Before I start on the story of my road trip with a rooster, look at this hen:
I think this chicken looks exactly like Lazar Wolf - the way that character was portrayed in the movie version of Fiddler on the Roof. It's her feathery beard. I tried singing “To Life!” to her, but she just stared at me blankly.
You may remember that we had two roosters, and that they were becoming increasingly competitive - causing fights and high speed chases in the chicken yard. We finally decided that we had to find a new home for one of them, and a woman in Santa Fe volunteered to take on Gorgeous George, our Ameraucana rooster.
In order to transport him, we had to catch him and put him in a cat crate. The easiest way to catch a chicken is to go into their coop before the sun is even close to coming up over the horizon. Chickens sleep very soundly when it's dark.
Jan had seen someone catch a rooster. They caught him by his legs and immediately held him upside down. The person who did this said that holding a chicken upside down puts the chicken into a state of “playing possum”. (I’ve since read on the internet that it’s dangerous to hold chickens upside down - in rare cases it can be fatal.)
The chickens that Jan saw caught and held upside down were just fine, and no one had read about the danger at that point, so our plan was to sneak into the chicken coop in the dead of night (OK, at about 5:30 a.m.) and grab the rooster by the feet, quickly putting him into the cat carrier, where he would right himself and be ready for a road trip.
We had a flashlight. We snuck up on the coop. Jan was going to grab Gorgeous George, I was going to hold the light - being careful to keep the light from landing on any of the chickens, which would wake them up. My goal was to hold the light so that it illuminated the wall near Gorgeous George.
We entered the coop. Our coop is eight feet by eight feet. But, on three of the walls, the perches extend more than a foot into the coop. The perches were, of course, loaded with chickens. Twenty-five of them live in that coop. And we have a big feeder sitting in the middle of the coop, which takes up more room. So, as we shut the door behind ourselves (to keep the skunks from coming in and murdering our chickens) there was hardly any room for us to move around.
Jan made an unsuccessful first grab at the rooster, and he went running. Now we had to find him with the flashlight, which woke up a few of the hens. Jan made another attempt at grabbing him, and more hens woke up. Pretty soon we were shut in a tiny coop with twenty-five freaked out chickens running around the floor or flapping their wings next to our heads.
It seemed as if it was going to be impossible to grab him by his feet, so I asked if I should try just picking him up the way I used to pick up Big Red - grabbing him firmly on each side with his wings pinned to his sides by my hands. When these birds were babies we did this every day in order to clean their little enclosure in my house. Jan had taught me then that if I pinned their wings gently to their sides with my hands they didn’t panic.
She said go ahead and try, so I just grabbed him, and then it was easy to set him into the cat carrier. Whew! Phase one of his transport - the phase we had both been worried about - was accomplished.
Next we secured the carrier in the van, tying it to the floor with baling twine. When I set off for Santa Fe with him, I thought he’d crow all the way there, but he never said a word, except for clucking at me one time when I passed a truck.
I got him to his new home, where he is now the sole rooster with twenty-five hens all to himself. The rest of our flock seems relieved that he’s gone. Our remaining rooster - The Roo - is a Brahma - he’s bigger and slower than Gorgeous George. The Roo can’t catch any of the Ameraucanas - they’re all faster than he is. So, the road trip had a happy ending for all of the chickens involved.
Meanwhile, look at yesterday’s bucket of eggs!
Do you know what this means? That very small egg is a fairy egg! It probably doesn’t even have a yolk. It is the first egg from our new flock - the birds we got in the mail this past summer. And whoever laid that egg laid it in the old flock’s coop - where the nesting boxes are plush. When I gathered that egg yesterday I went squealing into the house to show Jan.
The last thing I want to talk about today is a discovery Coco made. Every day, Coco and I go on an adventure. I put her on her leash, and we go to both coops and the chicken wilderness to say hi to the chickens, we check out all the goats in their pens, and sometimes we walk down the road. We greet all the feral cats who are sunning themselves by the house.
A couple of days ago Coco became obsessed with scratching in the dirt near Jan’s front door. She dug and dug, but I couldn’t tell what she was after. I’m never really sure when I should tell her to quit doing something. In any case, suddenly she ran toward me with something in her mouth. I couldn’t tell what it was, and I immediately told her to spit it out - assisting her with that task by prying her jaws open so it’d fall onto the ground.
The thing that fell from her mouth was round and furry and had two enormous yellow teeth. It was a decapitated gopher head! I ran indoors to tell Jan - and then ran back outside, and the head had already disappeared! Aargh! Either some chicken (they are omnivores, truly) or one of the feral cats ran off with it. And now I live in fear that they’ll drop it back on the front sidewalk. Our Chewy boxes always get dropped there, and we’re always so sorry that the delivery person has to wade through two flocks of chickens to leave our boxes. We don’t want them to also have to step over decapitated gopher heads. Man. I hope whoever took that head buried it or ate it.
I have a correction from last week. My brother pointed out to me that if a person threw away 80,000 shampoo bottles in their life time (as I had said last week that the average person does), they would have to throw away a bottle nearly every three days for eighty years. Normally when I post a fact, I either find a confirming source, or I name my source. In this case, I simply did the math - and did it wrong. I thought, sure, ten bottles a year for eighty years. That adds up to 80,000. Clearly arithmetic is not my strong suit. In any case, it is true that 552 million shampoo bottles are disposed of every year. BUT, I doubt there’s anyone on the planet who’s personally responsible for 80,000 bottles in their lifetime. So, I apologize. And I fixed last week's post so that my error wouldn't live on eternally, misleading people.
But, if you want shampoo bars to help lower our annual amount of disposed bottles, they’ll be ready in just about two weeks!!! https://www.serenasoaps.com/
