tiger_spot

Today I got up stupidly early and drove a stupidly long way to come home with a twittering boxful of chickies! They are Goblin (yellow), Gremlin (stripy brown), and Ghost (black and grey) and they are adorable.

Morgan is a little scared of them and wanted gloves to handle them. Tori is super into them; she likes to explain to me what they are doing or what they want. “The chickens say they don’t know it gets dark! They can understand us.”

So far Ghost is the most adventurous and Goblin is the most dominant/aggressive towards the other chicks.

I have now bathed the chickens. I've been meaning to for some time, and have finally gotten around to it. They both had crustiness in the feathers around their vents, which dust bathing and preening was not taking care of, so I stepped in with warm water and soap.

Bathing a chicken is actually surprisingly easy. If I'd realized it would be this quick I'd've done it earlier. They were not precisely cooperative, but I would characterize their responses as puzzled, perhaps offended, rather than panicked or angry, so one hand on top to minimize flapping and one hand in the bucket agitating the water underneath was quite sufficient. The internet advised me to use very warm water and I think that helped.

We'll see how they look when they dry out, and whether they can keep that area clean on their own now or whether we'll need to repeat the procedure in the future. But for now I am quite satisfied with the chicken bathing experiment.

This week's question: "How did you get started having chickens?"

When I was a kid, my dad got an incubator and some eggs from a coworker of his who also raised chickens, and attempted to hatch about three dozen eggs (over the course of several batches). He wound up with seven slimy little chicks living in an old refrigerator box in his workshop. (I was expecting fluffy cute chicks, and they did turn into fluffy cute chicks pretty quickly, but as it turns out the inside of an egg is full of slime! Who knew.) They took ill, and four of them didn't make it. Of the remaining three, Spot and Feathers turned out to be roosters and had to be returned to the farm, but Blacky endeared herself to us by laying eggs and eating grubs, and lived a reasonably full chickeny life before some kind of nocturnal predator broke into her coop.

So I had fond memories of chickens.

Then, when we moved into our last apartment here, I started biking past the police station on my way to work. There were three or four chickens who lived across the street from the police station that I would frequently see milling about in their front yard, scratching in the police station's lawn, or crossing the street on the way from one side to the other. Huh, I thought. Keeping chickens in Mountain View must be legal.

So I looked up the city code and started haunting the forums at Backyard Chickens. After we bought the house brooksmoses designed a coop that followed all (well, most of) the relevant rules and suggestions, a friend who worked at a pet store hooked me up with three-day-old sexed chicks (thereby skipping all the really difficult parts), and that was that. They lived in a cage with a heat lamp until they were big enough to go outside and the coop was finished.

There have been somewhat fewer eggs than usual this summer. Partly this is an expected decline as the hens age, but it's seemed like a bit of a steep drop-off lately. Today, while I was rummaging around behind the orange trees picking up dessicated oranges, I found another reason: Dragon's secret nest. She had 10 eggs back there, which is something like two weeks' production. No wonder we were short in the nest box!

There is a fine and venerable tradition in anthropology of taking any artifact or behavior that does not have a purpose that is immediately apparent to the observer and declaring it part of a religion.

Herewith I describe the chickenly ritual known as The Laying of the Sun.

This ceremony occurs between first light and full light on days determined by a complex, possibly lunar-influenced, ritual calendar. It is most frequently observed just before the summer solstice, though occasional celebration occurs all year, or at least the parts of the year in which (a) I am awake already when the sun comes up or (b) we've left the bedroom window open.

During the ritual, one chicken (usually Norska, I think, although they're hard to tell apart by voice) takes the role of Mother of the Sun and re-enacts the original laying of the sun, with fanfare and song. Note that this re-enactment does not include the production of an actual egg; egg production happens much later in the day and is typically accompanied by much less fanfare and very little song. The troubles and strife experienced by the Mother of the Sun are described in lurid and exacting detail by this High Priestess, supported at intervals by a full chorus of all the other chickens. The song then shifts into a profound and celebratory triumphal march, again supported at intervals by a full chorus of all the other chickens. Possibly they are re-enacting a Narnian sort of singing the world into existence[1]; the song's division into clear individual segments tends to support a narrative interpretation.

Once the ritual is complete, the chickens go about the usual business of the morning. The ceremony does not appear to be accompanied by any fasting or particular ceremonial foodstuffs, nor by any complex personal preparations or alterations to the ritual space.

There are, however, occasional rehearsals.



[1] As described in Lewis, C.S. (1955). The Magician's Nephew. London, England: The Bodley Head.

Phoenix gets the Golden Snowball Award for excellence in winter laying. She's been chugging right along, straight through the solstice and everything. Go go reliable bird!

(Norska and Teckla, on the other hand, are total slackers. Their heads have gone all pale, too, so they're not going to be back to laying any time soon. Lazy chickens.)

We have entered the dark time of year.

Lately, I'm getting up on train-catching days before the sun is properly up and biking home in the last little trailing bits of sunset. That means it's time to start buying my lunch more often, so I can take it out to the park and soak up some sunlight while it's there.

The other day, I went and bought lunch at the Indian place around the corner from my office, as I often do. However, it was cloudy and yucky out, so instead of taking it to the park I sat at the counter and watched the kitchen go. I knew the place was busy, but I hadn't realized quite how busy. I was really impressed watching all the various cooks zooming around doing six things at once, fetching and patting and frying and passing things off to other cooks and plating and serving and generally doing the well-oiled machine thing. An overclocked well-oiled machine.

One advantage of getting up before sunrise is that I cannot possibly be woken up before the alarm by the chickens or wild birds or anything, because nothing whatsoever is stirring out there. The chickens have been slow with egg production lately; Norska and Phoenix are both molting, so they're out of commission for a while. I may give in and buy store eggs again to support my ice cream creation experiments / late-night chocolate cake needs. (The five-spice syrup, by the way, worked stupendously. Piña colada next!)

***

Lunch today was exciting. I made a new recipe, kale bread, which is a fried Indian flatbread with kale, coriander, and chilis in it. They came out fairly tasty, although next time I am going to knead by hand, not using the food processor, because the food processor isn't really big enough and just makes a mess to clean up. Also I put too much water in, so the dough was really sticky and had to be overfloured to work with properly. As a proof-of-concept they worked, but I think I can make them better next time. brooksmoses helpfully fried them for me while I was finishing up the rolling and making a salad to go with them.

After the frying was done, the pan got a little overenthusiastic and set off the smoke alarm, which set off the dog, who remained agitated for quite a long time. One of the other alarms decided that ten minutes after the first one had gone off was a good time to start beeping for a battery replacement, which I'm sure reassured the dog not at all. He decided, after the beeping had in fact stopped, that the best thing to do was let himself out the front door. After being retrieved, he tried the back door (open to the screen to let out the smoke, so that one was easy). After being retrieved from there, he was not any happier about existence, and kept running around whining like something was making a noise I couldn't hear, although none of the other alarms were beeping or anything. After I sat out back with him for a while, he calmed down (and did a great job ignoring the chickens). Sunlight is magic, I guess.

***

I have noticed that some of my shirts are fitting differently in the arms and shoulders lately. I can only assume that I'm putting on muscle from climbing. In the abstract, this is good, but it is making it even harder to find shirts that fit, which I frankly didn't expect was possible.

Clearly I should only wear tank tops from now on.

***

The other day, coming home from the train station after Sociological Observation Shopping[1], part of my rear bike light fell off. I didn't realize it at the time -- I thought the noise was me running over a plastic cup or something of that nature. The next morning I checked the spot where the noise occurred (in the park) and found the light cover and the batteries. I reassembled the light and continued on my way. Unfortunately, the cover fell off again later in the ride, and before I could safely retrieve it a great big car ran right over it and pulverized the poor thing. (I did manage to get the batteries, which had not been pulverized.)

So now I have a nice new rear light. The screws holding it to the rack don't want to go in very far, so I'm a little concerned about its stability, but it seems to be doing okay so far.

[1] Sociological Observation Shopping is like shopping, but without the expectation (or in this case the fact) of buying anything (well, lunch and cream puffs, but those hardly count). It's much less stressful than the other kind. Oh, and we went to Paxton Gate, which I will have to take my sibling & sibling-in-law to if they ever come visit, because it is awesome. I wanted to buy them this lamp with chicken feet and a sort of bathysphere aesthetic and an anglerfish/lotus flower thing on a stem and a tentacle, but it was too expensive. (Aha. Not this one, but a similar one.) The website looks all respectable; this is a lie. The store is full of disreputably alarming things like mouse skeletons dressed up as cherubs and taxidermy unicorn heads and bowls full of penis bones and strings of dried pufferfish. Occasionally you get this feeling like you're being watched, and of course you are, by six things that have been dead for years and have their heads swapped around on the wrong bodies.

I have questions! These questions are from mrissa. If you would like lovingly handcrafted questions of your own from me, comment below and ask for them.


1. What is the most unexpected thing about the chickens?

Sunday, I cleaned out the coop. This is not unexpected, just obnoxious, but it's important background. So I cleaned out the coop, filthying up many rags and dampening much ground and wearing myself out entirely, then covered the bottom of said coop with nice clean rice hulls to replace the rather horrible mess of sand and food dust and god-knows-what that had developed since the last time I cleaned out the chicken coop. Ah, bliss. Clean bliss.

Each morning I scoop out obvious lumps of waste and deposit them in a small trash can near the coop for later transport to the compost heap. Monday morning, while I was bent over depositing a scoop, Dragon kicked a bunch of rice hulls out of the coop onto my head. The unexpected part is how they then filtered down into my undergarments.

Rice hulls are itchy.


2. The sword in your icon: how often do you pick it up? Can it be sheathed without drinking blood?

That particular sword is a cavalry saber. Like the shirt I'm wearing in that icon, it wasn't (and isn't) mine, just brought along to share for the photo shoot. (When I was in the UT fencing club, we did a photo shoot for a calendar for a fundraiser one year. The calendar did not come out well, but the original pictures were excellent.) I don't think it actually had a sheath, so its blood-drinking requirements are unknown to me.

I don't pick up any other swords regularly these days either, which is a shame.


3. What part of your life would be hardest to explain to your 20-year-old self? your 10-year-old self?

Hmmm. 10-year-old me I think predates our AOL subscription, so perhaps the amount of socializing and information-finding I do online would be hardest to explain. Or I could go into detail about how to get a mortgage -- I don't really fully understand that now and I've done it, so explaining it would definitely be a challenge. "Why I don't really, 100%, with every fiber of my being, want to go to Mars" would also be a tricky one.

20-year-old me... I'm not sure. I was going to say certain aspects of my job situation, but 20 was after I'd graduated, so the seeds of that were already well-planted and predictable. (Not inevitable, but obviously likely enough.) It'd be slightly depressing to explain, but not actually difficult. This sense I've been having lately of my life being fated, in a seasonal circle-of-life kind of way, would probably be hard to explain to a lot of 20-year-olds but I don't think I was one of them. Politics, maybe, but 20-year-old me had vivid recent memories of the World Trade Center towers coming down and would not have been surprised by anything. I may have to fall back on the mortgage again.

I wish 40 or 50 or 60-year-old me would come explain something. It doesn't have to be anything difficult.


4. What is your reading missing most these days?

Spanish. And picture books. But I will get to those.


5. What do you wish you could send out as a postcard (image, text, whatever)?

Plans for a low cost, very safe, easy to build teleporter. Or possibly the resume and cover letter to end all resumes and cover letters; that'd be handy to have in a nice easily-distributable format.

Monday, when I got home from work, I noticed that Phoenix was huddled up in a corner of the run looking unhappy. Teckla and Norska were both out in her general vicinity, ignoring her entirely and not harassing her in any way. Neither of these things is normal.

Upon picking Phoenix up for investigation and snuggling, I noticed that my hands were bloody. Well, that at least told me what sort of injury to look for, and some first clues about where on the chicken it might be.... Somehow or other, she tore off a claw (ouch). Since the other chickens weren't being super-obnoxious about it, I let her stay in with them, and she perked up and got more active later in the evening. I'll keep an eye on it in case it gets infected, but it looks like it should be fine eventually. Still, poor girl.

This morning, I let the dog out on the porch while I was feeding the chickens. The chickens decided it was a good morning to make a break for it, and dodged around me as I was coming in to take off across the yard. "Oh boy!" said the dog. "Running chickens! I'll follow this red one!"

No chickens were harmed, but I'm sure a lolloping 80-pound predator is not a happy sight for a bird to get in the rear-view mirror.

I tell you, if something's going to go wrong it's going to happen to Phoenix. A month or two ago she managed to take a divot out of her beak somehow. For a while there it looked like I was going to need to clip off the remaining side bit before it got overgrown and started interfering with pecking, but she managed to wear it off evenly without any intervention from me.

On the plus side, she's started laying. Her first egg, Monday, was a gorgeous dark brown with light speckles, a bit bigger than Dragon's first few tries here. Today, there were definitely two new-layer eggs, and one's brown so I think it's hers, but it's so light that I almost wonder whether Dragon laid twice (unlikely, but possible).

I've been getting a lot of broken eggs lately, and it occurred to me today that perhaps, now that the junior chickens are laying, they will stop pulling hay out of the nestbox and it can stay and perform its useful padding function. So now the box is lovely and hay-filled once more, and we will just see about this jostling the big eggs around so much that they break.

Today I set up the tent in the backyard so that we can introduce the dog to it and make sure he's generally comfortable with this new object and familiar with the basic Rules of Tent ("This is inside. Do not pee on it.") before we take him camping. So far I have learned the following things:

1. The diagrams in the tent assembly manual are misleading and not comprehensive.

2. It is possible for one person to assemble the Giant Tent of Doom, but I don't know that I'd recommend it.

3. Assembling a tent in the backyard startles the heck out of the chickens.

4. Boy, it's hot out.

5. These stakes bend really easily.

6. As it turns out, Dragon can slither through that space in the dog crate[1].

7. Teckla reacts to accessible junior chicken just exactly like one would expect (i.e., the sort of chase that ought to be scored to "Yakety Sax").

8. These color-coded buckles on the tent & rain fly are really handy.

9. Galen thinks the tent is pretty cool.

10. He shows no inclination to pee in or on it (though it is in the yard, and he is in general not all that willing to pee in the yard), but he thought maybe it would be a fun place to dig. The workings of the doggish brain are inexplicable.

11. The tent walls statically attract dog hair with a force greater than the force of gravity. This looks kind of cool but is probably going to be a pain to clean up.

12. The correct way to enter or exit the tent, according to Galen, is with a high, graceful leap over the little sill with the zipper on it.

13. The vestibule has a tendency to pull off the stakes if they are not firmly sunk into the ground. I am not willing to bother sinking stakes into the ground any more firmly than they go when I step on them when the tent is set up in the yard for dog introduction purposes.

14. The air mattress inflating pump should not be stored with the batteries in it, because one of them leaked. I have cleaned it up and think it will be okay once it dries out, but checking whether Galen has an issue with air mattresses will have to wait for another time.


[1] I moved the junior chickens outside yesterday. They're in the plastic dog crate that Galen chewed up, tucked under the coop in the shady part of the run. I covered the chewed-up bits with duct tape so nobody would get scratched, but there was still a space below the door where plastic was missing. It looked a little borderline as to whether the small chickens could fit through it, so I figured I'd give it a try and fix it later if it turned out they could. There is cardboard there now. Also yesterday, I got out all the material needed to divide the run into two parts so each set of chickens could have outside space until the little guys are big enough to be safely combined with the older chickens, then looked at how much space the dog crate takes up, how difficult it would be to arrange a temporary divider in a way that still allowed access to the crate for feeding and cleaning, and decided that the first idea I'd had, where each pair of chickens can alternate days out in the run, was in fact a fine idea.