Roosters crow almost 24/7, building from the pre-dawn hours into a crescendo at sunrise. We got too many cocks, not enough hens. One gallo is usually able to service about 13 guillinas every day, but this spring I ordered 50 red roaster chicks straight run, and about 30 turned out male.
I'd tried raising a few meat chickens at the old Boont Berry farm back in the spring of '08, the hybrid white birds with sparse feathers who can barely walk and have no instincts unless lounging next to the feed trough counts as an instinct. I really couldn't stand looking at those pathetic aberrations and wasn't surprised when a biker gang of ravens teamed up with vultures to corral the helpless, flightless, almost immobile creatures and turn them into McNuggets. The few survivors were surprisingly easy to "dress," meaning removing all feathers. Plucking seems more like undressing to me, but then again roosters and hens do not bother to remove feathers before fucking, sort of like the Puritans supposedly designed itchy nightwear with minimal holes to prevent sensual pleasure while dutifully repopulating North America with uptight white people replacing the ignorant savages.
These "red roaster" chickens impress me with their hardiness, unlike their white, inbred cousins. I guess we got red roaster roosters for sale as an alternative to Thanksgiving turkeys. They have to go ASAP. Roosters don't seem to care any more for the pleasure of their lady lovers than the Puritan men did, and these randy fuckers are growing out of control. The poor hens walk around like babes in bikinis strolling past yard birds doing bench press in a men's correctional facility. Sometimes I feel compelled to intervene when two or more roosters gang up on one hen, but we don't have adequate freezer space. These guys are almost as big as turkeys. I've butchered about 10 so far, and the slabs of breast meat are as impressive as the stocky legs. Due possibly to those massive legs, they hop around like tweakers in the mosh pit at a Slipknot concert for about a minute after you sever their heads. They really put on a macabre show, something Jetta is still getting used to.
"You got to keep the white one, AND the tan one," she's been saying since they were cute little chicks under a light in the back room of the basement.
"I don't like white chickens."
"But he's so pretty with that emerald tail, the auburn on his wings."
I've somewhat quit arguing with people in general, but I don't like having somebody meddle in my business. "Get your own damn flock of chickens and start selectively breeding them," I say. "Maybe at your own farm!"
"I know you're just a cowboy. You just want to be alone forever. That's why you wrote that song."
Not really a cowboy these days, I want to say. More of a chicken boy, though I recently composed a song about a cowboy who let a filly reside in his house, a filly named "Fitch" who liked to buck, "No Cowboy Ever Rode That Bucking Fitch," which has gotten some attention and put a strain on our relationship. Supposedly we will be recording later this week.
"That's why you wrote that song. Everybody knows you're the cowboy and I'm the fucking bitch."
"The song is really about EVERY relationship, not just you and me," I try to tell her. "Every guy mutters those words once a week if he's trying to live with a woman. It's got universal appeal."
"Well why is there that line about the horse eating the vintage copy of Playboy magazine? That directly refers to me."
"You're the one who tore that up?" We were referring to an early 1980's edition Playboy featuring college girls that somehow had ended up on our coffee table, later shredded and scattered on the floor. "I didn't know who did that."
There is no point in arguing about which roosters to butcher first. The way I got it figured, there were originally 30 red roosters plus the white and tan guys, meaning I could take out 25 red roaster roosters without threatening the gene pool. My plan is to raise chicks in the spring.
I've raised chicks before, so this ain't my first rodeo. At the old Boont Berry Farm the spring of 2008 my second Ex and I got all fired up for the blossoming local food movement and bought an incubator that looked like a refrigerator and did about 300 eggs at once. We raised the chicks in the backyard of the house next to the store, did them in batches, one wave after another, one nightmare after another. For the previous 5 years we'd kept a flock of several hundred laying hens, supplying the Boont Berry store, with little trouble, though we were somewhat obligated to supply the store with fresh eggs in lieu of paying rent, as those free range eggs were in high demand. Unfortunately they were in such demand that people started driving out to the farm to pick up a dozen or two or ten, and of course I was happy to let folks grab them out of the basket unwashed, place them in cartons themselves. It was sort of a pain in the ass sometimes to clean the eggs, and then to sell them in the store you had to put labels on every carton with the correct date even though they sold out immediately. This caused friction with Boont Berry, so we tried to step up the game that year, though our chick raising endeavor might have been the mouse on the elevator for that relationship. At the time we had a stationary coop that still stands today, as well as a mobile coop on a trailer. Previously we had raised a new batch of chicks every spring, introduced them to the flock at a certain age, but now we were doing batches of several hundred at a time, and the transitioning from each stage as they grew was more than I'd been prepared for. Not to mention chickens were EVERYWHERE, eating our baby lettuce. I hated chickens. I got to the point, after my Ex left with the kids, where I didn't give a damn if the raccoons massacred a bunch at night. Of course we'd ordered some of those white chickens, the hybrid grotesque creatures with KKK robes that laid around like pigs with feathers, that were mutilated by the ravens and vultures.
Now we got chickens running all over the farm here in Indiana. Thanks to our 3 dogs there are no raccoons or coyotes venturing within a mile of our place, so we don't have to worry about shutting the door on the coop at night, which makes a huge difference if you want to have a social life. Our chickens are basically wild for that reason, and roost in the trees and bushes, on fence posts and the outhouses we constructed for the music festival. They stay on the property, though, and do not cross the road.
Naturally I still dream about the old Boont Berry Farm, dreams no doubt triggered by the flourishing of livestock. I still dream about every field I ever planted, all the livestock I've taken care of. Due to predators I was walking around out at the old Boont Berry Farm every morning and night for about a decade, opening or closing the doors on the coops, so the place indelibly etched in my memory. Due to smoking weed possibly I had to double check several times some nights, not remembering if I'd shut the door, but that could have been PTSD after a few initial experiences with coons ravaging the entire flock.
Originally I got the chickens going in 2003 because Boont Berry, the General Store, and Glad's Cafe were tossing out all kinds of food scraps every week. The other night I dreamed that the Boont Berry kitchen was overflowing with compost, and so I loaded the totes in my old GMC flatbed diesel, thinking to take the leftover food scraps to the chickens, but as I drove and looked at the fuel gauge I thought, shit, I'll never get all the way to Indiana.
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