A Funny Chicken Story

Being a farmer and bringing you natural and organic products can make you want to keep your day job.

From Stoneybrook Farm.wordpress.com/category/chickens

This batch of Red Broiler meat chickens that I am raising is flighty as hell. Ordinarily when you touch a meat bird it squawks a bit and a tremor shoots through its body, and that’s about it. When you touch a good percentage of this batch of Red Broilers, they go off screeching and flapping like they were shot out of a cannon.

None of the batches of meat chickens that I have raised have had a terribly good homing instinct, so they get close to the shelter at night, but not all of them get in it. This means that it is always necessary to round up a few of them and get them into the shelter. When I get out there well into dusk but before dark the round up is pretty easy. I just herd them with my feet. However, after dark, a chicken is pretty blind, so they don’t like to move. After dark, I need to pick the birds up and walk them to the shelter. As I mentioned above, this is usually pretty simple, just reach down and pick the bird up. With this group, however, you have to snatch them with two hands around both wings and hope you get a good grip before the cannon fires.

Last night my neighbor came over to buy some pork and another neighbor came to pick up a few pigs I piggy sat for him for a week, so we didn’t have dinner until about 8:30, which meant that I didn’t get out to the coop until well after dark.  One bird had squirmed its way in between two of the hay bales that I placed up against the shelter for added warmth because the nights have been so cool. Its head was “inside” but its butt was sticking out into the paddock, so I wanted to pick it up and bring it around to the front of the shelter and place it inside. Because there were still other birds to round up, I hadn’t closed the front of the shelter yet. When I touched that bird to try to grab it, it exploded forward, screeching and squawking, and slammed right into the back of the shelter. There was a huge boom inside the shelter as all seventy-five or so birds that had been inside frantically flapped their wings and came rocketing out, dashing in all directions once they cleared the door, screaming their heads off.

“Son of a bitch!” I thought to myself and shook my head as the commotion died down.  I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them peeping to each other and from the sound of it they were all over the place. I could hear that at least a few of them had gone through the fence. What should have been a simple little job had become a real chore.