My Work: Lenny's Girls - Part 1

The first spring on our farm, I asked Ray about welding me a frame with wheels that I could use for a chicken coop and move from paddock to paddock behind the sheep. My idea was to let meat chickens scratch around and eat any parasites to help keep the pastures clean. Then, when the chickens matured, we could sell the ones we didn’t eat ourselves.

He said, “I can do better than that. I have a van back by the woods. I was going to cut the engine out of it and make into a chicken coop, why don’t you take it?”

It was perfect – an old ambulance high enough inside to stand in, off the ground, critter tight, with lots of doors and windows. We removed the engine and all the useful parts and added a tongue for hauling it away. Then I drove my tractor down to his place and towed the chicken van home.

But, after reading a book or two on chickens, we decided on laying hens first instead of meat birds. In May, Susan and I fashioned an insulated enclosure in the basement with a 100-watt light bulb to keep the temperature at the 30˚ C that chicks need until they feather out. We covered the floor of the pen with wood shavings and peat moss, then we bought a gravity chick waterer that was basically a big white plastic jar topped by a red screw-on water tray. We filled the jar with fresh water, screwed the round tray onto the top, then turned the jar over so the water ran out a small hole in the jar and into the tray. We added an old metal chick feeder we found in one of the barns and our chick hotel was ready for our first guests.

We ordered day-old Barred Plymouth Rocks from the feed mill - twenty females and two males, all black balls of fluff with a white spot on their foreheads. They came in a cardboard box with holes punched in the top. I couldn’t believe the noise they made on the way back to our farm. Their high-pitched cheeping both thrilled me about our new venture and set my teeth on edge. I had heard of people raising chicks in their kitchen next to the wood stove for warmth. I was glad ours would be in the basement.

We found out why “bird-brain” is a insult. We had to dip the chick’s beaks in the water to make sure they knew where it was. They discovered their food all right, but we were constantly rescuing them from being stuck facing into corners like misbehaved schoolboys.

After four weeks, the chicks began to mature into the old-fashioned pullets with grey and white striped feathers that used to be found on every nineteenth century farm. When they started escaping from their enclosure, we figured they were ready for the van.

Susan, Conor, Charlotte and I built a yard out of chicken wire, nesting boxes and roosts but stopped short of promising to tow them to the lake in the summer for a dip. We carried the pullets out in plastic buckets. Conor named the largest and best-crowing rooster Lenny. We had chickens and it was beginning to sound like a real farm.