Poultry Apocalypse

Sometime in April my neighbor walked over to the back corner of our place while we were stretching the plastic over our wooden greenhouse frame. He had plenty of guinea eggs, he said, also informing us we were welcome to shoot and eat most of the flock of the chicken-like, noisy birds who show up in the shady grove outside my bedroom window about sunrise. "Just leave the older ones."

"Younger ones are better eating, anyway," I said. "We've had a few--the boys couldn't help doing target practice with their bow."

"Anyway, I've got plenty eggs if you want to incubate some."

So I ordered a relatively cheap, Styrofoam incubator, thinking I wanted to start a bunch of chickens anyway. I thought it would be cheaper to order eggs than chicks in the mail, but that didn't turn out to be the case. My neighbor, who actually grew up in the farmhouse I somewhat inherited, took me around the orchards his dad planted, where we located several nests filled with dozens of extremely hard-shelled guinea eggs. A physicist who designs army tanks, he gave detailed instructions on exactly how to control the humidity in the incubator down to the percentage points, a bunch of advice that went in one ear and out the other. I figured Indiana is usually humid enough, and set the thermostat to 100 F, dumping a bowl of water into the gap beneath the automatic egg turner.

I'd never really raised chicks from eggs on my own before. My second Ex and I supplied the Boont Berry Farm store with eggs for nearly a decade, and we kept several hundred hens, hatching chicks in a somewhat industrial incubator in the back room, but I never was too much in charge of the baby chicks. If there was a problem with the humidifier or something, I dealt with it, but otherwise I left that to her. Baby chicks is just one of those things that women and girls generally are drawn to, more so than boys, and I've always been of the philosophy that if somebody else wants to do something, they'd probably do a better job than I would.

No sooner had I stuck the guinea eggs in the incubator in our front room, and wouldn't you know a buddy stops by the farm to tell me that the sky is falling, chicken-wise. Sam has worked for Rose Acre Farms up in Cortland, Indiana, for more than a decade--Rose Acre Farms being one of the largest egg producers in the world. The business was started about four decades ago by a local entrepreneur, and employs a big chunk of country folk in our county. "They're going plum nuts over this bird flu," he said over some whiskey. "They've already had to destroy more than 44 million birds in Iowa and Minnesota, mostly. It hasn't hit Indiana, yet."

The state of Indiana has banned the sale of chickens at the Amish auctions. There will be no bird expositions at the 4H county fairs.

"I got to work the other day and they had these giant excavators ripping all the poplar trees out from around the buildings. They're paranoid about wild birds. You wouldn't believe all the sanitary precautions we have to go through."

The giant factory hog and chicken farms in our region ring their unsightly imitations of Nazi concentration camps with poplar or other fast-growing trees, to hide them from public view. Wild birds are immune to this flu, though they carry it and spread the virus in their guano, so trees are starting to scare Chicken Big, as well as the sky itself.

For the most part, Chicken Little, as in free-range or simply backyard birds, as well as the brown egg-laying breed, also show either entire immunity or at least resistance to the bird flu. Rose Acres is swiftly switching to the brown-egg laying breeds in a desperate attempt to ward off the pandemic (which is not dangerous to any animals besides the pale, darkness-dwelling industrial egg layers). "They're wasting their time trying to prevent contamination from wild birds," said Sam. "Look at all the grain fields covered with blackbirds and crows in the fall. Or go to their feed mill and there's sparrows all over the place. It's only a matter of time." The very day I was about to give up on the guinea eggs hatching, telling the boys they could use them to pelt cars because they were probably rotten, a few of them started rustling like mice in potato chip bags. 13 in all pecked through the shells that are about twice as hard as chicken eggs and might have been a liability hitting car windows like rocks, anyway. My girlfriend, Jetta, of course got all excited about the chicks but on Friday night after returning from the bar I set the heat lamp too close and roasted half of them, breaking her heart somewhat. Now she's afraid to go see the remaining birds in the morning until I've examined the scene. I've been through some of this before--raising chicks in Boonville I think I saw about one hundred one ways a baby bird could end this incarnation, but now I'm thinking man I got to get this set up right before we get the 100 baby chicks I ordered in the mail from Murray McMurray hatchery in Iowa a couple weeks ago.

"You worried about the bird flu?" I asked the lady over the phone. "Being in Iowa and all?"

"Well, of course we're worried, but not paranoid."

"I heard it's mostly the birds in the factory farms that are susceptible."

"That's what they say."

Sunday it rained and turned cool--one other reason I'd been delaying getting started in chickens again, waiting on the consistently hot weather. The tomatoes and melons had all been transplanted, and I wanted to take Jetta out of town for dinner. We tried heading south, towards Louisville, and stopped on the town square in Salem at a Mexican place. I had to order the "Pollo A La Brasa"--actually a Peruvian dish--and Jetta got a "Pollo Enchilada," thinking hey we better eat chicken while we can.