Our next door neighbors are out of town for the holidays and in their absence, we are taking care of their 15 chickens. The plan is we feed the chickens and keep the eggs. No big deal! And it really hasn't been a big deal at all. Chickens are relatively low maintenance. I have always wondered what it would be like having chickens, and we have had fun with the "time share."
The first time we went over to feed the chickens was absolute chaos! It was nighttime, and the chickens swarmed us, lit only by the eerie red glow of their heat lamps and my phone's flashlight. Chicken feet are so scaly and gross! And their jerky skinny little heads with bulging side-to-side eyes! We vowed not to go back in the dark after that first visit, and it has been relatively smooth sailing ever since. We also learned that if we collect the eggs every day they are less dirty than if we wait longer. Another unexpected lesson: chickens drink a LOT of water! Their bowl is always bone dry whether we go every day or every three days! Jeff has taken it upon himself to slip away and do the chicken check every day. He also patiently washes all of the poop and dirt off of the eggs at home. We have been collecting at least a dozen eggs per day for the past week! We gave 54 eggs (three 18 pack cartons) to family members and have eaten eggs for one meal per day, and we still have plenty to spare! It's eggcellent. Eggs for days. Egg-a-licious. You get the idea.
This morning Jeff wasn't feeling well so I decided to do the chicken check. When I got back from my run, I dashed over to take care of the chickens. When I lifted the egg-box door on the coop, I yelled "ahhhuuughhh!" A headless dead chicken with a bloody pecked neck was lying in one of the egg boxes. YUCK. Just to make sure it was dead and not...laying, I gave the birds water, then their scratch corn, collected the eggs into my bucket, and then lifted the cover again. The carcass was still there, stiff and bloody as ever. I must confess to moaning a lot. In general I don't consider myself too hoity toity to get a yucky job done (I am a mother of small children after all), but for some reason this dead chicken was giving me the creeps! I think it was the shameless cannibalism that got me. While I thought about how to move the body without touching it, a chicken strutted over to it and pecked a few more bloody fleshy nibbles out of the gash in the neck. I yelled at it.
I found two sticks in the snow and spent a few disgusting minutes trying to tweezer the dead chicken body out of the egg area. It is not easy to pick up a lopsided slick-feathery lump between two sticks. The sticks kept slipping on the feathers and twitching, gouging, and prodding the body. I also kept having to pause my pick-up efforts to bat back the living chickens. They had clearly been snacking on their dead coop-mate and were not happy to have her removed. I was groaning and squealing and yelling "get back, you nasty dinosaurs!" while trying my best to lift the surprisingly heavy stiff chicken body up out of the egg laying box and into my bucket. At last I managed the transfer and with a sigh of relief, I closed the door on the beastly birdy cannibals. When I glanced down at the bird in my bucket, I jumped. It turns out the head had not been completely severed, just folded under with empty pecked eyes. It reminded me of a cartoon with x's on its dead eyes. The thing locked me in a dead stare for my whole 90 second journey home.
Chickens are so creepy! I RAN with my egg-and death bucket back home and then realized that I couldn't dump the dead thing into our trash can without also dumping in the dozen [poop and blood speckled] eggs which were in the bucket with it. So I went inside and asked Jeff for help. I simply could not bring myself to pick up the dead bird with my hands! I had my running gloves on, but that thin breathable fabric barrier did not seem sufficient in any way. I had no desire to feel the cold hard stiff chicken carcass in my hands! Jeff came out and calmly lifted the bird into a cardboard box, covered it in crumpled Christmas wrapping paper, and lowered it into the trash can. Too bad the garbage truck already came this morning! We will have a dead chicken in our trash can for the next week.
With mild trepidation, I sent our neighbor a text to tell him the bad news. Thankfully he said that he's seen plenty of chickens die for no reason. He texted me "RIP, pollito!" and a "thanks for helping!" Whew, well at least we didn't kill the thing with our novice-level Google-based chicken husbandry skills! I mean, when you take care of someone's animals, the main goal is to keep them alive until their owners come back. I guess we have a 14/15 success rate so far...I hope it holds! Shudder, today confirmed my previous persuasion that if I had to kill my own meat, I would be a vegetarian. I'll take care of chickens and eat their eggs, but dead bodies? No thank you!
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