A coup in the coop
Breaking news on the chicken front! A coup d’état has taken place! (Dare I call it a coop d’état?) The smaller of the two roosters, a feisty Buff Orpingon, has dethroned the larger one, a Wyandotte. The battle must have been bloody; the victor has spattered blood on his neck, and there’s blood on the wall of the chicken coop. The result is that the victor has his harem of a dozen or so hens, while the loser is chased any time he comes near to them.
Over the summer we lost ten hens because we let them free-range. Candidates for the predator: fox, coyote, bobcat (seen by a neighbor), bear even; but since we’ve not seen much gore but only, every once in a while, a scattering of feathers, we’re wondering also about raptors, perhaps a hawk or a turkey vulture.
Are the predators schooled in quantum physics? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKx7v-uHDRQ
Is this a metaphor for intra-RCC politics? ;)
William Collier beat me to it! Perhaps the Buff O will protect his shrinking flock a bit better than the previous king.
I would pay to see a bobcat in the wild. They seem to have been left off the predator comeback list that coyotes have topped.
It must be the Neo-Con Hawks!
Do you take them indoors at night?
Yes, the chickens are locked up at night. We think the coup occurred at night. And, no, this pericope is not a parable.
My father raised chickens when I was a kid, and I don’t remember any drama like this, although I think we had only one rooster.
I do remember baby chicks hatching, and in fact I remember once my whole kindergarten class walking to my house (about a 20 minute walk) to see our new baby chicks. But I also remember going to the hatchery with my father when he wanted to buy chicks, and I remember huge numbers of chicks being picked through and sorted in what seemed to me a distressingly rough manner.
One of my strangest memories is a baby chick my father brought in the house because it had a “disability.” It only walked backwards. He had it in a big trash can lid, and the chick just walked around and around the outside edge, always backwards.
It’s not just chickens that can be strange. Chicken afficionados can seem pretty odd to me.
Seeking pictures of JAK’s beloved birds, I searched Wikipedia for “Buff Orpington”, and a duck came up, but that was my fault. Finally found one, and it is indeed quite a handsome bird. But I wonder: what color is a “lemon blue”?? Hmmmmm.
Checking out Wyandottes, I discovered that “The blue laced red is a buff/red color with a blue that looks just like grey around the edge of every feather.” How do they tell the difference between a blue that is blue and a blue that looks just like a gray? Notice the spelling, “grEy”. Sounds to me like some English eccentric contributed that.
Also of note is Mike the Headless Chicken, a Wyandotte. It was not quite beheaded, lived and toured the U. S. Mike is no longer with us but is not forgotten:
“Mike the Headless Chicken is now an institution in Fruita, Colorado, with an annual “Mike the Headless Chicken Day”, the third weekend of May, starting in 1999. Events held include the “5K Run Like a Headless Chicken Race”, egg toss, “Pin the Head on the Chicken”, the “Chicken Cluck-Off”, and “Chicken Bingo”, in which chicken droppings on a numbered grid choose the numbers.[5] There is also a song about Mike by the band Radioactive Chickenheads.”
Truly weird.
Although it is not a parable, there is a lesson to be learned, it is never a Good idea to allow “free-range” for those who wholly ignore that Christ Has Revealed Himself to His Church through the trinitarian relationship of Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and The Teaching of The Magisterium, and thus the entire Deposit of Faith is infallible.
When I was growing up, before we got our first TV, one of the radio shows we listened to regularly was Blondie. An occasional visitor to the Bumstead household arrived in a limousine so long that it took several minutes, it seemed, before it came to a halt. Out stepped Mrs. Buff-Orpington, an immensely wealthy widow, with a gargly upper-class soprano voice and, one just knew, a very full chest. It was only a couple of years ago that I learned that her name was that of a very popular breed of chickens and that I understood the full meaning of the explanation of her great wealth. Her husband, we were told, “invented the chicken.”
You’re stretching things, Nancy. This thread was meant to supply a respite from our oh-so-intense exchanges.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH9GO6Xoz44
Fr. Komonchak,
Do you name your chickens?
Some of our chickens that stood out from the others wound up being called by name. One of the hens that had feathers of a different color than the others was named Fanny. One night we were eating chicken for dinner, and someone asked my father which chicken it was. He said, “Fanny.” Different members of the family remember what happened at this point differently, but I am quite sure someone, perhaps my mother, pushed her plate away and said, “I’m not eating this.” And the rest of us, except my father, followed suit. This incident has some of the creepiness of incidents in Greek mythology or the works of Alfred Hitchcock.
Has the Chicken of Minerva flown so soon?
No, the chickens have not been named. We had the same experience as you, David, when we were raising rabbits. My sisters wouldn’t eat it. And then there were my cousins who sat down to eat one evening when their mother was serving them squirrel, freshly shot that afternoon. When they asked her what it was, she told them it was chicken. “First time I’ve seen a chicken with four legs,” one of them said.
My Irish mother learned from my Slovak grandmother a wonderful way of cooking chicken. My father would slaughter the chicken (they can run around without their heads, in case you were wondering); he’d dunk in a pot of boiling water and we’d pluck all the feathers off; he knew how to get the unpleasant stuff out of the insides but to keep the liver and gizzard (I think); and then he’d cut it up. My mother would make a chicken soup that would cook with potatoes and carrots. When that was done, we would have a first course over homemade egg-noodles, and after that would come the meat of the chicken and the carrots and potatoes with the taste of the chicken all through them (and lots of butter on them). It was the only two-course meal on our regular menu. Delicious! I think it has a fancy name.
My brother and I tried to recreate this childhood memory three years ago, but it was a miserable failure. The chickens were too young–no fat on them–and we cooked the soup too long. Disaster!
Losing 10 hens out of a flock in the 20′s seems like an enormous attrition rate. If you’re counting on your chickens to make a living, that’s not good! My grandparents were farmers and I never heard of their losing a hen to wild animals. America is a dangerous place for chickens!
Chicken was our Sunday feast when we were there. One big chicken would feed 12 people. My grandmother was the one who slaughtered the chicken by twisting their neck, plucked their feathers, and cooked the entire meal. Her favorite piece was the neck, if I remember correctly, although now I wonder if she faked it.
My father would slaughter the chicken (they can run around without their heads, in case you were wondering) . . . .
Fr. Komonchak,
There was a special tree stump in our back yard where my father beheaded chickens with an ax. He had a particular old sweatshirt he would wear because of all the flapping around and the blood. My father would then dip the chickens in very hot water to make them easier to pluck. The smell of feathers in hot water is very unpleasant, as I recall. My father would then take out the insides, and my sister and I would ask him do identify the various organs. Occasionally my father would find an egg in the chicken that was in the process of formation. Neither my sister and I were at all squeamish about this, although I think if we were to witness it today, we would both find it very disturbing. I am not even particularly happy when removing the giblets wrapped in paper from inside a chicken from the supermarket.
My father made delicious chicken and noodles, but I don’t remember him doing this with our own chickens, which we no longer raised after we moved when I was in the 5th grade. My mother made delicious beef (chuck steak, I think) and noodles, which I have never been able to duplicate. She once accidentally varied the recipe by adding what she thought was plain water from a pitcher in the kitchen, and it actually was Kool-Aid Pink Lemonade.
Sorry, Father. I know it was a stretch.
I read you too quickly, Joe. You said you listened to Blondie on the radio. I listened to Blondie on the radio too growing up–but the rock group Blondie, not the cartoon Blondie. Although, I suppose they both were, well, blonde.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blondie_%28band%29
All this fun reminded me of the one chapter in Owen Wister’s romantic western, The Virginian, about a crazy hen called Emily. I remember my Mom giving me that chapter to read years before I was old enough for the rest of it.
Joe,
Here I am home from work all ready to jump right into mature conversation and I find the thread shut down and a conversation about chickens.
You made a funny and you didn’t even know it!
Found on the internet: “A reason why keeping a rooster in your chicken flock is a wise idea is for the protection of your chickens. It is a rooster’s instincts to protect its hens from harmful predators that may invade the chicken pen and threaten your livestock.”
Maybe the coup was planned by the smaller rooster with the help of the hens in reaction to the failure of the larger rooster to protect its flock from predators!
Is this the chatter of Our Lady of the Puppets?
You know what day chickens hate most?
Fry-day!
There was more drama in my gramma’s hen house than on “Young Dr. Malone”–hens pecking each other to death, ostracizing sick ones, roosters vying for attention, hens turning on the chicks, chicks turning on each other. And I remember the beheading stump, though the deed was usually done before we got there. We’d drive up to see gramma plucking feathers into a big old galvanized washtub.
There was always a certain amount of loss due to predators, but gramma always said the fox had to eat, too. On the other hand, she was a pretty good shot.
She used to make a chicken stew/soup thing by simmering an older hen with vegetables and tomato juice, then straining it all out and addiing She’d then add tender chicken chunks and used a sieve to make spaetzle, which thickened it all up.
I do something similar, add a lot of whatever I’ve got in my herb garden–sage and thyme are good–and use the potato ricer (disk with the larger holes) to make the spaetzle, and it works pretty good. No butter for us, but I sneak a dollop of sour cream on it sometimes.
And, my gosh I’m getting really hungry now and I think I’m gonna make this tomorrow!
My Grandma’s chicken yard had drama, too. And Grandpa beheaded them on a stump. And Grandma cleaned them on a side porch. And the cats from the neighborhood waited for her to throw them the guts. And the fried chicken and the fresh vegetables from the garden were wonderful. (Chicken feet make wonderful broth for gravy.)
When Grandma sat in the living room listening to Young Dr. Malone (and Mary Noble and Pepper Young), I sat on the porch reading books from the tiny library in the tiny town. (Penrod, The Little Princesses, et al.)
For some old Blondie episodes:
http://www.archive.org/browse.php?field=subject&mediatype=audio&collection=oldtimeradio
OMG, “Penrod”!
My gramma had hidden depths. She had a big collection of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, a science fiction fan before there was science almost. We used to rock on the porch and talk about how some day we’d go to Egypt and explore the pyramids. By the time King Tut’s exhibition came near enough for us to go, she was way too old and frail, one of the great disappointments of my life.
My bird-watcher niece tells me that the predator wouldn’t be a turkey vulture whose talons she says are too weak to grasp prey; they feed on carrion. If it’s a raptor, it’s probably a red-tail hawk.
No news on the battlefield. The defeated Wyandotte roosts outside the coop at night. I don’t know what he’ll do when the weather gets cold.