The long northern winter is upon us here. The sun set at 5:00 today. After a long day of cold rain, we decided to take a meal out. Our dinner conversation meandered though the year on the farm, what we liked, or disliked; what was forgettable, or unforgettable.
The apple trees did well enough this year, more than tripling last year’s output. The drought stressed some of the trees, and we’ll see how they do next season. But the lack of airborne moisture also kept disease and pests at bay, a welcome change.
As we talked I grew uneasy, knowing that at some point the conversation must turn to the great chicken imbroglio of last summer and fall. To raise a few chickens…we never considered our hobbies on the farm to be life threatening, well at least not to us, they were meat chickens after all. But when ill winds blow they may topple any tree, or man for that matter.
It started with a bright almost neon green car that would sit on the side of the road in front of our farm. Once when I was pruning trees I noticed it just a few feet from where I stood but had not heard it drive up. It was a silent car, it could come and go without the merest noise but the light grind of gravel as it glided off the pavement to the road’s shoulder. Its side windows were darkened but there were two entities inside, visible only by their shadows; they stared at me, at the farm, leaving me uneasy from the start.
But we’ve had people from town, and the waterfront homes that surround us, suddenly show up lately, folks who join the peninsula every May and stay until Halloween, people who never passaged our way before, because someone posted a photo of newborn fox cubs, playing outside their den in a culvert next to our road. It became the local zoo for a few weeks until coyotes chased the foxes to a new hole in the ground somewhere else, a wild turn of events that I witnessed first hand from the window I sit at today. I guess that’s the difference between a zoo and the countryside. Visitors though were not amused by the overnight evacuation of the den. One gentleman came and setup an easel and waited for quite a while until he realized the den was now empty, not sleeping. A couple of the visitors questioned me, when I was within earshot, as if I had something to do with it: “Do YOU know what happened to the fox and her cubs?” the gals asked, seeing the culvert was empty.
“Coyotes,” was my one word answer. This stopped them in their tracks while they did the calculus. Then they screwed their brow and stared at me contemptuously, since they had never seen a coyote, except on Saturday morning cartoons. “There’s coyotes in Michigan?”
Well, yes there are coyotes in Michigan. There’s coyotes in your suburban Chicago neighborhood actually, though you’ve never seen one. By the way, your neighbor’s Jack Russel…yep coyotes.
Looking back, the fox den and its evacuation were ominous signs of the summer to come, but we had no idea at the time. We wrote it off as just some silliness. “What did they want,” my wife Mary asked.
“The foxes again,” I replied.
“People really love foxes, I had no idea” she said.
“Oh yeah and they love and hate with equal passion,” I replied.
While the foxes amused us all, the chicks arrived. I ordered them online, 20 Cornish Rock Cross chicks and 6 white Thanksgiving turkey poults. I picked them up from the local post office on a Thursday morning just after they arrived. I’d prepared a nice bed for them in the barn with plenty of wood shavings, heat lamps and even warm water in the waterer. I removed the chicks and poults into their own beds, counting along and made sure each one had a sip of water, so they would know where to find water when they needed it. To my delight the vendor sent one additional chick, so we had 21. All appeared to be in good shape. I covered the beds with an old sleeping bag. They were good and warm. And following the advice of the vendor and other poultry farmers I did not give them food for a few hours, or until they settled into their new home after the stressful trip. When I finally put some food out they weren’t shy at all. Seemed like our first foray into raising chickens and turkeys was going well.
We were amazed to see how quickly they grew. Within two week the chicks were three to four times as big as when they came and they were voracious eaters. It’s very important when raising these birds that you do not overfeed them. The food they receive must be measured every day. The turkey poults took their time comparatively. Soon it was time to move the chicks out to their new home. I have an 8 by 8 wood house I built several years ago for geese. It was clean, to the degree you can clean a goose house, and I set it up so the the chicks had the run of half of it, and again with a thick carpet of wood shavings, plus heat lamps and covers for the cool evenings. During the day when it warmed up I let them have the run of the whole place with the door opened but boarded on the bottom. I didn’t think their legs were sturdy enough for the outdoors yet.
By week 4 the chicks looked like chickens, almost fully feathered and good strong legs. I let them roam a large grassed field surrounding their pen, bordered by an electric fence to prevent the wildlife from taking a free chicken dinner. I poured their feed into an old 8 foot length of plastic gutter I no longer used on the pole barn. They scrambled for food like maniacs. I learned quickly to pour the food before letting them out of their house in the morning. This reduced the likelihood of injury to one of them, or me.
I also put the turkeys out at this time. They had a separate shelter which I built as a series of steps, since turkeys love to roost up off the ground. It was a roofed but the walls were open, and it was covered on all side with chicken wire. It was also sitting in a large grass field enclosed by an electric fence. When I drove by in the tractor the six little turkeys would run up the steps and stare at me from the top step. I thought this was kind of funny.
Things went along well. After the morning feed the birds roamed around their respective fields for a few hours, until the sun was high in the sky. Neither the chickens nor the turkeys were inclined to sun bathing. They both gathered under the protection of their roofs for a little shade. I can’t say that I blame them. When it’s hot and sunny out, which it was almost everyday this summer, I also look for something to do in the shade. And they went through an awful amount of water. I had two waterers comprising 5 gallons in each of their pens and added to them at least twice a day, sometimes more.
Once the sun was behind the hardwoods, they all came out again to roam and peck. I often sat on the porch after dinner and watched their behavior. They didn’t bother each other like the geese sometimes had, and they were all very healthy looking. I was concerned about the chickens having strong enough legs for their body size, but soon realized this was not a problem here; their legs were an inch in diameter by week 5.
Out of the blue one day the postal deliverer came to the door with a letter we had to sign for. Ok, happy to do it, but curious what it could be about. Turns out it was a summons to appear before our township council to answer questions about the poultry “operation.”
The language of the letter was official, very official. There were no charges, per se, just several concerns about the housing, feeding, watering, psychological welfare and eventual fate of the birds on our farm property. We’d never had anything to do with the council before, had never attended a meeting actually. We soon learned that our ignorance or innocence of the council’s activities was no useful defense. After a few minutes under their ‘heat lamp’ we felt our skin burned and our farm’s peace forever shadowed.
We showed up at the council meeting the Monday evening designated in the letter. We were surprised that all of the other attendees appeared to know each other quite well, though we knew none of them. There were hugs and handshakes and conversations about past and future social occasions. The last person to enter the crowded meeting room that evening was the council ‘president’. With a small hand gesture the head Man had the other council members seated and the room quieted, the meeting called to order.
The secretary read the agenda, with a few small corrections by the head Man, and we were underway. The first item was an issue to which I was completely ignorant, so I naturally fazed out, only to be brought back to reality by a gentle elbow to the ribs by Mary - “they’re talking to you,” she whispered.
“Yes, yes,” I offered, like I had not heard the previous summons well.
“Could you please approach the lectern, sir?”
“Sure,” I replied, and made my way to the middle of the middle of the room where a short lectern that had seen better days, sat upon a small table.
“Please give your name and …” the secretary started. But I interrupted her.
“Aren’t you two the ladies who own the bright green battery car that parks alongside the road…” I pointed to two ladies, apparently sisters, in the row just left of the lectern.
At this the head Man spoke up assertively, but without emotion, “Mr. Foydel, we asked you here to answer questions about the raising of poultry at your so called farm and we are not interested in anything else, including the ladies sitting in the row to your left there. Please stay on point and refrain from any further sudden outbursts. Ms. Secretary, please continue.” I heard the words but was still focused on the two sisters. There was something unusual there, so alike but oddly jarring.
“Please give your name…” she tried again.
“Well you know my name, he just said it.” At this there was some tsk tsking from the audience, like they had seen this little play before and knew where it was headed. For my part I kept one eye on the head Man. I’d seen him before, well not him exactly but his clone. At some level of the corporate hierarchy, especially in areas like health care and education, you meet men like this. They lacked the charisma for the open marketplace, so they emptied themselves of any remaining sense of humor and fell willingly into a large bureaucracy where they wiggled for decades until some combination of organization growth and incumbent attrition left them in charge of one thing or another. This was the vice grips that produced the head Man of our local council ’chambers’.
The head Man’s face was again straight poker but the vein on his right temple was more pronounced. The empty shells of men like him contain pools of heavy water and when you lower the fissile material into it, they don’t take long to boil.
“Your name please, for the record.”
“Thomas Foydel.”
The pleasantries now concluded, the head Man began his interrogation.
“Mr. Foydel, do you understand why you were asked here tonight and…”
“Well,” I interrupted again, “it seems that some of our part time residents recently wandered off the beaten track of the Peninsula, M-22 that is, in order to come to view some fox pups, which had long evacuated the area, and during this visit also noticed the poultry that I raise on my small farm, so called. Apparently they know as little about poultry and how its raised as they understand about foxes and coyotes.”
This was enough to get some of the spectators aggrieved, as I’d hoped, and a bit of bedlam broke out. So many were the voices of disapproval that the head Man had to ask three times for order to restore. It annoyed him that the audience, normally deferential to his leadership, had not followed his dispassionate example. Their outburst weakened his position, and the veins on both temples above his still deadpan face swelled noticeably.
When the room finally settled, he continued his questions. “You are aware I’m sure that your chickens are left largely unsupervised and there have been instances of aggressive behavior witnessed by members of this community…”
This mention of “members” led my eyes back to the two sisters.
“especially aggressive behavior of the male roosters among your little flock,” he concluded. To which I replied “I can assure you, my friend, that all my chickens identify as female hens!”
“This is an outrage?“ and other like exclamations were heard, such a huge clamor rose that the head Man didn’t even try to quell it. At that, one of the sisters rose and threw her head back very dramatically, shifting the wig she wore. I stepped to the other side of the lectern, amazed that my sad attempt at humor caused such a spasm of vitriol in the rows to my left. This is when I realized she was a man. It also didn’t hurt that her large nostrils flared open as she lowered her head and shoulders to take a run at me. When she made her mad dive I shifted north again and she ran right into the lectern and the little table like a bull in the ring.
Neither the table nor the lectern had a chance with that 200 pound lady on top of them. Her wig was off entirely now and there were scrapes and a little blood appeared as I stepped over her and gathered my wife. We were at the truck in no time and I made a couple of quick moves to put us on the road back to safety and sanity.
“Well, that’s a spirited group,” I told Mary. “Those two sisters had me flummoxed until he tried to tackle me.”
“Those two aren’t sisters, they’re husband and wife, the woman next to me told me,” Mary said.
“No kiddin’, and here I thought they were twins, a little different no doubt.”
“I guess he wants to be her,” Mary offered.
“That dude was more aggressive than any of our chickens, they should send him a letter.”
For the rest of the summer I took the mail reluctantly. It was a relief that no further letters came from the council; I’m not sure I could survive another bout with the twins and the poker faced head Man, who, I would later find out, was a May to November resident, a former CEO of a large hospital system in Cincinnati. Running our little township council must be a huge step down for him. But now as an elected official, the desire for power no longer inhibited, he rules the roost as they say with a proud beak and lethal claw.
When the temporary population arrives in May there are 3,000 people in our corner of the Peninsula. But in winter only the 600 full time residents remain and life settles down again. I have nothing against the temps, but they decided to not just vacation here, but to run the place as well. It’s a misjudgment on their part. They make themselves miserable, and ruin their vacations and retirements, pushing their politics onto the simple lives of the inland locals who are half farmers and half tradesmen. They no sooner arrive in May at their waterfront homes than our weekly local paper details a whole new set of “issues” to be sorted out in the normal ‘us versus them’ manner. I’ve concluded they do this to make sure that during their summer of fun they, their spouses and their friends don’t stray too far from their flock.
Speaking of the CEO, the last time I saw him and his portly wife they were at the meat counter of the local grocer comparing two packages of chicken. “I wouldn’t buy either,” I snarked as I walked by, “that farmer runs a well known cock fighting ring, and all his egg layers are hens!”
As for our chickens they finished well, beautifully really. Homegrown chickens have less fat and a cleaner flavor than store chicken. And no, slaughtering poultry is not fun, I certainly don’t enjoy it, but it doesn’t bother me. After a few years you learn to do it, let us say, dispassionately.
This is so funny, I can't quite believe it really happened.
I’m sharing this with Jeff. He will love it!
Thanks Tom!