No Cock-a-Doo!
A chicken that once belonged to my friend’s mom. Recognize this one Carol? ;-)
As of today, we have officially become chicken farmers—or at least chicken owners. I say “farmers” because I suppose we’ll have eggs eventually, and that feels like entering the farming fray. Obviously, this will be in an extremely minimalist and suburban way, particularly since we only have three chicks at present and really have no clue what we’re doing.
Just two nights before finding out we were bringing home the chicks, I suggested that Will would need to turn the underside of his beautifully crafted playhouse into a chicken coop. We don’t even actually know how long we have until said coop needs to be completed. For all our combined years of growing up as country kids, we have zero experience raising poultry. I find humour in the fact that our first chickens are here in the suburbs of San Francisco!
I also find it strange that while I am a detail-oriented planner for pretty much everything else in our lives, all of the pets we have ever had as adults have come into our lives with very minimal preparation.
First was the rabbit. A big ol’ gorgeous bunny we named Hunca Munca after the mischievous mouse from Beatrix Potter’s ‘The Tale of Two Bad Mice’. He needed a home, and I was told rabbits were low-maintenance. We had a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and I was about to become pregnant with our third child. During this time, Will travelled a lot to Asia for weeks at a time, so “low-key” sounded right up my alley.
Unexpectedly, this pet turned out to be a VERY pesky wabbit (sorry, couldn’t resist). By the time baby number three arrived, I was very much unable to meet the needs of both a high-maintenance bunny and a newborn. We found Hunca Munca a new home at the local Montessori school, where he was very well loved by the students and staff, but deeply mourned by my girls for many years afterward. I vowed I would never get rid of an animal again. The guilt was real.
While visiting, my dad suggested acquiring a hamster to help the girls recover from the loss of their beloved bunny. I was assured they were not only low-maintenance, but also only lived about three years. This seemed like a commitment I could manage. And so, my dad took my oldest to the pet store and, with my blessing, purchased a small dark hamster whom we christened “Bear” because he looked like a miniature version of one.
Bear was definitely much less work than Hunca Munca, but also a lot less fun. Since I didn’t have the capacity for handling both a hamster and a newborn, the girls never got used to handling him much, and so he never became the kind you could cup in your hands and cuddle. Several times he escaped, and we found ourselves on dramatic hamster hunts throughout the house. By the time Bear died, I’ll admit I was relieved to have one less being to keep fed and watered. I knew it would be our last pet for a long time.
Four years later, our bird-obsessed third child (who had pretty much missed out on the first two pets) was offered some chicks to care for. Unfortunately, before we could take them home, a winter storm tore up our rancher friend’s coop, and the local predators had a heyday. Our son was devastated, but waited with increasing eagerness for the coop to be repaired and for a new batch of chicks to hatch.
During this time, I put zero effort into research. Why? Because I was researching and planning every other aspect of our lives—not the possibility of what to do with baby chicks. Plus, we were under the initial impression that we would simply be hosting the chicks for a short term and then giving them back once they were ready to spread their wings and be launched into the big wide world. That is exactly what we thought we were committing to this past Friday when we were told the chicks were ready.
Only, we somehow said yes to much more.
When we were offered a long-term arrangement (i.e. permanent chicken ownership), I shared my concern: we travel for long periods at various times during the year, and I wouldn’t have anyone to care for our chickens. Our rancher friend benevolently offered to have the chickens returned to her care whenever we travelled. This was exactly what I needed to hear in order to say “yes” to becoming a permanent mother hen.
So here we are, on our small suburban lot, with three 5-week-old chirpity-chirps (of the Heinz 57 variety) and one very smitten young boy. The girls are adoring and delighted to have pets once again, but my youngest is a budding birder and now the proud papa to a trio of chicks, all of which he had names for immediately. The chicks have been named Henny, Daisy, and Frederica/Frederika—we aren’t sure on preferred spelling yet.
Tonight they chirped like crazy when I turned the lights off (turns out everyone on the internet says they’re afraid of the dark?!), but they settled down much better once I slowly dimmed the lights instead. So far, so good.
There’s just one possible problem. I mean, I’m sure there are many, but the first one we might face is this: if any of them turn out to be roosters, it’s back to the rancher they go. No roosters within city limits.
Or, in the words of my middle child back when she was pint-sized and chickens scared the ever-livin’ daylights out of her:
“NO COCK-A-DOO!”
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Signing off from Fenwick Farms,
Jaime
PS // Photos forthcoming. Stay tuned.
