A month ago we had a period of soul searching about our hens. Catherine announced one morning that one of the hens had eaten an egg. It doesn't seem like such a big deal at first, but it is actually a serious problem if you raise hens for eggs, as we do. They do like the taste and pretty soon the whole flock does it. Chicken books put this problem in the category of cannibalism (chickens will eat each other). Catherine has a friend who had a similar problem, but delayed action and the one egg eater initiated the others into the pleasures of egg eating. Chicken books all say that you have to remove the egg eater as soon as you can determine who it is. We swung into action. I made what I call our mini Guantanamo in the pump house and we both watched and watched, trying to find out who the culprit was. The important thing is finding the culprit and isolating her, but what then? The term the "experts" use is cull the hen from the flock. Cull is a nice word for getting rid of the chicken, i.e. killing her. If someone would take her it would only be for the meat, unless we lied about her situation.
So, here we have two Buddhist priests with a dilemma. Our hens aren't pets, they are parts of our household economy. Around here they are a part of most everyone's household economy and many of our neighbors depend on them for eggs and meat. Hunting, raising animals for meat, and small vegetable gardens are important in people's lives in ways that have been alien to this city guy.
We lucked out as the egg eating seems to have been a one time thing, but in the back of my mind I am aware that I may have to face this issue again. All I can say now is that I don't know what I would do.
We have some other egg layers around here.
In our lawn we have a post, about six feet high. It is the base of a tree that was cut down and is quite dead. Our cat likes to climb up to the top, as do my kids. A few weeks ago a chickadee decided that it would be a good spot for a nest (nesting season seems to get started in May around here) and she began to excavate a cavity. Day after day she would dig out her site. I first became aware of her work not by seeing her, but by hearing the tap tap of her work. The cavity got bigger and bigger and I was getting excited about having a nest I could see from my desk. I also was worried about our cat, so I strung up a fence of chicken wire around the post to keep the cat out. The chickadee began to get skittish about her site when tree swallows went zooming around the place looking for nest sites, but she continued her work. Then, she stopped showing up for work. I'm guessing that she realized what we realized: her site was very open to predators and had too much activity going on around it. So she apparently abandoned the site and, I hoped, found a better site elsewhere.
Birds and animals aren't the only interesting living beings out here. We have mountain men out here, independent and fairly self-sufficient folks.
About three or four miles down the road from us there's a fellow who is often having a yard sale (Catherine refers to it as the perpetual yard sale). So last Friday on the way home from picking up Deborah from the airport we stopped at the yard sale. This fellow comes out. He's got on a large floppy leather hat, a droopy mustache, and longish hair. Large and somewhat lumbering with what seems to be only one tooth on his lower jaw. Patricia, the woman who sits with us on Tuesday mornings told us that the fellow had a lot of skillets that he finds and restores. Well it was cast iron heaven. We talked about cast iron and skillets and he showed us some that were very old and beautifully restored. He has lived as a hunter and also as a restorer of muskets and cast iron, and showing folks how to use these.
I think our listening got him inspired and he then went into a tale about a Mountain Man Rendezvous (a get together of people who try to maintain and re-enact the lives of people in the early nineteenth century) during winter.
We were told that the wind chill factor was twenty below. There were a couple of sections to the site: the primitive area (using nothing that came after 1840) and the area merchants were. He was there showing his 300 plus collection of muskets in a 30x40 tent. He set up a butane heater and enjoyed the day with a couple of friends. In pops a woman in buckskin who tells him he can't have that heater, he tells her he wasn't in the primitive area and he damned well can. They have a good squabble and she storms out. It turns out that the woman was the wife of one of the fellows he was with. She comes back later a bit huffy, but goes over to the heater to warm her hands. He gets up and turns the heater off, followed by another scene. She does come back the next day and apologizes and they become good friends when when they learn they have an interest in beads.
I have the feeling that this is a mountain man tall tale or a stretch of what happened . I don't know what really happened, but he's a pretty good story teller.
As I'm writing this the chickadee has reappeared to work on the nesting cavity. Meanwhile we have another bird house where another chickadee is sitting on her eggs. Right now I'm just wondering how long it's going to take to finish the cavity.
End Note: I took a break from editing this and went outside to do some work. I found another eaten egg. No more editing of this; just being here with this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach.
