I’ve been going through some old blogs recently; sort of a nostalgic stumble down memory lane. And, as it is most times when you dig too deeply into things that are best left undisturbed, I uncovered something so awful and terrifying that I am loath to even utter the words; even though “utter”, in this context means “type”. But this devil must be expunged, so utter I will. After going through blog after blog after blog you could fairly say that… I, er, uh. Damn.

It looks like I have become predictable.

All the blogs I looked at could be simply and succinctly summarized as “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it got worse. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Had I known this in advance, I could have saved me a lot of time typing and you a lot of time reading if I only posted: “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it got worse. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Week, after week, after week. Some of you could successfully argue that the blog would have been even moreentertaining had I done so.

All of it; micro-farming, politics, bees, chickens, economics, the French: “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it got worse. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Damn. I hate being predictable.

I will endeavor to correct that flaw.

So, the chickens. The chickens. Everyone’s doing well, thank you for asking, and the oldest batch, now three weeks from leaving the shell, are entering what appears to be some kind of adolescent stage. Their silky-soft baby down is quickly being pushed aside by their first set of adult feathers and they are growing at an alarming rate. The down they came with now sticks through the new feathers at bizarre angles giving them a look like an accidental electrocution, or a chicken explosion frozen in time nanoseconds after the fuse reached the charge. Along with this growth spurt came an awful lot of rather chicken-like behavior like scratching and pecking, and flying, or trying to.

We were trying to come up with names to help distinguish one chick from another in conversation. We’d sit quietly, contemplating them for whole minutes, in an attempt to uncover some unique characteristic to help select the name. The older chickens, the Ameraucanas, were easy to tell apart as each had different colors and patterns than the others. Their colors all all shades of brown grading from a dark mocha to a creamy latte. That was a no brainer, huh? The only question was whether to call the one in the middle Cappuccino or Macchiato. Cappuccino won out.

The younger three, the Iowa Blues, were pretty much cut from the same cloth. All black, white under the chin, and a white butt. But all of them have a distinct personality. This may seem a bit of a reach applied to a creature which in the real world would be not even half way between dodging the frying pan only to end up on the grill, but it’s true.

From the very start Mocha – no relation to my sister’s attack llama of the same name – has been the curious one. Cappuccino is the confrontational one – she’ll stare you down and on one occasion took a peck at my hand. Latte is, well, Latte is chicken. She screams bloody murder when you pick her up and will fly into a panic at the drop of a hat and run around like a chicken with its…well, you know. 

So where there were no physically distinct attributes, we relied on their personalities for names. In the younger set, the one mentioned last week as taking over the top spot of the pecking order at the tender age of two days, got named Alpha. Then, there was the little chicken that almost couldn’t. For the first week of her life she was weak, lethargic, and always laying around on her own. Sometimes she’d hang with the others but most of the time she’d be off on her own. She didn’t seem sick just not quite in the game. The good news is that she has turned the corner. She still prefers to be off by herself, so we call her Solo. The last chicken to be named has exactly no personality, no distinguishing features, and no behavioral quirks to identify her as a unique individual. Her personality is beige; her favorite flavor: vanilla. If it had been her lot in life to end up skewered on a rotisserie – not that that is likely to happen now – I am certain that not only would she taste like chicken but she would taste exactly like what everybody thinks chicken tastes like. Everybody. For this totally average bird, the only name we could think of was Middle.

It’s great fun to watch the newly named chickens try to figure out what chickens are supposed to do. They’ve already learned that if they hang out under the heat lamp at night they can eat the tasty moths attracted to the light. The wing thing seems to have most of them flummoxed but they like to run from one end of their brood box to the other flapping their wings, trying to get airborne. So far, thank god, only one is thinking in three dimensions. This morning she decided to fly the coop, as it were, and with a flutter of quarter-fledged wings elevated herself out of the brood box and onto the floor next to it. She appeared to be as amazed as we were. We quickly returned her to her nest mates but it became clear that the chickens were going to need something bigger, stronger, and taller to live in if we were going to try and keep them down on the farm.

Back when we got the building supplies for the greenhouse, we also bought a bunch of lumber and plywood and nails and stuff that might, with some thought, be converted into a chicken coop. It turned out that “some thought” should have been “enough thought” because the old-growth trees; sacrificed to build a structure to protect the chickens from the marauding eagles who are only preying on chickens because the old-growth forests in which they used to live have all been decimated for people, like us, who have chickens to protect from them, found themselves sacrificed on the altar of my learning curve. See how the circle of life works? 

Anyway, I gave it more thought and carefully considered the plans I had in hand.

Yeah, right!

Okay, what I actually did was go buy a saw and glue and some screws, and started cutting.

I’m working on the outside portion of their enclosure which will be something like a screened-in covered porch. When they get a bit bigger we can stuff the brood box and heat lamp inside so they can get out and play yet still have a warm place to retire to in the evenings. But the problem with owning a saw and glue is that it encourages you to do things you wouldn’t normally do had you considered your project under the rubric of “enough thought”; an activity which we have already determined that I have not. Because, if I had, I would have also been in possession of one critical piece of the puzzle mentioned above, namely, the plans.

As my greenhouse experience showed, I don’t do well with plans. I think this goes back to my old report cards where the teachers always wrote “no respect for authority” in the comments section. Not that this is a bad thing. When I try to use plans, about half-way through the project, I give up the attempt and ignore them thereafter. Having done this more than a few times, I can assert that not following plans I have turns out much worse than building something by following plans I don’t. Typically, I start with a rough sketch, a vision in my mind of the finished project – in this case a brightly painted henhouse seen at a distance across the meadow – and a saw.

So far I’ve managed to put together something that might be the ceiling or, if that doesn’t work, the floor; as well as two things that vaguely resemble walls. I just have to put the end bits on and see if it will stand up. Hope, in all things, springs eternal.

I took a break from my construction work the other day when I realized that the walls actually sloped in opposite directions, which would make the roof look very Dali-esque, but permanently relegate the roof I already constructed to being the floor.

As a side note I figured out that my problem came from not realizing that either wall could be easily reversed, thereby making the pitches the same, or at least sloping in the same direction.

During this break I wandered out to check on the bees. I scanned across a meadow anomalously free of munching deer, ravenous raccoons, and skeletal coyotes looking for an easy lunch. I marveled at a clear, blue sky empty of rapacious eagles and hawks looking for a feathered snack to take back to their clear-cut snags and feed their starving babies. Wherever I looked, I could not make out a single stoat, weasel, bobcat, otter or cougar seeking to demolish the few remaining dreams of micro-agriculture that survived the French.

So I stepped out into the meadow.

And then – oh, come on, you knew it was coming – it got worse.