Editor’s Note: Remember the good old days of blogging? We do. Quite a few writers and editors who have passed through Tweetspeak’s doors (or are still here) first began as personal bloggers. Many of these writers have let their blogs go dormant, changed directions towards a professional aim, or deleted their blogs altogether. So, there’s a whole stack of intriguing, inspiring, sometimes humorous material that’s just sitting in the dark. The Life Notes column is dedicated to bringing that material to light. Because, after all, each of us comes from the stories that made us. And these stories often shine in the retelling.
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An LW Lindquist blog post, July 14, 2012
The Great Chicken Chase (Or, 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Chickens)
I have chickens penned in my front yard.* Right next to the apple tree. Between strays and intentional pets, and occasional vandalistic landscaping, we’re running a regular petting zoo and small arboretum.
This morning, one flew the coop. The coop is a 4×4 makeshift pen, but it doesn’t work with the idiom. After an hour of trying to outsmart an eight-week-old chicken, I’ve learned a few things I feel ready to share.
1. Chickens poop a lot (sorry!). Often, in their own food and water. I find this distasteful and not just a little unsanitary. They especially poop when alarmed by the unintended consequences of flying out of the pen.
2. Chickens would rather be in the pen. Except when they are in the pen. Then they would like to be out of the pen.
3. Chickens are fast. Faster than me. Don’t laugh. They’re faster than you, too. You cannot chase a chicken and win, unless by winning you mean that she is still loose and you are on the ground after having chased, swiped, and missed by a feather, again.
4. There’s a reason they’re called chickens. Chickens are chickens. Easily terrified. And not very clever when frightened.
5. Chickens have a marked advantage in Duck Duck Goose. Period.
6. Chickens desperately want to be together. The escaped chicken would not leave the perimeter of the pen because her friend was inside. For an hour, they ran from one side to the other so that they could cheep at each other. And attempt to peck out one another’s eyes. Which reminds me…
7. Hen-pecked is more than a metaphor.
8. A chicken’s appetite is greater than her fear. She will continue to peck for food, even as she perceives imminent danger (me) less than a foot away.
9. Some chickens only know how to run in one direction. I haven’t tested this hypothesis with more than one chicken, thus I cannot say all chickens. No matter what, this one could only run the pen’s perimeter in one direction.
10. When chasing chickens, one could use an empty laundry basket for a net, if one didn’t know there was a handy fish net hanging on the garage wall.
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*A nice farm awaits Mordecai and Drumstick, where they can run free from the pen and lay eggs to their hearts’ content, as soon as they get their big chicken feathers.
Photo by David Goehring, Creative Commons, via Flickr.
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Maureen says
You could get a cat, though the exercise is healthful.
Will Willingham says
There’s a whole set of other stories about the cat that lived in the house around the same time, along with her mother the neighborhood stray who stayed in the garage when it was cold, and her wayward children, and her ex, and his girlfriend, and his drinking buddies… 😉
Paul Willingham says
I miss your blogs. You got a lot of blog mileage out of your brief experience of raising chickens.
Dad
Will Willingham says
Those chickens got a lot of mileage out of me, too. 😉
Claire Schultz says
This made my morning brighter – it’s freezing here in Hull, Quebec: brought back memories of summer. I raised chickens as a child: I am remembering their very quirky individual ways.
And I too miss your blog posts.
Will Willingham says
It finally got above zero here, so I sympathize. 🙂
Bethany R. says
Fun post. The second observation reminded me of another kind of creature: humans. “Chickens would rather be in the pen. Except when they are in the pen. Then they would like to be out of the pen.”
SimplyDarlene says
I saw a man at a rodeo put an escapee chicken into a trance. The man held is cigarette in one hand, squatted, waggled his fingers of the other hand, and then cooed some gibberash. The chicken stopped, fell over, went to sleep, and I almost toppled off my perch in the bleachers.
(A loose chicken at a rodeo? Yeah, the last event is the Chicken Round-up. Oodles of squawkers are turned loose for the children to chase, capture, and beg their momma’s to bring home. It’s all manner of horribleness you mentioned in your blog piece, LW.)
Will Willingham says
So if I just took up smoking, I coulda had the little critter then. Who knew?
(That is a wild story, though. I’ve never heard of such a thing.)
Monica Sharman says
I like the segue from 6 to 7.
Will Willingham says
That might be my favorite. 😉