Photograph of bluebells by LeAnn Spencer
A Murder Most Foul!
It was only a chicken. And I was a chicken farmer; it was bound to happen sooner or later.
I was crouched under last year’s stalks of ornamental grasses, a pair of pruners methodically snipping, piling sheaves of brown into a mound that I would later gather and carry to the compost. Knowledge kept stabbing me unexpectedly as I recalled my morning. Bound to happen. Only a chicken. Or something like that.
I hadn’t noticed the side door, pulled open and sitting crookedly that morning, hadn’t noticed the absence of grumpy clucks coming from inside the coop (she was always bursting out first: a frantic flapping and a nosedive, sometimes a summersault, onto the grass). I hadn’t even noticed the red feathers caught in the still-hibernating lawn as I made my sleepy stumble across the backyard to open the chicken coop.
It didn’t really hit me, even as I clucked good-morning to the quizzical, cocked heads bobbing under two red combs. Only two. I then noted the side door: soft old wood, pulled open from the hinges. I thought so this is how it happens.
With a queer, cold proficiency, I scanned the yard and saw the feathers. I called to her just to be sure, half expecting her squatty form to come running from the garden. Instead, those red feathers quivered in the breezy March morning as I led the other two hens to their breakfast.
Really, I had expected it in a way. Since day one, I had accepted their helplessness, their utter dependency. I employed my feeble construction skills to their limit, designing a predator-tight coop for the nights. I fretted over the hawks that hunt the air by day, even threw a trowel at a neighborhood dog once (it was the closest object within reach). I persuaded the neighbors and was prepared to fight city ordinances, but I always knew that, at some point, I would have to feel the weight of a lifeless body in my hands or discover a spectacle of feathery carnage. The best-built coops, the most fiercely guarded hens sometimes fell prey to nature’s nasty side.
Sure, my hands shook a little when I pulled the headless body from under the deck where I found her, and some tears fell into the soil as I broke earth, then covered my hen. But it wasn’t until later in the day that the knowledge began to chew at me and leave me feeling, well, one hen short of a flock. I didn’t blame the animal, which had clawed its way into the coop, dragged my bird to its death, only to take a few bites. It – a raccoon, a fox, a wayward opossum? – was only acting according to its natural programming. I also decided not to be too hard on myself for letting my backyard fortress fall to attack. I had begun to believe that my stretch of suburbia was not yet re-inhabited with the wildlife, ousted when developers came.
There are plant species’ that pioneer disturbed areas, helping to restore them to ecological health. They create proper conditions for more finicky plants, then slip backstage when the ecosystem stabilizes. In a similar way, there are animals that trailblaze nature’s persistent reclamation of the land we unsettle. These are opportunistic species like raccoons and coyotes.
My hen had died at the hands of one of these eager, adaptable creatures, and the ironic part was that her death confirmed something for which I had been longing. Her death told me that the natural world was seeping through the cracks of concrete and turf grass, bursting through the seams of suburban sprawl. As much as I rejoiced in this unyielding fecundity, I had to admit that, when it came to my chickens, the predacious members of nature’s drama could stay in the forest preserves.
I sealed the side door of the coop with a piece of plywood and way too many screws, then stapled an extra layer of chicken wire over the windows. The following day I had to leave town for the weekend, placing the remaining two birds in the care of my neighbor, Marge.
“Erin, are you sure the raccoon can’t push through that chicken wire?” she asked me, and I sighed, wishing I hadn’t planted the idea. Marge, who had cried over the dead chicken enough for the both of us, tended to fret even more than I did. I knew that I would get calls throughout my weekend away: questions, worries and updates.
“Erin, the girls looked a bit harried this morning. Do you think something tried to get them last night? Or are they having flashbacks?”
“The weather’s supposed to be really bad this afternoon. Do you think I should put the chickens to bed early? God, you should have seen Ted and me chase them around the yard last night, trying to get them in their coop.” I pictured this and laughed out loud. Ted was a bear of a man, and I could almost see his thick legs dancing among the stubborn hens as they darted and flapped just out of reach.
“Okay, Erin, we’ve done it. We went to Home Depot and, well, your hens are safe. I just decided that nobody’s gonna hurt those little shits while I’m in charge.” When I got home, my garden looked like a prison yard with a spotlight on the coop and metal grating over its windows. No doubt, Marge and Ted had been making nightly patrols of the area. I would have called their measures extreme, except that I felt enormously comforted by the electric beam, flooding my yard and unmasking the night, and by the metal grilles over the widows. If they kept feral danger at bay, I was tempted to shape the same material into chicken-shaped chain-mail.
But it didn’t quite work that way. I would keep my chickens under tight security after that, shielding them with nervous glances out the window and closing them in their coop long before dusk. But I would eventually move the floodlight to a shelf in the garage. As a tender of chickens, I must engage in the dance of man and nature. What is untamed must forever interact with the cultivated, and the farmer must approach the natural world with awe and reverence – and – always, extra chicken-wire.Copyright © 2008 Erin Tuttle. All rights reserved.