Chicken Porn

I was relating the story of Lola the hen's passing to some of the women who work at our local Co-op grocery, and lamenting the lack of useful books on backyard poultry-keeping for the true hobbyist. I've seen plenty of books on chickens as backyard pets, or small-scale chicken husbandry. But books on backyard pets do not cover slaughtering your pets for Sunday dinner, and small-scale animal husbandry books—where small-scale is roughly under a thousand birds—aren't for people keeping chickens in a suburban backyard.

Well, those agriculturally-hip ladies turned me onto Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens. It is perfect. Gail Damerow, the author, details Choosing a Breed, Fowl Disposition (fowl language, peck order), Shelter (free range, fenced range, portable shelters, permanant shelters, cages, fences, to give you an idea of the range of situations covered), Routine Management (cannibalism (!), dealing with manure, handling chickens), Meat on the Table...and so on.

Under Laying Hen Management is a section, "Distinguishing Layers from Liars." Some hens, you see, are awful layers. Even if they are an egg-laying breed. She describes how to ferret out these slackers from within your flock. They involve getting personal with the hen's private area. So since I am now pretty sure I'd like to concentrate on laying hens rather than meat, breeding, or show hens, I have been getting up in my hen's business to see if they are good layers...with the intention of culling any poor layers.

The good news is, everyone has a "large, moist, oval vent" so no one's getting whacked.

That's Ives, our Maran cockerel. He hatched in October, and he's now as big as Betty Astralorp, our largest hen. His Maran ladies, Chanel and Coco, are bigger than Sonja the RIR (our smallest hen), but haven't yet started to lay. Ives is a very pretty, mellow guy—yet Marilyn picks on him relentlessly. No crowing yet. Which is a good thing for Ives.