My Life With Chickens
I’ve been living at a ecological community near the Yosemite mountains in California. We also call it the Co-Op or Cooperative. It’s run by Rex Eastman who relocated here to be closer to nature, live more naturally and build a traveller’s community. The official name for the place is Solazo Paz, which is Spanish for ‘Sun-drenched Peace’. Living at the co-op for a couple of weeks inspired the following essays.
My Life With Chickens
If you’re living at the co-op, you will have the experience of being a keeper of hens. I never really thought too much about chickens in the past, because I haven’t lived near them. But, now with six of them a part of my daily experience, I’m learning a lot about the natural world here. Chickens, I discover, are quite intelligent. They also run unusually fast. Some days, when there are several volunteers around, and most of the work has been finished, you can feel like the only work you’ve done the entire day is open and close the door to the chicken coop. Simple as that is, I tell myself I’m doing a good job of that. We don’t have any roosters, only hens, so we don’t wake up early morning to the sounds of a rooster, but even our hens noisily demand to be opened up from their coop when they’ve had enough time inside. Whoever wakes up the earliest, frees them up. They come out in a frenzy, like rush hour commuters, and start pecking at whatever they can find.
Feeding Frenzy
The topic of food is an interesting one where chickens are concerned and it is safe to say that a satiated chicken is a myth. They will never refuse any food as they are hungry most of the time. The kind of hens we have lay an egg almost daily or just as frequently. So, it is understandable that they feel hungry constantly. We try to give them lots of food, which consists of organic leftovers from our kitchen. Peels, vegetables, fruits, grains. We also get a lot of leftover food at the weekly Mexican market in the nearby town, and a huge quantity of it goes to our hungry chickens. I think it’s pretty cool that even our waste get utilised in this manner. Being around them has definitely opened my eyes to how much a free creature actually eats. A diet as robust and diverse as a human. We do them great disservice when we only feed them the grain or chicken feed at those poultry farms.
Fearless Birds
The first time I walked into Solazo Paz, I marvelled to Rex, ’I’ve never seen chickens who don’t run away from me but are running towards me. They are really fearless.’ ‘That’s because they know we’re not going to do them any harm. They are usually scared of people because they know that people will kill them. But, here they consider us their caregivers.’ I asked him whether they can sense his feeling of care towards them? ‘I’d like to think that, but I guess I’m more of an easy source of food for them.’ In the days to come, I too become an easy source of food for them, and they run expectantly at the sight of me. I have never seen a hen run as fast as they do if some food is being distributed. I say to my friends, ‘Not even people who love me run like that when they see me.’ Sometimes, they even jump on our tables looking for food, so we prefer to eat inside the common room. Whatever it may be, I am having a good time being a hen keeper.
Coming Home At Night
One day Rex informed us that he was going to leave for 5 days to go to LA. He gave us all the general instructions to maintain the co-op. He said, ‘You have just to make sure you close the chickens up at sundown. At this I asked, ‘Wow, will we have to run after them and catch them? Finally some action in hen keeping.’
‘Oh, no. When the sun starts setting, they’ll go inside the coop themselves. You just have to close the door.’
‘Huh. That’s convenient. They don’t need much work.’
I continued wondering about this. What is it that makes the hens go into the coop naturally at sundown? Do they get tired? The way the other birds go to sleep at night in the trees and the nests? I’m sure all that pecking and the never-ending search for food must tire the hens out. If that’s all I did all day, I would be tired for sure. I discovered later that once they identify the coop as their home, they would go back to it naturally when it starts getting dark. They consider it a place of safety and shelter. And it is important to close it before it is night time, to protect them from nocturnal predators that might come for a taste of them. So, this is how the days were spent in my life with chickens.
