In case you haven’t noticed, it’s chick season again. And if you haven’t noticed then you’re probably not a flock owner. Stop by Aubuchon in Belfast, the place on Route 1 that sells hardware, paint, animal feed and supplies, garden gear and plants. The store where a pet potbellied pig sleeps behind the counter, where you can get your dog groomed, and where, during the weeks of chick season, the sound of peep peep peep is constant. If you’re drawn to the sound, or have young children in tow, you’ll find the pen set up among the lawn mowers and such, full of tiny, feathery puffs, each kind separated in its own little section.

The chicks are in! Each week, a sign at the checkout counter promises, new breeds will arrive. Selling chicks in the spring is an old tradition at feed stores, for if you buy their chicks it’s a sure thing you’ll be a customer all season for the chicken feed and other supplies they sell. The other day, as I stood admiring the new arrivals, a woman was lifting up her young son to see them better. “Do you have chickens?” I asked.

“We used to,” she said, “but they were too much work.”

Hmmmm. Well, yes they are. And that got me to thinking, maybe for the first time, why we’ve kept chickens from the first year of our marriage. That took me back to the beginning, how we jumped right in and bought a whole flock at once.

We must have seen a sign up by the road, “chickens for sale”. I’ve got dozens of those signs, homemade, ratty signs painted on an old broken board: Free Kittens (several of those), Perennials, Garlic, Eggs, Goslings, Milk & Butter. They’d get nailed to the mailbox post for a time, all but the Free Kitten sign; that was more or less permanent for a lot of years. I’ve never had the heart to throw them out, so instead have made a kind of gallery on the rafters of our barn. One of our sons noticed them the other day and didn’t even remember all the stuff we’ve had for sale over the years.

Anyway, before the days of Facebook or Craig’s List or the Lincolnville Bulletin Board you tacked up a sign to let the neighbors know what you had. Agnes Underhill had a flock of bantams to get rid of, and we saw her sign on Tucker Brook Road. She had about 15, and wanted $15 for the lot. Without much thought we took them all.

Bantams are charming, half size chickens of every imaginable variety. Check out the Murray McMurray catalog where they list 31 different kinds of bantams alone, along with every other conceivable breed of chicken, duck, turkey, etc . Unlike most other laying hens, bantam hens haven’t had their broody instinct bred out of them, which means when they’ve laid a clutch of eggs they’ll sit down on them until they hatch. That’s how you get a mother hen with a trail of chicks running around behind her. Standard laying breeds generally drop their egg, wander off and never look back.

I don’t remember our first chicken house; we must have built it, the two of us, with our rudimentary carpentry skills – barnyard carpentry we’ve always called it.  All I remember of that first house is the night Wally, bollicky you-know-what and with shotgun in hand, stood in the moonlit barnyard and shot off the gable end, trying to hit a coon that was stealing our chickens. I was up on the back porch, supposedly lighting his way, but I think he fired before I shone the flashlight on what was a never-to-be forgotten scene in our family lore.

After that first flock, I think we might have been sucked into the feed store deal where you got free or nearly free chicks in the spring, “meat birds” they were meant to be, but actually were the cockerels, the disposables of the egg-laying industry, the males. We’re all too familiar these days with the horrors of the large-scale farming that supplies most of our animal protein: the beef feed lots, caged chickens, hogs raised in confinement pens. For the egg and dairy industry, there’s another grim side: nobody needs the boys. Or at any rate, it only takes a very few males to keep the girls producing milk and eggs.

Dairy farmers want heifers which will grow into good, milk-giving cows, and egg farmers want pullets, which five months after hatching will begin laying eggs of their own. Though to get a cow pregnant (and she’ll only begin lactating after “freshening” or giving birth) there has to be a bull (or bull semen – I’ve got a story about that too, but will save it for another day), chickens lay eggs whether there’s a rooster in the flock or not. The rooster’s only needed when you want the eggs to actually hatch.

Therefore, the boys are dispensable. Perhaps we don’t want to look too closely into the actual fate of 50% of the offspring of the dairy and egg industries, but it’s enough to say that the little cockerels don’t make it out of the bin where they’re tossed by the professional “vent sexers”; I guess we all know about veal. Yes, there is such a thing as highly trained and experienced people who visually inspect the sex organs inside the day old chick’s vent. The differences are so subtle that even these professionals are only accurate 90-95% of the time.

A lot of our chicken-keeping years blur in the remembering (doesn’t most of a life?), but there are a few highlights. Early on we discovered we could order chicks through the mail. This is an amazing thing, probably little-known outside of rural areas, but a hatchery such as Murray McMurray will take chicks right out of the shell, pop them into special cardboard boxes divided into sections designed to hold 25 chicks apiece, and mail them to you. The birds can live for a couple of days without food or water, as they absorb the remaining nutrients from their egg’s yolk. The hatcheries must count on the Post Office’s squeamishness with having boxes full of live, peeping birds stacking up, for no sooner does that box arrive than you get a call from someone at the office saying “you’ve got chicks here; can you come right away and pick them up?” These live chick shipments are like a hot potato to Post Office personnel.

Yet what’s more fun than taking a young child – your own or a grandchild or one you’ve borrowed – on that trip to the Post Office? You go in and ask for your box, then carry it out and place it on the child’s lap for the ride home. Tiny beaks peek out the holes in the sides and top, while tiny fingers reach in to feel the soft down. You hope the child remembers, but perhaps the memory is elusive, and only the sense of wonder endures. It’s enough.

We found out there’s such a thing as a special meat bird, different from laying breeds in that they put on weight at an amazing rate. Franken Chickens we call them, for they’re truly a man-made phenomenon. They come in the same box as the layers, and generally all are covered with a pale yellow or brown fuzz, but you just have to look at the feet. Layers are dainty little things with dainty little legs and feet, while the Franken Chickens have heavy, thick legs and large feet. They’ll need them to hold up their enormous breasts in the weeks to come as they grow into hefty broilers and roasters. Imagine being known as a “broiler”, your fate sealed before you’ve hatched.

Well, back to those feed store cockerels we fell for years ago, the discarded males of the chicken industry. Since they’re a laying breed they have the lighter build of their kind, and even though, as males they’ll grow larger than the laying hens they put on stringy muscle, and never approach the plump broilers. They’re tough and take months and months to get any size. And they eat lots and lots of grain along the way.  The above doesn’t apply to the chicks at Aubuchon; these are egg-laying breeds, and pullets not cockerels. You get them if you want to start a flock of your own layers.

Somewhere along the way, maybe in the early 90s, we built a new hen house on a memorable week-end with a crew made up of a couple of rowdy houseguests/relatives (yes, John and Bubba, I’m talking about you) along with our neighbor friends, Tom and Jan Shandera. We all worked together to erect a proper coop. For a couple of the crew it was just an occasion to drink more beer, while the more sober among us, (thank you, Tom and Jan) saw to it that the walls were straight and the floor level. It got done, and although it needed a new floor a couple of years ago, three sheets of plywood laid on top of some 2x4 stringers, it’s done the job through every season.

A lot of work? Twice a day, morning and night, open or close the door, chase in errant hens if need be, fill the grain hopper, carry a pail of water in the winter or stand in the late afternoon sun on a summer day with hose in hand, pick up eggs two at a time out of the nests counting 2,4,6,8,10 as they go gently into the wire basket, yes, that’s work.  Devoting most of a morning in barn boots shoveling out the accumulation of a winter’s poop, half choking on the ammonia smell, well, I guess it depends what you call work. If living your life is work, then yes, yes it is.

Librarian Sheila Polson reports: “The library will be open for needlework time again this Tuesday, April 26 from 4 to 6 p.m., … a fun time for people to get together to work on knitting, crocheting and other handwork projects while chatting and sharing ideas with friends. Everyone is welcome, from beginners to the more experienced, and may stay for part or all of the time. The library is also open on Tuesdays from 4 to 7 p.m. for those who want to stop in to read, check out books, or use the computers or internet. 

The first of the three part series about end of life issues will be held Friday, April 30 at United Christian Church Parish Hall, 10 a.m. to noon. Camden attorney Pam Terry will take the first hour to discuss legal and estate planning questions., wills, trusts, and other important legal documents one should have in place, as well as specific situations that can cause complications -- care for children, disabled parents or partners, etc.  During the second hour Pam will respond to questions.

I never realized that we had an accomplished boxer in town until I read this article in the Bangor Daily News about Jack Simpkins!

Our neighbor, Urcel Dodge, passed away last week. Sympathy to her family and friends.

It was spring vacation last week, and although it’s been a long, long time since those words made my heart sing (both as a student and as a teacher), there’s always something in the air when the children are free. For me it was an excuse to sit on the steps in front of our big barn door and tackle my crow. This crow has been dead for at least two winters; it was the gift of a friend to whom I’d confided my fascination with bird bones. He’d found it on a snow bank behind his house, winter before last, and arrived at my door some months later with the dried up thing in a cardboard box.

I buried it in a container of dirt and set it outside to simmer. So finally, last week, with two young granddaughters sitting on either side, I began to take him apart. As I scraped and tugged at the tough sinews, they admired each bone as it appeared. We all agreed that we’d never given a thought to crow leather, but there it was, the skin of a crow. Each claimed a vertebra, noting the hole through the middle, a ready made bead to put on a string. I’ve examined many song bird bones this way, but never such a big bird. I’m proudest of the intact rib cage, fragile articulated ribs and a perfect wishbone. It’s hard to find anyone (other than those two little girls) as fascinated as I am at this project. If you are, let me know. We can talk bird bones.