Outlaw Chickens

  The Lady of the House and I once had “outlaw chickens.”

  They were outlaw chickens because we kept them in our back yard in the city limits where you weren’t supposed to have chickens.

  Now chickens weren’t totally banned in our little ol’ New Mexico town.  If you lived south of the rail yard near the livestock auction house you could have a few in your yard, but God forbid NOT north of the rail yard.

  The Lady of the House loves fresh eggs and that was her whole point of having the hens in our back yard.

  People are funny about chickens.  Got a neighbor whose dogs bark non-stop?  Got loud music in th’ hood?  Have a war zone of fireworks around the 4^th of July?  Stuff like this often is tolerated.  But put a rooster in your backyard and John Law will be breathing down your neck to get rid of it in short order.

  I reckon chickens present a threat to folks who are all about image and stuff, probably afraid their property values will go down, I don’t know.

  Some folks tried to get chickens allowed in the city limits a few months ago.  For a few weeks it looked like it would be allowed then some skinflint, or maybe it was a few of them, bitched to city commissioners and the idea went swirling down the toilet of politics.

  Outlaw chickens ain’t no big deal….as long as your neighbors don’t care or animal control doesn’t come a-callin’.

  It never made sense to me that chickens were outlawed…I mean we live in “The Golden West” with all of it’s wide open space and stuff.

  “The Girls,” as we called the two hens Ethel and Lucy, gave us really great eggs and manure for the organic garden.

  We started out with three chicks from the old feed store on the east side of town. We were assured they were all hens.  So we named them Ethel, Lucy and Henrietta.

  We watched them grow.  Kept a heat lamp out with them when they graduated from a big cage in the house to a small area of the back yard.  Months later we set them loose in their own big chicken yard complete with a coop that The Lady of the House built.

  One morning as I was getting ready for work I heard a noise like a squeaky chair, but then not quite like a squeaky chair.

  “Aw-ahh.”

  This was like 430 in the morning so I thought our big ol’ 20 pound cat Tom had jumped down from our rocking recliner.

  “Aw-ahh.”

  There it was again.

  I looked at the chair I thought was making the noise.

  Nothing.

  “Aw-ahh.”

  Where was that noise coming from?

  I stood in the kitchen and waited for the next noise.

  “Aw-ahh.”

  It was coming from OUTSIDE.

  “Aw-ahh.”

  I stepped out on the back porch.  It was a foggy spring morning.  Standing out in the middle of the chicken yard was Henrietta in all of “her” glorious white feathers.  “She” stretched out her neck….

  “Aw-ahh.”

  Well Henrietta was a crowing hen…I thought.  After all, my grandmother had once told me a little ditty:  “A whistling girl and a crowing hen both come to the same bad end,” so I figured there was such a thing.

  That wasn’t what was going on.

  Henrietta was a Henry.  And Henry was “getting his pipes,” firing up his crowing on that foggy spring morning.  It also explained why Henry had always been such a bossy chicken.

  As it turns out a co-worker knew of a farm that would welcome Henry and they did.  For a year or two after we sent Henry away I would see him out there as I passed by occasionally, a huge white rooster out in the farm yard.

  That left us with Lucy and Ethel, named in honor of that famous television redhead and her pal.

  Once The Girls started laying eggs The lady of the House was overjoyed.  When she fried up the first ones she called me over to the frying pan.

  “Look at these glorious eggs,” she said.  “See how the yolk is a deep, rich orange color and how the yolk sits up high?  Now THAT’S an egg!”

  This was what was at the heart of having outlaw chickens…The Lady of the House wanted eggs that she KNEW came from cage-free hens, hens who were allowed to roam around.

  Lucy was kind of shy but Ethel liked to have her back scratched. She would’ve made a good pet but I’ve heard that chickens don’t use litter boxes.  I’d walk up to Ethel, start scratching her back and then she’d stomp her little feet and hunker down close to the ground while I rubbed her feathers.

  Ethel also liked to fly.  I never actually saw her fly but there would be times I’d find her outside the fence of the chicken yard.

  Because some people say chicken’s aren’t the sharpest thinkers in the bird world I imagined that Ethel just started flapping her wings, lifted off and moved her head around as if saying, “What’s going on?  What’s happening?  Where am I going?”

  This happened one time when The Lady of the House and I were off on vacation.  We found a High Plains debutante to house sit for us. 

  One evening we got a call….

  “One of the chickens is out,” reported The Debutante to The Lady of the House.

  “Just pick her up and put her back in the pen,” said The Lady of the House.

  There was a long silence on the line.

  “It won’t attack me?” asked The Debutante.

  Everything turned out okay because when we got back from vacation both of The Girls were in their yard.

  All good things come to an end. So it was with outlaw chickens.

  Over time the chicken feed attracted a flock of sparrows that chowed down on Lucy and Ethel’s feed.  Soon we had a flock of super-sized sparrows that made our backyard their messy home.  

  A year after we got them we shipped Lucy and Ethel off to a guy outside of town who was seriously impressed at how big our two “girls” were.

  After that I’d look at the empty chicken yard and get a little sad.

  An empty chicken coop.  A big pile of chicken manure.

  The next year we spread our bumper crop of chicken manure all over the garden. Part of what we fed “The Girls” were the leftovers of store-bought watermelons and homegrown tomatoes.

“Volunteer” tomato and watermelon plants popped up all over the garden patch that year, a parting gift from Ethel and Lucy.

  We let some of them grow.

  The watermelons didn’t do so well, but then we’ve never had much luck with watermelons.

  But the tomatoes were pretty good.

  I didn’t spend too much time thinking about the plant’s origin…from a chicken butt.

  But then I do eat eggs, and you know where they come from.......