Chickens
We got rid of the chickens today.
I packed them up in totes and drove them to a nearby friend’s house who had a homestead with lots of other birds. It was a tough decision and this may sound silly, but I feel a little emptiness in our backyard right now.
We added some new hens to our flock this spring when egg production was down and the new girls were proving unruly. They didn’t want to lay in the nesting boxes and they would fly the coop and free range during the day. At first I didn’t mind, but then they found their way in to the garden, with the giant dogs trampling after them to catch poop snacks.
We’ve been struggling with the responsibility for caring for the chickens in the summer. It means we can’t travel much because we don’t have anyone to care for them in our absence. We also have to be back in the evenings to make sure the coop is closed as there’s a pretty large pack of coyotes who have a den close by. So the idea of getting rid of them was on the radar but the benefit of fresh eggs was winning out.
Until they started pulled up a zucchini plant and ate through half the bush beans.
And then, to seal the deal, one of the new girls attacked our husky dog, who then turned around and made quick work of her. I don’t blame either of them. It was bound to happen.
So I called up my friend as asked if she was interested in 8 (not 9) laying hens and she was happy to have them.
I’m sad because I genuinely liked having the chickens around. They were fun to watch and hang out with. They also represented a reciprocal relationship that had worked well for us for the past few years. Yes, they were unruly but I admired their ungovernability. I fed them lots of good weeds, they made great compost and have kept me fed with daily eggs in return.
I think chickens are also kind of a benchmark in homesteading; a step above gardening and moving into self-sufficiency because of their high production value. I will miss the eggs, but the truth is there’s no shortage of backyard free range eggs available to me for a reasonable price.
This “letting go” of the chickens comes at a time when I’m actively offloading unnecessary responsibilities. I wrote in my last post about burnout, and the natural follow up from burnout is to try and lessen the load. Without the requirement to care for the birds, I can sleep in a bit more in the morning, I can take overnight trips away with my family, I don’t have to clean their coop or spend money on chicken feed, I can start a proper compost with food scraps. I won’t have immediate access to eggs, but I can easily turn to my neighbours to help fill that gap.
I come back to this phrase again, as many of us do: it takes a village. We are not meant to live in isolation and do “all the things” on our own. Humans thrive in groups where we can work together to get our needs met. I think this is one of the major criticisms that homesteaders face: trying to be self-sufficient is great for reducing one’s own reliance on broken systems, but it doesn’t do anything to actually fix those systems. Opting out is fairly useless if you’re only solving the problems for yourself. The reliance on community comes with it’s risks, namely that people are fairly unreliable! But building these networks where I can get my eggs from next door, maybe in exchange for a loaf of homemade sourdough, ultimately helps our community thrive in the long run.
I will miss the birds, and maybe someday we’ll get some more (I’m plotting a shared coop between neighbours!) but for now I’m happy to shed some of that unnecessary responsibility and go knock on my neighbours’ door to get my backyard free range eggs from them.