Drama in the hen house

1. We discover that Penguina (our barred rock hen) is actually Penguino (a silver laced polish bantam rooster). For two weeks we trip over our pronouns like parents of a newly-outed transgendered child, while Penguino explores his hormonal destiny as a crack-of-dawn crooner. Our neighbor, who’s tolerated ten years of our shenanigans (late-night backyard parties; replacing the neighborhood-sacred lawn with a tangled garden; nudist toddler colony) mentions that he misses the “cute noises” our chickens used to make. Plus, roosters are illegal within city limits. We find a new home for Penguino.
   

   Our young chicken-whisperer stuffs Penguino into a travel box

2. We set Penguino free to eat spent trays of wheat grass with a flock of chickens at The Organic Farm School, run by Katrina Blair, Durango’s raw-food guru-ess. I’m heavy hearted and nervous, like I’m dropping my child off for his first day of school, except I’m never coming back. Penguino sprints around the coop and postures on top of a straw bale like “Yo! how you like me now!” while the other hens ignore him. He’s still dashing around maniacally as we leave, while his new coop-mates tear into a tray of sunflower sprouts.
3. We return from camping to find that our silver wyandotte, Lily, is sitting on the other hens’ eggs, no longer laying or leaving the coop. This, we learn, is called brooding. We snatch warm eggs from under her docile featheryness, and wonder what to do.
4. We buy a new, adolescent hen to replace Penguino. Penelope (a golden laced wyandotte) is our smallest hen and immediately gets pecked bloody and hazed like a pledge to a sorority of nasty girls. “Great. We have one broody hen and one bloody hen,” I lament to Dan.
5. Lily continues to brood, we isolate Penelope from the gang of mean girls and her neck feathers slowly grow back. We hear from Organic Farm School friends that Penguino has been missing for days. “Maybe he wanted to be wild” offers Col. “He probly wanted to make a nest and have babies!” Rose says cheerily. “Won’t be long before a coyote gets him,” my no-nonsense farmer friend Bruce muses while my chest feels like gravel being rubbed together.
6. I scour backyardchickens.com for info on breaking a broody chicken. On their advice I pull Lily from the coop and put her in a wire-bottomed cage for the day, letting her out to grub insects and weeds in the evening.
   

   Sweet Lil being escorted to the cage

   The next morning Col informs me that “Lily is brooding again.” Back in the cage she goes. We return from a hike five hours later, get the kids down for naps and Dan tells me Lily is dead.

7. Dan, bless his wild carnivorous heart, slices into Lily’s warm abdomen and tugs the feathered coat off her body. Pasted to her flesh are globs of yellow fat, which Dan admires like a hungry fox. The afternoon heat and Lily’s sudden lifelessness wash over me like a rogue wave, taking my breath away. I killed her, leaving her out in the 85F heat for the morning. While I’m suffocating with guilt, Dan sees the end result: meat. But perhaps she was sick, seeking a quiet, cool place to rest, not brooding; if so we shouldn’t eat her. I call Bruce, who’s raised and eaten many-a-chicken. His assessment: “You can get a chicken from the store for $10, but an Emergency Room trip’s a lot more than that; I wouldn’t risk it.”
8. Col and Rose pick flowers to cheer me up. Handfuls of roses, sage flowers, hollyhocks, mallow and mint leaves. They tell me Lily is now our garden angel. They want to see Lily’s body–in the freezer–slated to bring to the woods. The words of my friend Dean–who helped me get started in backyard chickens–echo in my head: chickens come and chickens go. But two dead chickens in less than a week takes a toll on a motherly heart.

Ah Penguino, we hardly knew ye, and Lily dear, may you make a hungry weasel very happy.