Poultry Personified

Hopefully everyone read my April gardening column and is enjoying a bumper crop of fresh vegetables about now. But a vegetable garden alone isn’t going to feed your family. We have sat down at many a meal here at the Eden homestead where everything on our plate was grown, raised, or caught by us. Like many “hobby farmers” we’ve never gone “whole hog,” as in raising pigs and beef critters, but we have had our share of farm animals.

Raising animals for the table is vastly different than roaming the Maine woods and waters armed with a gun or a fishing pole seeking protein. You don’t get to know a particular game animal for more than a few seconds before it’s on its way to your plate. To illustrate that, I have a few stories from my hobby farming archives to share with you.

Anyone delving into animal husbandry usually starts out raising laying hens and broiler chickens. We’d order our day-old chicks at the local grain store and bring them home to a heated brooder I built in the barn. Egg producers were ordered as just pullets (hens), but inevitably we would get some cockerels (roosters) mixed in. The kids would of course name the chicks and get attached to them. Once they grew too large for the brooder they were transferred to the chicken coop. This was a tenuous time since every predator within five miles seems to know when fresh chickens are available. Despite fortifying the coop like it was Fort Knox, inevitably a skunk or a coon would penetrate the stronghold and devour “Puff Ball” or “Chicky.” If we were lucky we’d have enough hens left to produce a few eggs to scramble now and then and the kids wouldn’t be too traumatized. I eventually learned that allowing the hens to roam freely cut down on the body count since they then had a fighting chance to escape marauders.
Problem was, once free they might lay an egg or two in the straw-lined nest boxes, but it wasn’t unusual to discover a pile of over a dozen eggs hidden under a shrub in the flowerbed. With no way of knowing how fresh they were, they got tossed. As far as the random rooster—after chasing the kids around the yard and pecking them, they were, let’s say, no longer welcome here.

One winter I had just settled down for a long winter’s nap, when out on the lawn there arose such a clatter I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter. Away to the window I flew like a flash, tore open the shutters and threw up the sash . . . when, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a pack of coyotes attacking my chickens! By the time I had pulled on some boots and was outside, the yard was riddled with dead soldiers. I trudged through the snow from one to another, all lifeless except one barely breathing hen. I brought the limp body inside and put her in a cardboard box next to the woodstove. In the morning her head was sticking out the top of the box and clucking to beat the band. This lone survivor enjoyed a very pampered life thereafter.

We also raised the bronze-type turkeys that look like the wild turkeys we now have in Maine. (Most people choose the white variety because they don’t have any dark pinfeathers left after plucking that can spoil an appetite.) I engaged my first daughter as my turkey helper when she was just a tyke. Some birds topped off at over 30 pounds, and at full height they towered over her when she joined me to tend them. Bobbing, long-necked birds like emus and ostriches terrify her to this day. Even so, I can honestly say a farm-raised turkey beats any Butterball hands down.

From a quantity standpoint, our most successful foray into raising poultry was with broiler chickens. These are bred for meat and are the Frankensteins of the domestic poultry world. They put on weight so fast that within a few weeks they can hardly walk. Once when I went out to feed them, an obese chicken waddled away from the mostly prone flock and stood on my foot. At first I thought it was a fluke until this same chicken made an effort to greet me and stand on my foot at every visit, and look up at me as if asking to be spared. When it came time to process these birds after seven to eight weeks, I didn’t have the heart to include my foot sitter. She joined the laying hens but only lasted a short while before her altered genetics caught up with her. She died fat and happy.

These days I stick mostly to wild game supplemented by store-bought poultry. It’s a lot less personal.