The chickens came first. At least for us.
So apparently, we have more chickens now, through no fault of our own. Well, no recent fault of our own. We had chickens in the first place—that was our fault. But now we have more chickens.
And you’re like, “I already read this article.”
No, this is even more chickens.
For the past year or so, we’ve had 3 chickens in our backyard, living in a coop that my son built based on memories of having seen a coop once or twice.
Chickens are great—they’re a pet that actually gives something back. What other pet does this? I mean a cat can kill mice, but how many mice do you have? Hopefully less than the number of eggs we get.
It’s also the one pet my wife seems to be okay with, largely I think due to the fact that they live outside. She’s already long ago made her peace with animals living outside.
I think the eggs help. Owning chickens is definitely the most time-consuming, expensive way to get eggs that taste basically the same. But that at least you’re proud of. We’re literally giving away raw eggs to guests, which is a weird thing to leave someone’s house with, especially when you did not bring along a good way to carry it.
“Just put it in your cup holder.”
We have 3 chickens: We have Yapchick, who is our main chicken; and Baby Mo, who is our emergency backup chicken; and Henshe, who is our rooster.
(Everyone was named before we knew their genders.)
What makes Mo our emergency backup chicken is that she’s not kosher. (Every breed of chicken needs a mesorah, so unless you know, you don’t eat it.)
On top of being a breed we can’t identify, Mo is also a Bantam, which is a mini chicken—sort of like the pony of chickens, except that you can’t ride it. It’s about a third the size, but it doesn’t seem to know it’s smaller. It just hangs out with the others, and always cocks its head and looks up at them in conversations.
People ask, “Why do you keep Baby Mo if she’s not kosher?” Basically, she’s Yapchick’s emotional support chicken. Yapchick is the one who lays the eggs that we eat. Mo lays the eggs that we give our non-Jewish neighbors as an apology for the noises that Henshe makes. It’s a delicate ecosystem.
Wait; why do we have Henshe?
We didn’t know he was a rooster when our son got him as a surprise bar mitzvah present for our other son.
Yes, our son got our other son a rooster as a present. Apparently, we live in the shtetl.
So anyway, for the past couple of months we were hoping to get even more chickens, because we’re currently feeding three chickens every day (chickens eat every single day) in order to get one chicken worth of eggs. And we were hoping to do it the old-fashioned way—by having one of the chickens sit on the eggs. Yes, we can get an incubator, but incubators are expensive, except for the cheap ones, and you have to worry about humidity and turning the eggs every few hours and blackouts and so on. Whereas when a chicken sits on the eggs, she takes care of all that stuff. She just has to go broody.
Basically, “going broody” means that the chicken has to be willing to sit on the eggs for three weeks until they hatch. Even if you take her off their eggs, some interior magnet will pull her right back. It’s an instinct. I don’t know if the chicken even knows why, or what’s going to happen at the end of the three weeks.
They go into a trance. They get up maybe once a day to eat and drink and dust bathe and to lay something that is as big as an egg but is definitely not an egg, and then they hurry back, because they only have about 20 minutes until the eggs get cold. They do their entire daily routine in fast forward—eat drink bathe eat drink bathroom bathe—while the other chickens stand still with their mouths agape basically in their way.
And yes, chickens do stand around with their mouths agape sometimes, like humans, except that chickens do it when they’re either hot or stressed. They do this panting thing where they open their mouths, and their throats move up and down really quickly, like faster than your pulse. But a broody chicken does not pant, no matter how hot it gets. She just sits on the eggs with this look of concentration.
And you’re thinking, “What’s so hard about sitting still for three weeks? I wish I could sit still for three weeks!” So first of all, imagine sitting for three weeks on a clutch of raw eggs and trying not to break them. I can’t even sit on my own kids for three weeks without breaking them.
So that was our hope. But then I read somewhere that Yapchick is of a breed that is not likely to sit on eggs. Apparently, a lot of chickens don’t sit on eggs anymore. It’s become out of vogue. That instinct has been selectively bred out of them. Though I’m not sure how. The chickens that sit on eggs, farmers don’t let them hatch eggs, but the chickens that don’t sit on eggs are allowed to hatch eggs. How does that work?
But then one day I came outside to see Mo sitting on the eggs. Well, sitting is a strong word. She was actually pressed flat against the pile, trying to stretch herself over a clutch of eggs laid by a chicken that was three times her size. But if Yapchick wasn’t going to sit on the eggs, enter the emergency backup chicken. This is why you want an emergency backup chicken.
It turns out that a broody hen doesn’t just sit on her own babies—she sits on whatever babies you give her. Chickens are not so makpid. I’ve seen videos of people giving a hen a duck egg, and she’s like, “Okay, one of my babies is special needs. They need a pool every day! That’s okay; I love them all equally.”
The typical broody chicken will somehow gather as many eggs as they could from every nest you own. She has no idea how many eggs are under her. Though if she puts too many eggs under her, more just come out the back. I have to keep checking to make sure she’s covering everything.
So if there’s nothing going on inside a given egg, or if the process has stalled, we’re supposed to get rid of it so she can focus on fewer eggs. So apparently, there’s this technique called candling, where you go outside in middle of the night with a candle and a feather (the chicken provides the feather) or nowadays usually a flashlight and shine a light through every egg one at a time to see what’s going on inside, and say, “I don’t know. This doesn’t look like the pictures.” And you can’t keep looking back at the pictures, because you have to do this in the dark, and your hen is getting increasingly annoyed, and you’re losing track of which egg is which, and you’re trying not to crack anything, and you have to get all of them back under her as soon as possible.
I don’t know what the feather is used for. I made symbols on the eggs based on what I saw, but I used a magic marker.
Why do we keep Mo? Because it turns out she’s the only one who’s wiling to sit on the eggs. It takes a village. And then when these chicks grow up and lay eggs, they’re not going to sit either, because of their actual biological parentage, and Mo will have to sit on those. This is why I left a couple of Mo eggs in the clutch, so we don’t, um, put all our eggs in one basket. Someone needs to sit on the eggs for future generations.
Officially, you’re supposed to separate the broody hen from the flock, but we don’t have a ton of separate chicken facilities, other than a dog crate we found at the side of the road that we picked up after no one claimed it for 48 hours. The plan was to bring the cage into the house about a day or two before the eggs started hatching.
But until then, we built Mo a separate nest in the coop so Yapchick could continue laying where she was accustomed. So every morning, when Mo got up and did her mad-rush thing, I had to run outside to make sure she got back on the correct nest before the eggs got cold, rather than onto whatever new egg Yapchick had laid that morning.
Then Yapchick started helping out by laying new eggs in the nest that had a greater number of eggs in it. Not that Mo minded. She just cheerfully sat on the new egg, that was developmentally 2 ½ weeks behind all the other eggs. I’m still not sure she knew what the endgame was of this whole thing.
And I suspect this because when the day finally came that eggs started hatching, and chicks started cheeping and running around under her, we finally saw Mo start panting again:
“Um… Now what?” n
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of seven books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.
