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| Where the chickens live. |
Today I learned how to locate the
carotid arteries of a chicken. Feeling the bird's throat, just below
its ear, there is a soft spot in the triangle of flesh bracketed
between the skull and the descending spinal cord. Or ascending spinal
cord, as the case may be, with the chicken suspended upside-down in
an aluminum cone, lulled into calmness by the fingers stroking its
feet.
My fingertips, encountering this soft
spot, provide a rough estimate of where the major blood vessels will
be found. But they do not, themselves, play the role of finding the arteries. The
arteries are found by the thin knife in my other hand. I
ask the knife, “is this the place?” and it answers, I hope, a yes in deep
red that promises that the chicken will be unconscious almost before it
can register what's happened.
I am new to this question-and-answer,
though, and the knife sometimes responds with “no.” Here instead
is a windpipe, or a minor trickle of blood and a squawk of pain.
When this happens a feeling of discomfort centered in the point where
my jaw meets my ear demands that I ask again, apologetically, finding
relief only in flowing affirmation of the end of a life.
I have never before killed something
for food, or really much of anything more advanced than an insect.
I've spent one summer raising beef cattle, and am partway through a
summer raising chickens, turkeys, guineas, ducks, geese, goats and
pigs, all of which are eventually food. But this step in the process
is new to me. While it's not pleasurable, it does feel important. I'm
not yet sure why, though. Do I know more now than I did before, aside
from where those blood vessels reside? Do I understand something now
that was hidden to me before?
Even if I'm still sorting out some of
the reasons why, I do feel it to be an important piece of the process
of understanding, in more than just the intellectual sense of
knowing, the way in which
energy from the sun interacts with the materials of earth to animate
the fantastic web of living things in which we're all inextricably
embedded.
New lives begin even as others end.
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| Each thing that falls feeds another's growth. |
For two and a half
weeks, a beautiful black Cochin chicken named St. Agnes' Daughter did
me the service of incubating twelve small speckled eggs that were not
her own. They were fertile Guinea Fowl eggs, a gift from another
farmer. It was decided that raising a little flock of Guineas would
be a good project for me to take on personally, so I built a cozy
nest box and scraped a corner pen in the big blue chicken coop free
of the seemingly ancient, solidified chicken manure that coated the
floor.
The chicks are
beautiful. Lightly striped with a lavender gray that hints at their
future coloration, a pale blue-gray laced with white. Guinea Fowl
originate in Africa and are raised both for food and for the
role they can play in reducing pests like ticks on the farm. With Lyme disease a point of growing concern, Guineas may be an increasingly appreciated presence on small farms in the region. They are
voracious hunters not just of ticks but supposedly anything small
enough to eat, insect and reptile and rodent alike. They are also
reputed to be excellent guard animals, with raucous voices that they
raise whenever an intruder appears.
Less domesticated
than chickens, Guineas are supposed to have a good bit of wild left
in their natures. Managing them in spite of their instincts to roost
in the woods, for example, may prove a serious future challenge. I
still have a lot of learning to do.
I look
forward in particular to learning the character of Guinea Fowl.
Chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese all have different
species-characters. Their are plenty of individual personalities
within each species, of course, but there are certain actions and
tendencies that are very “chicken” traits or very “duck”
traits. So far I definitely prefer the species-characters of chickens
and geese to those of ducks and turkeys. It will be interesting to
see where Guineas fall on that spectrum.
It has not been a
good season for vegetable crops. Rain is usually a good thing for a
garden. Rain of varying duration appearing five days out of every
six, and often as not in very heavy showers, can be a bit too much of
a good thing. Rot takes a toll on root crops like onions and
potatoes. A heavy rain just after I planted rows of carrots flooded
that section of the field and many of those little seeds floated
right up out of their shallow coverings of soil and are now growing
as far as 20 feet from where I planted them. A good portion are in
the strawberry patch.
We'll be borrowing
a backhoe shortly. After we dig a ditch to improve the drainage of
the garden field I hope to take advantage of the wet season by
preparing part of the ditch for growing watercress. The field is wet
enough as it is that there's already watercress here and there
volunteering as weeds in my scattered carrot row.
