STEPPING OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE and straight into a flock of chickens.
Writing My Way Out of Burnout: Essay # One (includes behind the scenes thoughts about writing this piece for paid subscribers)
The first time I held a chicken I thought: This. Is. It. This is where I’m supposed to be, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. These feathery creatures are meant to be part of my life. It was an instant, significant connection.
Sitting on a hay bale, the late June sun warming my face and turning my décolletage a subtle shade of dark pink because I’d been too excited to remember - or even think about - suncream, I cradled a young brown hen. I felt the soft feathers, touched her rubbery-like comb, stroked her smooth beak and marvelled at the way her foot curled around my finger just like a baby’s tiny hand would.
Underneath the reptilian-like chicken’s foot was a surprisingly soft padded bit that I would later think summed up my family flock of chickens pretty well. They look like they’d fly up and peck your eyes out at the slightest provocation but they had a sweet vulnerability to them. I just wanted to be their guardian.
Oh my goodness, I miss them.
That simple brown chicken melted the tension in my shoulders from our recent, stressful house move. My jaw unclenched and my legs seemed to sink into the hay. She was, in fact, an all powerful wonder-chicken.
I know some people look at chickens and think, ugh - feathers, sharp beaks, or that they’re prehistoric (apparently they are distantly related to dinosaurs) but I just saw a small, gentle creature that I knew was about to become my life. Which they were for seven years.
That is until one devastating Saturday in February 2019 when all but two of my flock - alongside my runner ducks that had been hatched by one of my chickens - were destroyed by a magnificent looking but deadly fox. I never, ever, want to go through that again.
Over those seven years I went from a flock of six to a flock of nearly forty at one point. Just before the fox came I think we had around ten or twelve. Plus four ducks.
I went from knowing absolutely nothing about them, to becoming proficient in cleaning out their houses, experimenting with different layouts to keep them safe and discerning which one was behind me, simply by the noise she was making.
We had broody chickens and I bought fertilised eggs off eBay for them to sit on for three weeks. When our ducks depleted in numbers the next broody chicken got duck eggs whether she liked it or not and she faithfully presided over them for an extra week (as they take four weeks to hatch). She was pretty calm the first time they went for a swim. I was impressed. I wasn’t as composed when my son went off to university.
We had a few boys who became quite loud early in the morning. I learned that cockerels don’t just crow at dawn but all the damn day. And chickens don’t make their stereotypical clucking noise all the time - only when they’ve laid an egg. It’s called their egg-laying song. Some of them were more dramatic and flouncy than others, really making a meal of it for a solid five minutes or more. The rest of the time they would make gentle coo-ing sounds or, occasionally, an alarm call when the buzzard or red-kite flew over the top of them.
I also learned where some of our popular idioms come from, such as ‘pecking order’. Good grief, they can get really arsey when it comes to who’s in charge. And if a new chicken deigned to join the flock they can be absolutely vicious towards it. Letting them know just where they stand in that pecking order.
We had hybrid chickens that were bred for hardiness and in order to provide eggs all year round, we rescued battery chickens and we hatched pure breeds who took the winter off laying. When one of the broody chickens decided she was bored and didn’t want to be a mother anymore I hastily purchased a small incubator and we watched in wonder as the first cracks appeared in the shells.
It was an amazing learning experience. Of course we had deaths, all of them died eventually, mostly to age or disease or in one case extreme cold. We had a false spring one year and we bought three young pullets, but the weather turned with a hard north wind sweeping across our paddock bringing snow with it. And it was just too much. That was in the early days and yes, I kicked myself for not keeping them alive although I did everything I could at the time. I suspect where I had bought them from was also harbouring a disease but we live and learn.
The first time I thought I saw a dead chicken it was actually sunbathing. Nelly, our first brown hybrid, had stretched out in front of our fence, fanning her wings and was really soaking up the sun. To me she looked like she’d been splattered. Nelly though was just living her best life.
We had wooden coops, plastic ones, we had electric fence that I had to switch off at night so the hedgehogs wouldn’t curl up around the bottom wire and die. Which then meant the rabbits would nibble at the wire creating holes for the foxes to sneak in. Nothing was ever simple. Each decision had a repercussion.
One time I heard a ruckus from the girls and ran out the house with my yellow labrador. A fox was walking off with my white and black chicken in it’s mouth (it was Barbara Mark I or Mark II I can’t quite remember). She’d been locked inside her run, inside the electric fence. But the fox had got in through a hole in the fence (bloody rabbits) and I’d forgotten to put the bottom catch through the plastic house and run meaning it had cleverly pushed open the door and made a gap of about two inches to pull Barbara out.
This story had a happy ending. I shouted at the fox, the dog ran after it, I tried to run too but felt like I was running through quicksand, I wasn’t as fast as I was in my youth (and I wasn’t fast then, to be fair). The fox dropped Barbara and I scooped her up and popped her in the dark of the wooden coop and closed the hatch (chickens calm immediately in the dark). Within an hour she was up and about as though nothing had happened. Barbara was ace.
When we gave up on the electric fence and moved the chickens into a large run instead - more hedgehog friendly, we started to attract vermin. Luckily my dog was an excellent rat catcher but it was a continual battle. Don’t even talk to me about the grey squirrel I once found in the bag of corn (it had cleverly knocked the lid off, or perhaps it had come loose in the wind). My scream was louder than any cockerel.
That reminds me, one night I was walking down to Hen Orchard (as we used to call it) in the dark with a small torch and the dog for company and something squealed at me; almost bringing my heart to a stop. I shone my torch down, which is where the noise had come from, and a large hedgehog was there very annoyed at nearly being trod on. Good job I wasn’t bare foot.
Before I became a chicken-keeper I knew nothing about them. I did my research, I read books and went on a chicken-keeping course, making copious notes and getting laughed at, not unkindly, by the farmer (that’s what I was doing on the hay bale, getting sunburnt in June). It was daunting having creatures to keep alive and care for. Almost as daunting as having my first child.
But nothing beats practical experience. Before we got them I’d built up in my head that I couldn’t do it. That it would be beyond me. That’s how I feel whenever I start a new project. That’s how I felt starting this piece of writing. But I learned that I could try new things, I could step out of my comfort zone and succeed. Because when you do, you find a new layer to who you are as a person. (That reminds me, we had a white hybrid chicken once called Princess Layer.)
One day I will have chickens again. And I can’t wait to cuddle them and let them curl their scaly yet secretly soft foot around my finger.
BEHIND THE CURTAIN: Thoughts from writing this piece.
The fears are back, which of course they would be considering I haven’t written anything like this in some considerable time. This meant it took me a few days to write it fully in first draft form after developing the initial idea. I was scared of trying - and failing. Always my go-to thoughts when I’m doing something slightly different and out of my comfort zone. I thought I wasn’t up to writing it, I thought I didn’t have enough memories or that I wouldn’t be able to work out the direction I wanted to go in. Of course, I was wrong.