Chicken Nuggets

Angel was the sole survivor of the scrub jay attack. We found her the following morning running through the yard in panicky zigzags. D bent down and scooped her up in a baseball cap as she ran past, returned her to the coop and bird-proofed the fence. I ran right out and bought four more chicks to keep her company. Ruby was red, Daisy was white, and Sophie was golden and grew up to lay blue eggs. The fourth was black and beautiful, and I named her Shaniqua, a solid urban name. It was also a private joke. I couldn’t wait for one of my neighbors to ask, “What’s a Shaniqua?”

I had never felt any maternal urges before, but these chicks brought out the mother hen in me. I set them up in a big cardboard box lined with wood shavings and equipped it with a heat lamp. The musty smell of sawdust and the gentle sound of peeping soothed me. I hovered as the chicks tripped over each other to peck at the crumble in their feeder. In the evenings, I knelt on the floor beside the box and watched for long minutes as they quieted down and fell asleep. A friend who also raised chickens once told me, “Maybe I’m a simpleton, but I can sit and watch them for hours.” I understand completely. It’s pure entertainment without an ounce of intellectual effort.

A few months went by as the chicks adjusted to living in the coop. Under Angel’s tutelage they learned to return from free-ranging at sunset so we could lock them in, and every morning we let them out again. One spring day D opened the door as usual. Daisy flew down from her roost to land in the doorway, puffed up her chest and flapped her wings, and belted out a hearty “COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!” What’s a shocked parent to do? I renamed her Tyrone.

As he matured, Tyrone became more and more neurotic. Crazy amounts of chicken hormones running through your veins will do that to you. I’d look out the back window at a lovely pastoral scene of blue sky and flowers and hens serenely pecking in the grass, and suddenly a blur of white would whizz past, head down and wings straight up, madly clucking like his tail was on fire. But there was never a sign of an actual threat. After a while the hens didn’t even bother to look up from their grazing. Tyrone was predictably ridiculous.  But we stopped laughing the day he confronted 2-year-old Sofia with a belly bump that knocked her to the ground. Shortly afterward while I was away on a business trip, D called to break the news: Tyrone ran away. That was his story and he was sticking to it. Now, I’ve never heard of a rooster running away, but I simply asked D to promise that Tyrone would not appear in any of my meals. And Tyrone was never heard from again.