The End of Eden

The first few months we lived at Lonely Worm Farm, the ticks were so abundant, they’d jump you as you made your way from the driveway to the kitchen door. So imagine my reaction when I learned that chickens eat up to 400 ticks a day… On a muggy day in June of 2021, my kids and I drove over to Hackett’s, our local farm store, and bought ten baby chicks. Five Rhode Island Reds, five Buff Brahmas, each vibrating with worry and excitement as we scooped them up and put them in a cardboard box. They peeped all the way home.

The kids were given the job of socializing them–picking them up, stroking them, and generally accustoming them to people and their grabby ways. It was not always easy.

Within a month or two they were big enough to eat those ticks. An added bonus was eggs.

What we most loved about the chickens was their cheerfulness. One Rhode Island Red we named Puppy on account of her sociability. She would follow us around, begging to be held. Even those who preferred not to be touched were eager to see us and would run over over to say hi.

Visitors often remarked on how friendly they were, not only to us, but to each other. There was no obvious pecking order, no internecine squawking, no feathers flying. I figured it was because they had what they needed: a safe coop at night, fresh water, plenty of food, and lots of space; if they got sick of each other, they could always go off and find their own little bush or nice piney root bed.

What about predators? People would ask. I would never know what to say. I mean, chickens are delicious–not only to people, but to foxes, raccoons, possums, fisher cats, weasels, snakes, hawks, eagles. Some keepers try to protect them with cages and nets, but I figured a life of freedom and adventure, even if shorter, beat life in a cage. Plus, how could a fenced in chicken eat our ticks?

And our chicks proved to be savvy. When they were only a few weeks old, they heard the recorded kee-eeee-arr of a red tailed hawk played on the Merlin app and immediately took to the lilac bush. They hid from real hawks, too.

As they grew, they continued to thrive. I would watch them running from eagles and occasionally losing a tailfeather, but surviving to eat another tick, lay another egg, and cluck companionably with their flock.

Then, in the fall of 2022, when they had been with us for about a year and a half, we lost three in a single week: one to a hawk, one to a car, one to a raccoon. To plump up the flock—and ease our sadness—we bought ten new chicks. Only to have eight of them eaten a couple weeks later when a weasel snuck into the coop.

Get a rooster, various men had told me. A rooster will protect your hens. I hadn’t paid much attention when my flock seemed perfectly capable of protecting itself. Now that they had slacked off in that department, I decided to give it a shot.

Our farmer Jess bought a big brassy rooster and nine full grown chickens from a nearby farm in early November. The chickens–white, speckled, barred and golden—were gorgeous, but aloof. Even after they had settled in, they would not run to greet us or let us pick them up. They wouldn’t even be petted. To my grief, our original chickens, six of whom survived, followed the newcomers' lead.

And the rooster. A couple days after he arrived, I delivered a container of water to the coop and he flew at me and beaked my leg. Not a sweet little peck like our original chickens–a nasty jab. I kicked him off. He charged again.

He attacked Jess and his little boy Soma, too. Soma named him Cowboy.

We figured Cowboy was still nervous about the move. Once he got used to the land, he would feel more secure and calm down. Alas, as time went on, he got more territorial, and continued to charge at us, sometimes drawing blood. Nowhere was safe. He’d come at us from behind, even in the driveway. We learned to pick up a stick or shovel whenever he got near.

I kept hoping that things would get better. Or reasoning that at least he was protecting the hens. But come springtime, any protection that might have been happening was outweighed by the harm he caused. One of our original Rhode Island Reds got the worst of it. He was always racing after her, mounting her and yanking her feathers until she had a pitiful bald patch in the middle of her back and wobbled around with a nervous expression and a greasy neck.

Cowboy had it out for cars, too. He would strut into the middle of our road and stand off with passing pick ups, staring them down before shaking his feathers and sauntering away. Would it be so terrible, I mused, if he got hit?

Then the chicks were born. Right around the summer solstice, two fuzzy little hatchlings appeared in the coop. A couple of the hens who had arrived with the rooster tended to them faithfully. Cowboy was temporarily forgiven.

But not for long. His wrath had extended beyond our beleaguered Rhode Island Red. Almost all the chickens had bald patches. I talked to Jason. Something had to be done. And I wanted Jason to do it. Partly because I am a wimp. Partly because Jason has a steadier hand and would do a quicker and better job of it. You kill him, I said, I will deal with the feathers and guts and make coq au vin.

Jason agreed. But he kept putting it off. Days, then weeks wore on, Cowboy crowing, charging us from behind and terrorizing the hens. Possibly his presence deterred some predators, but the numbers weren’t good: three chickens were taken during his tenure, by raccoons and foxes we think.

Eventually, I told Jason that I would kill the rooster. That did the trick. Jason grabbed him in the coop and quickly turned him upside down (when blood runs to the head, fowls become catatonic). What came next wasn’t pretty. It involved me pinioning my former foe with a broom handle and Jason chopping off his head with a cleaver. But afterwards, when he had been stewed in white wine for nine hours and seasoned with herbs from the garden, he was delicious.

It is an ordeal killing a living being. Even when you don’t like them and conscientiously use every part of their body–the meat eaten, the bones turned into broth, the feathers into art projects. In the days after Cowboy’s demise, Jason and I were subdued and the chickens were wary. Soon, however, their feathers began to grow back and their friendliness towards people returned. Puppy ran to me and crouched low to the ground, showing me that she wanted to be picked up. What a pleasure it was to again hold her to my chest and stroke her remarkably soft feathers. Not long after, one of the newer hens did the same thing. She was white and bony and not quite as cuddly, but I was happy nonetheless.

I had been hoping that with Cowboy gone, the chickens would be able to enjoy a life free of harassment. But the power vacuum left by his absence led to a good deal of squawking and tussling over food, and sometimes more yanked feathers. It was not all strife. There were also instances of altruism. The mama hens whose chicks were born on the solstice were killed while trying to protect them. The orphaned chicks were adopted by a former ally of the rooster named Gertie. She was hardly gentle; but she was nicer than the other hens, who were unremittingly hostile. We took to calling these orphaned chicks the Teenagers, due to their unpopularity and ever increasing size–and also to differentiate them from a couple of younger chicks, born a few weeks after Cowboy died, and reared by an endearing and flighty Buff Brahma named Blondie.

I wondered if the spirit of cooperation and coexistence that had characterized our original flock arose from them all having discovered the world together, without being socialized into an existing order. Once the order came, in the guise of Cowboy and the grown hens from the other farm, there was no going back…

Around the winter solstice, the Teenagers suddenly doubled in size, brightened their feathers to a fiery orange and emerged as the spitting image of Cowboy, only doubled. Within a couple weeks, they were crowing. Soon after, they took to gang banging the hens. Even Gertie, who had adopted them. No wonder the hens had been so unwelcoming.

What have I learned from all this? What I knew before: it is not easy ridding the world of cruelty. And yet, we still try. Anyone want a rooster–or two?

Thanks for reading! In the future, I will be posting longer pieces like this as well as fiction and other not-directly-farm-related writing to Substack. If you would like to keep reading my work (it doesn’t cost anything), please sign up here!

The Lonely Worm Farm blog/newsletter will continue, but be more about volunteer days, veggies that need to be harvested, etc.

Volunteer Day Coming Up!

Happy New Year!