving to the store, thing, chickens:

--Eat weeds. I never realized how satisfying it would be after a lifetime of battling dandelions and spurge and chickweed (ah, that's why it's called that) to watch chickens chow down and devour literally every blade and leaf of a huge patch of dandelions. They are voracious and ferocious and descend upon those weeds with the exact murderous passion I feel for those weeds, except that my hen assassins take weeding one step further and transform those weeds into eggs that I can make into cupcakes. 

--Are entertaining. Who knew scratching chickens could evoke a Zen trance state? Since we put the pullets out into the backyard, every dinner party we've had, no matter how highly educated, fascinatingly well-read, and articulate the guests are has degenerated into a bring the margaritas out into the backyard and, fascinated, watch the chickens scratch for bugs in the dirt-stravaganza. It's so peaceful, it's hypnotic. I often push their movable coop to a different patch of clover in the front yard and suddenly realize I've been sitting in the grass watching them graze without moving for an hour. This can't have been a thing with prairie people. It has to somehow be a commentary on our stressful lives but I can't think about that at the moment, the hens just found a new patch of crabgrass.

--Lay eggs in the tall grass. I pasture my hens in a movable run and let them hang out in the front yard all day eating my feral lawn, which means they lay their eggs right out there in the grass. Since
fresh eggs have a "bloom" or a protective membrane on them (commercial egg farmers clean this off so the eggs are shiny) they stay fresh without refrigeration, so I usually collect the eggs in the evening when I put the hens to bed in their coop. Since it's dusk, it becomes a bit of an egg hunt, looking around to see if I can find the coppery, chocolate colored eggs hidden in amidst the green grass; they're cool to the touch from the soil and the dew-damp grass, and comfortably solid in the palm of my hand. 

--Put themselves to bed. Chickens have a strong roosting instinct that kicks in at dusk. Their movable run has a little ladder and if darkness fall before I have a chance to send them to their coop they will all climb the ladder and snuggle together on the top step in a huge fluffy pile. Otherwise I open the door to their run and they take off in a mad, zig-zag dash like they're avoiding sniper fire, making for the backyard gate and the safety of their coop. They look for all the world like extremely short, comically pudgy women with ruffled petticoats running with their arms glued to their sides, frantically shrieking to each other, "The Darkness! It comes!"

--Are themselves the source of all chicken-related idioms. Birds of a feather flock together. Yep. Chicken scratch. Yes, it is cheap as hell. Bird brain. Ruffle your feathers. Pecking order. The sky is falling. Dumb cluck (I'm sorry. I love my black and white Maran but she is just dumb as a rock). The only one that doesn't apply is Mad as a wet hen. They don't seem to care if they get wet and will stay out in the rain all day even though they have shelter.

Not to mention their poo, which is a compost kick starter and makes amazing manure in the garden; their eggs, which are far more flavorful and have beautiful golden yolks. They require about the same amount of care as a parakeet--fill the feeder and waterer and once a month (once every few months if you use a deep litter method) muck out the coop. They are sweet and personable and funny. 

But I recently read a book called "Make the Bread, Buy the Butter" that left me furious when the author disparaged backyard chickens as little more than pets. In summary, she had bought a half dozen chicks on a whim and ended up with a flock of over a dozen, some ridiculous ornamental breeds which don't realistically lay in any proliferation, and set them up in an old playhouse as their coop without a protected run. Needless to say, she lost ten of the original flock when dogs got under her chain link fence and into her flock in a bloody rampage. In response, she put up a $3500 redwood fence to surround the property--and with that as her startup cost, she warned her readers away from thinking backyard chickens would ever be cost effective. 

Look. 

Chickens on the urban farm definitely have a higher cost than just the $5 chick you buy. Equipment includes their waterer and feeder, litter, and of course their feed. We didn't buy a special brooder but just used a heat lamp in our bathroom for them until the chicks got big enough to hop out of the bathtub. The biggest cost was the coop and their movable run, which we built ourselves but probably would have been cheaper to have made. All told, those three $5 chicks cost us $700 in start up fees. But this year, when we bought our new batch of chicks, we had all that stuff and the chicks only cost us $10. In fact every year from this point on...and we plan to have chickens for the next ten, twenty years. If you don't blame your desire for landscape architecture on your chickens, the costs over time stay pretty darn reasonable and actually do start making themselves back in the ratio of eggs to feed.

The other detractor to backyard chickens is a pretty common conversation I have with people who don't know that in San Diego at least, the zoning laws restrict homeowners to no more than five chickens. Chickens lay well for their first year, which actually only starts at 4-6 months (one of ours didn't start laying until the end of her sixth month) and start to taper off after that, like Henopause. chickens live much longer than that, 5-8 years and sometimes as much as 12-16 years if they're, say, pasture raised on good food and live in a humane hygenic environment like an urban farm. so if a person like myself wants a steady supply of eggs, I can alternate years of getting chicks, as I did--my new babies won't start laying until my first group of hens are going through their molting period--and I can keep them laying longer by not forcing them to overlay with weird medicated feeds and lighting their coop at night so their bodies are tricked into constant production; but ultimately my hens are going to stop laying and I'm going to be feeding a crowd of weed eaters with no eggs to show for it and no ability to get new hens to replace the ones that aren't laying. 

"Can you give them to a farm?" one of my well meaning friends asked. Absolutely. What farm wouldn't love the privilege of feeding my spent hens, at no cost to me, with nothing to show for it? There must be some lovely places that would board my old hens, where they can go and retire in style and drink crabgrass juleps on the porch and bawk about the snails they've eaten. In fact another chicken owning friend of ours generously asked if we might be running such a place, and whether we would like five of their hens, who were two years old and coincidentally mostly done with their egg-producing years. 

Nope. We are not running such a place, and therein lies the biggest drawback with chicken ownership. If you want eggs and there's a limit on how many hens you can have, you have to do what's kindly termed "culling". 

"Oh my God," more than one of my friends has said in horror. "I could never kill a chicken." 

Yes, it's pretty horrible to think about until you take a look at how a commercial chicken lives its life, packed into a battery cage with the space of about a letter sized piece of paper, its feathers falling out from the stress of such terrible confinement, in a windowless room without ever feeling the sun or tasting anything but commercial chicken feed. Commercial chicken feed, by the way, is anything from corn to chopped up fish, beef and chicken remnants--yes chickens eat chicken. Even a so-called cage free chicken can just live in that same windowless warehouse, crowded into the same amount of space but without cages, walking in the feces of a thousand other chickens daily, certainly ingesting those feces in the air and in their food and putting that right into their eggs and the meat we all eat. Not to mention the inhumane treatment of birds who are debeaked, and the disgusting ways in which they're killed--electric shocks, gassing-- and processed (I'm still haunted by the pink slime video that shows how Mcdonalds mcnuggets are processed, beaks, entrails, blood and all, and bleached into something resembling white meat). Commercial chickens could also live to 5-8 years but rarely are allowed to live past one year because they just don't lay reliably after that. Meat chickens make it to about six weeks when they've been force fed to the point their weight exceeds their ability to stand. 

My chickens will have lived every day in the sunshine, eating what nature intended them to; they'll have been together in a flock which they love, in peaceful companionship, in an enriched environment, healthy and happy. When the time comes for them to be culled it'll be quick and humane. When you think of the misery that had to happen for the nugget in your hand to get to you...what's really worse? 

For me, taking responsibility for the eggs we eat is one small thing we can do to live more sustainably. The shiny white eggs Vons peddles certainly come with the same price tag attached, we just don't have to look it in the face. Frankly if I have to look anything in the face? It should really look like this.

Barnyard Vet in Heels

After an unseasonably cool San Diego August, with temperatures in the high 70s and some sprinkles of rain, we had a hot day today. A very hot day. My first day back teaching school and I alternated between shivering in the blasting air conditioning and dehydrating with the preposterous heat when I stepped outside. When I finally got into the car to head home at 3:30 p.m. the outside temp was 104. I had moved the chicken run this morning to a shadier spot beside the house with more grass for them to nibble, and supplied them with some nice cold pineapple and carrot pulp from my morning juice to help keep them cool during the day.

It wasn't enough.

I pulled up to my house to find three little feathered heaps lying under their angled shelter inside the run. They looked lifeless. I jumped out of my car and ran over to them, clucking to them. The black and white Maran perked up her head and looked at me without getting up; the auburn Rhode Island Red and the brown Welsummer with her pretty gold quail-patterned feathers didn't move at all. When I opened their run the Maran got to her feet but didn't run away (a first for her) and let me pick her up docilely. I put her under one arm and scooped up the Welsummer and the Red into the crook of my other arm. I could feel them panting (they cool themselves like dogs do) and their hearts beating, fast as horses, but they didn't struggle or even do more than lay quietly together in my arm.

Before we even thought about buying chicks I had been like a pregnant mother, reading every single scrap of literature on chicken rearing I could get my hands on. The Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, A Chicken in Every Yard, the chapters in Little House in the Suburbs and The Backyard Homestead's Guide to Raising Farm Animals. So as I was hurrying the chickens back to the backyard to care for them I didn't think, I just reacted.

• Cool their feet. I set down all three chickens and sprayed down their feet with cool water from the hose to help them lower their body temperatures. The black and white Maran perked up immediately and struggled and flapped to get down. My redhead, the Rhode Island Red,  pepped up a bit and lifted her head so she could sit up in my arms instead of dangling loose. I sprayed her feet for another minute and she clucked indignantly at me. Then I turned to the brown Welsummer. Her feet just dangled lifelessly underneath her, and her mouth was gaping wide and outstretched. I sprayed her feet but they didn't seem to feel any cooler. 
• Get them into the shade. I brought them back to their coop where it was not just shady but completely dark and put them inside. The Maran, already feeling the peppiest of the three, started walking around and fluffing her wings to cool herself. The Rhode Island Red and the Welsummer laid down immediately in the doorway of the coop. 
• Water. Normally the chicks have a nipple waterer (a big five gallon bucket with a metal nipple system underneath that they can click for a drop at a time without getting soaked themselves) but they seemed uninterested in drinking, and I knew they were dehydrated. I brought them a small tub of ice water and dipped my fingers in to coat the tops of the Red and the Welsummer's beaks. The Red almost immediately gulped down the drops, then the next ones I dripped onto her beak, then when I dunked her beak in the tub she got it and started drinking greedily. The Maran, not the brightest of birds under the best of circumstances, came over to investigate, but of course instead of drinking like an intelligent thirsty creature, tilted her head at me curiously. I sighed and dunked her beak, too, and she was like, OMIGOD you did not tell me that this was WATER why have I been drinking from a spigot like some kind of ANIMAL. She went to town on that tub like water was going out of style. 
• Cold fruit. I grabbed some cold peaches from the fridge and cut them up so their cool juicy flesh was exposed and threw them into the coop. Red and Maran immediately went for the fruit and tore open the fleshy center piece peck by peck down to the pit. 

By now Red and Maran were feeling good, clucking and drinking and eating freely and jumping down from the coop to peck for bugs under the coop. But beautiful Welsummer was still not moving. She lay there in a fat pile of pretty feathers, her little sides trembling with her panting, drinking the drops that I tapped onto her beak but otherwise not moving. I watched her with a critical eye, and noticed her golden eyes were dilating and contracting and dilating and contracting. This couldn't be good.

I pulled her out of the coop gently and put her on my lap with a bottle of ice for her feet. I laid her talons over the curve of the frozen water bottle with my bare thighs freezing under the painfully icy cold bottle but her feet still feverishly hot. With one of the peach pieces in hand, I was able to squeeze juice into her open beak. She nibbled the first ten or fifteen drops down but then lost interest, turning her head when I tried to tempt her with the sweet juice. I checked her feet. Still insanely hot, burning to the touch, but after a few minutes her golden eyes had stopped dilating. I switched to an ice water dish, dripping cold water into her beak with the ice bottle on her feet. After another few minutes she struggled to sit up and flapped to get down, so I set her on her feet. She made it a few unsteady steps before staggering like a drunk and falling over. 

Shit. 

Okay. I tried again. I filled a six inch deep tub with water and dunked and held her feet in the cool water, then dripped cool water over the top of her head. I dunked her beak into the water and she came up sputtering but slurped down the drops; I dunked her again and then two more times until she was slurping steadily. She was still unsteady on her feet so I picked her up and flipped her onto her back like I had when she was a baby chick, just two weeks old, and let her feet naturally curl around the ice water bottle as I held her in my lap. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her breathing stilled and she almost immediately fell asleep in my lap. When I touched her feet several minutes later they had finally started to move from oven-hot to her normal humming warmth. She opened her eyes and sat up, then struggled to flip over and sat on my knee. 

She looked up at me. I dripped some water onto her beak. She slurped it greedily then pecked my thumb. Hard. And turned a baleful eye on me. 

I felt a sudden warmth. 

The warmth spread over me like a font. 

It was not my heart, in an outpouring of tenderness, but the Welsummer releasing the last of her feverish heat with a truly alarming quantity of hot, watery chicken poo all over my leg. She shook herself and clucked at me, indignantly. 

Sigh. 

I'll just go inside and change my shoes then. 

Awkward Bombshell tries to Neighborhood

My neighbors keep, like, stopping to talk and I don't really know what to do with that.

Hi! This is totally not awkward. Welcome to my yard.

Ironically, before the water restrictions from the drought encouraged me to go apocalypto on my lawn, I never really spent any time out on the front yard. The perfectly green lawn was watered automatically and mowed and edged by manlier hands than mine so no need for me to do any gardening; and despite its cool green carpeted visual appeal, it seemed a little odd to pull up a lawn chair in the grass and just like...what...sit there or something? There is exactly zero percent of that going on on my street, except of course for the crazy/wise? person who last summer came and spread a blanket under my trees to have a picnic with her baby on my lawn.

Can you not?
I mean, actually what are you doing right now, just...having a picnic on my lawn? This is not a public park! There is actually, ACTUALLY, a public park like two blocks from here. THIS? Is my lawn omigodpleasedon'tstabmeinthehead....

Honestly I go out into my front yard so little that I recently went a block party two doors down from my house. My neighbor looked at me strangely before handing over my paper plate ticket to the potluck-buffet pasta-salad extravaganza and asked me if he could help me. I smiled awkwardly and said oh, I live in the white house on the corner. (subtext: I am not a crazy baby-picnic people's lawn-sitter, I didn't just stop in here for the questionable food and the company of strangers who I have nothing in common with and who will ask me for the one millionth time whether teaching music is like being on Glee because NO; I  can go get my astro-bright neon invitation you put in my mailbox so I can prove that I came here to build community. With you strangers.) He laughed even more awkwardly and handed me my plate. "Oh," he told me. "I always thought that guy lived alone."

Hmm. Note to self. Sit in grass on lawn more often.

But of course this year we made some major changes, one of which was to actually save water by putting in a handful of raised beds and dwarf citrus trees in the front yard and letting the lawn die; and saving rainwater to water by hand--so I'm out in front a lot hauling water cans. And of course there was one major change to our landscaping this spring.

"Are they talking about us right now?"
"Gurrrrl, how could they not. Shake a tail feather."

God.

When I spent about a month doing some hard digging and hand tilling to move all my rosebushes to the front yard, a smiling, coiffed middle-aged lady walking her pug said "Starting to look better!" I looked up at her with barely concealed fury. Is it? Is it "starting" to look better? Is the fact that I am covered in clay loam from head to foot and have eight broken nails beginning to meet your expectations of my yard? I mean thank you for letting me know it's not looking good yet but that it's starting to look better. Yay! Neighborhood! 

When we let the lawn die one of our older neighbors across the street came over to watch us, his hands on his hips as he surveyed the wasteland with an emotionless expression. "Huh. Think I liked it better the way it was." Oh did you? Did you?!

A lady stopped by to demand to know what was going on with my neighbor's car, a junked out jeep he's got in his driveway. "That is an EYESORE! What are you doing about it? Where is our homeowners association? We need to complain to the civic association. I didn't spend my whole life saving so that I could have a house in a neighborhood like THIS! We can't continue this way with our neighborhood being turned into a JUNKYARD and a DISGRACE!" I looked back at my dead lawn and thought about the bale of chicken wire I had in the garage. 

I hate people.

But when we put in our raised beds and recognizable squash vines started to sprout, people started stopping to talk. Not to do this awkward "I make a comment in the hopes of starting a conversation and that way we can pretend we have a neighborhood community" small talk, but actual TALK. "You've got some squash growing in there!" a couple called to us from the sidewalk. "What else is in there?" They stepped onto the lawn and came over to see. "Ooh, pumpkins too? That's just great! What kind, Big Macs? They just grow like crazy don't they?" And then the man told us how they'd had fifteen raised beds in their back yard at the end of the street for the past twenty years, quietly growing squash and pumpkins and cucumbers. The wife smiled uncomfortably and tugged at him to come along with an expression that told me she was worried about boring us young people, but I was more taken aback with how nice they were. That was, like, a real conversation. 

And when we started work on the chicken coop, the neighbors really came out of the woodwork, so to speak. There must be a silent alarm bell on the street when a girl uses power tools that rings at a frequency only suburban men can hear. They all came over to see "Whatcha got going on over there?" Meaning, of course, "Do you want me to do that for you?" and "Sorry, I just came over here to see whether it really was you running that power saw. You ARE! Lookit that." They wanted to know what I was building and how it was going to get put together and what it was for, and then gaped in delight at the box of chicks. "Look at that. LOOK AT THAT. I've always wanted chickens. How much work are they? They don't smell. That's so strange! I always thought they smelled. And do they make any noise? Not really, huh?" Again, I was startled. No judgement. 

Three gleaming ladies in their Coldstone Creek casuals stopped by yesterday, walking their purebred golden retrievers and immaculately groomed akitas. They paused at the sidewalk while I was feeding the chicks some watermelon and stopped as one hive mind. 

"Look how big they're getting!" the leader exclaimed. "I think they've put on another pound, haven't they?"

Awkward face. Why do you know about my life and my chicks? Why?! Who sent you?! What have you heard?! Brace for impact. Here comes the burn.

"I was so excited when I found out we could have chickens in our neighborhood!" the next one said with a  brilliant smile. "We all were!" 

"Oh yes. We were so disappointed when you moved the chicks into the backyard. We look forward to seeing them every time we take our walk! Are they easy to care for?"

Inexplicably I found myself talking about the chicks. Yes they were easy to care for, like a parakeet. Just feed. No they didn't make any noise, or have any smell, and yes they ate just about everything including caterpillars and snails from the garden and the new grass from the unexpected summer rain. 

"Well, I for one can't wait to see them just keep getting bigger. I'm bringing my grandchildren over here tomorrow to come and look--if that's okay." The leader smiled at me warmly, like we were neighbors having a normal conversation. Ay. Like, more, just...talking to people? And we're all going to pretend this is normal and we're, like in some Minnesota small town where we...like, know each other? 

I heard myself say yes, and laugh, and make a joke about starting an egg stand once the chicks were laying. Delighted, they made me promise to do just that and walked off in a cloud of cheerful goodbyes and Michael Kors perfume. 

What is life right now. Urban farming grows community? I'm not sure if I'm ready. 

Sun-Dappled Lies

Urban farming can be a bit of a betrayal.

This is something that not one of my rosy-cheeked backyard farming books mentioned, and that, in and of itself, is the biggest betrayal of all to a girl that was a three time Battle of the Books champion. Books are my people! They're supposed to tell it straight and not get bogged down in some mire of hippie liberal hemp-flavored lies.These books are full of sun-dappled happy talk about beekeeping naturally and flowers that attract beneficial insects and chocolate banana chutney parties. They have recipes for lavender beeswax hand salve and whimsical chicken coops in the shape of Hogwarts.  I should have realized; the covers of the backyard farming books are all softly lit with sunrise glows, gorgeous models-turned-farmers smiling serenely with slender arms cradling heritage breed chickens and baskets of tomatoes; standing amid a multitude of brilliantly colored flowers and set against a tastefully distressed and shabbily chic repurposed garden sheds while artisan butterflies flit about their artfully loose ringlets. Nobody who spends two hours to straighten and then re-curl their hair into a state of artistic undoneness can be trusted to tell the bald truth.

"Permaculture. Closed ecological loop. The joy of effortless sustainable chicken farming."

I have, on occasion, turned to the more conservative section of the homestead library. These cold and gritty books are written by real farmers who raise meat birds in battery cages in the barn. Hen treats? Are you serious? These guys would no sooner freeze canned corn into little silicon ice cube trays than they would plant heirloom watermelon radishes because they're beautifully colored and have a crisp, delicate taste. These guys plant potatoes, white potatoes, not blueberry-colored heirlooms, and wheat, no matter how non-ironically trendy it is to hate gluten, and there is no such thing as a pet or a vegan. They butcher, in great detail. They prune, as ruthlessly as they cull. The covers of these books are, in some inverse law of content to unattractiveness, graced by unsmiling, gnarled old men with plaid shirts and long white beards, hunched down in the frozen dirt on their Virginia acreage, firmly functional steel outbuildings with practical vinyl siding standing starkly in the background.

I'm not much for stark, or frozen, or vinyl siding, so you can imagine which books grace my Kindle library.

Damn you, Jenna, you just get me. 

It was this love of a pretty, sun-dappled cover ("Barnheart" by Jenna Woginrich) that led me to my current situation: hen-sitting. that is, I am sitting on my ass in the dead grass of my post-apocalyptic lawn with ants crawling up my shorts standing (okay, sitting) guard over my hens while they pasture graze so the neighbors' unleashed golden retrievers don't suddenly have any genetic homicidal instincts kick in. Despite the fact that as a classically trained pianist people have paid me $150 to play four pieces for their weddings for less than an hour I am sitting here getting wood chips and grass permanently embedded in the back of my thighs for the sake of three $5 chicks.

"Little House in the Suburbs" was my first urban homesteading book and my biggest inspiration. The two female authors were funny and hapless and clumsy like me and tried and failed and tried and failed (the gnarly sect of Farmers, capital F, don't fail. They cull.) and their experiences with chickens made it sounds so wonderful. Build a cage, throw in your vegetable scraps, take out free extra-healthy eggs! I started poring over chicken coop plans. I began longing for soaring red cedar structures with turrets and clever compartments and trays and gadgets. I had faith that my engineer husband would build something truly Williams-Sonoma worthy and all I needed now were the heritage breed chicks. I fantasized about souffles and baked eggs in ramekins and a secret flock of twenty that would eat all our vegetable scraps and poop out manure that would make my garden grow like something out of a Miracle-Grow commercial. My tomatoes would be as big as cabbages and the beans would climb to the sky! I worried about looking crazy to the neighbors. I worried about seeming crazy to my friends. I started obsessively reading articles on backyard chicken raising to make sure I had all the pertinent information. In this particular case, pertinent would equal things I wanted to hear about how easy, effortless, and absolutely expense-less this endeavor was about to be.

I stumbled across this you absolutely should not get backyard chickens article. It rather angrily pointed out something Little House in the Suburbs had never mentioned--chickens only lay for 2-4 years, but backyard chickens routinely live 8-10 years and can reportedly live up to twenty years!

Wait.

I went back through Little House, and another book I'd bought,"A Chicken in Every Yard". Tons of material on hens that laid colored eggs and bantam hens and ornamental silkie hens that didn't lay and couldn't be eaten but were too adorable not to add to a backyard flock and nowhere, NOWHERE did either of those books say a word about culling non-laying hens. A quick scan through the rest of my books for any mention of what to do when chicken lifespans exceeded their laying years was like Hermione trying to search the Hogwarts library for information on Horcruxes: a mention, here and there, of the existence of such a notion, alluded to and just as quickly swept under the rug.

From the covers of the real farming books the stark Appalachian farmers smirked from behind their white beards. You didn't think it'd be that easy, now did you, missy? Why don't you run along home to your petunias.

Dammit! Betrayed. But I refused to give up on the notion of backyard chickens. We'd just...cross that bridge when we came to it. Part of me hoped that once the hens stopped laying and the cost to feed them got to be prohibitive, the practical side of my nature would kick in; but I also hoped secretly that if I raised my chickens without hormones or any kind of feed that forced them to lay more than was natural they might extend their laying years. We started half-jokingly talking about ways of offing the hens when they went into Henopause that might relieve us of some of the guilt--letting them loose in the canyon in our suburbs for the coyotes to eat; letting my terrier "play" with them; my souffle fantasies were replaced with grisly and macabre mental chicken snuff films where my old hens choked to death on extra large seed corn or an unusually big Japanese beetle.

I went back to Little House in the Suburbs. The girls smiled up at me and reminded me that chickens were basically free; they fed their chickens on almost exclusively table scraps. My heart soared. If it didn't cost me anything to keep the chickens, and they were still technically working animals because they were composting my table scraps and the bugs in the backyard and the weeds that threatened to take over my nasturtium patch into black gold (aka chicken manure), we wouldn't need to kill them. They'd be fine! They could live to a ripe old age alongside the new flock of young laying hens we'd pick up in a few years, happily crapping out $40 an ounce nutrient dense fertilizing gold.

Except my six week old pullets would not eat table scraps.

I tried vegetable pulp from my juicer. They ran for it, looked at it, then kicked dirt over it and pooped on it. I tried fresh heirloom butter lettuce leaves from my garden. They ran over and sat on the leaves. I tried bits of apple and watermelon, clover, spurge, geranium leaves, orange peels, pineapple, carrot peels, green beans and finally, in a fit of despair, crab grass.

Guess which one they liked.

I did think a heritage breed chicken would be a bit more discriminating. 

Luckily in all my research (DIY Chicken Coops, Backyard Chickens for Beginners, 45 Ideas for Housing Your Flock, and of course, Building Chicken Coops for Dummies.) I had come across an all-important urban chicken farming cheat: the chicken tractor. Essentially this is like a little moveable chicken run, maybe 8 feet square, that because you move it to a different part of your yard every couple of days, gives the chickens constant access to fresh grass and bugs and gives them the closest thing to a free range experience outside of just building them some crazy 80' square monstrosity in the entirety of the backyard (sorry Jim. That's just crazy. THAT IS CRAZY. This is not Vermont. This is the suburbs. You have granite countertops. Pull it together.). We put the pullets outside in their chicken run, braving the neighbors' disapproval by moving them into the front yard so they could free range.

It's also the middle of the worst drought in California history. My lawn looks like this.

Thank God for no Home Owners Association.

The chicks pecked listlessly at the dead grass and looked for bugs (there were none) and started happily burrowing into the dust to give each other dust baths. Cute and fascinating to watch, but earning their own keep they were not. Dammit. There was crab grass, but it was all on the edges of the fenceline (dripping down from the neighbors, who refused to stop watering) and on the edges of my raised beds, where stragglers survived on the drips from my watering can. Only problem was that my sturdy, well-built chicken tractor had a sturdy, well-built base too wide to get into those narrow 1' strips of chicken-licking good crab grass. I didn't necessarily want the chicks eating my nasturtiums or my heirloom butter lettuce but there that crab grass was, just sitting there like the cupcakes in a Sprinkles vending machine. DAMN. MIT.

I grabbed my terrier's adjustable exercise pen and tried to squeeze it into the 1' area between the fence and the raised beds. The panels of the pen are 2' but with some creative pending and diagonals I made a bizarre parallelogram that encompassed what I thought was an optimal amount of lush green weeds and I dropped my hens inside.  

They rushed for the crab grass and spent at least 45 seconds mowing it down like goats before the little red hen realized there was a gate-like structure she could grab onto, and awkwardly fly-jumped out of the pen. 

I chased her down (she headed straight for my nasturtiums, the little elitist).

The little black hen watched the whole thing solemnly and then launched herself skyward (two feet at least) and hopped over the side of the pen. I threw the red one back into the pen and chased down the black one. My once cuddly-warm, downy-soft, make-me-your-pet chick took off screaming bloody murder like she was about to be butchered. I finally chased her down and threw her back into the pen while the brown spotted hen eyed me and eyed the top of the gate with an appraising yellow stare. 

Try me, bitch.  I really WISH YOU WOULD.

And so, here I find myself, hen-sitting in the dead grass in a stupidly optimistic effort to pasture my hens in the middle of the suburbs, in southern California zone 11 in July during the worst drought in history. Standing guard over my chickens so that they do not stupidly fly out of the precariously perched pen that offers the most marginal degree of safety from the unleashed dogs passing by, and absolutely no safety from the hawk I see eyeing them from the Eucalyptus tree on the hill; all so that I might extend the happy lives of these chicks and buy them a few extra days of laying health by giving them their natural diet of grass and grubs. I sit here, nobly attempting to stave off that day when they will have outlived their usefulness, trying to delay the axe-bringer, trying to close the ecological loop in my burgeoning food forest and take one step closer to the permaculture that will sustain my hens. 

The hens, for their part, pooped gooily, ignored the grass, and fell into a snuggle pile in the corner of the pen touching the dead lawn.