Chicken Keeping in the Age of Hopelessness; Rock and Roll, Freak Shows and a Hawk or Two...

I suppose I should write something here about my Backyard Poultry Meetup: Keeping chickens has been a total joy for me; they are hilarious and sweet, and a slice of real life that strikes a chord with me.

So, in the interest of getting together with other chicken farmers I decided to find a group of them. When I realized that the closest organization supporting chicken keeping in this area is out of NYC and really based in Brooklyn, I decided to start one myself. So, here I am writing press releases and fielding calls, and in the infancy of something that is very popular right now, trying to organize myself enough so that I'm not just taking questions all the time and actually moving into some sort of theme based classes. The meetings are currently once every 2 weeks here in Stamford, CT, with the next one being July 26th, at 2 PM. Full information is here along with some very cool pictures of my chickens. I think that everyone can keep 2 or 3 hens in their backyard pretty easily, and they provide food in the form of eggs! Visit my Meetup page to see great pictures of my birds!



Someday, if I ever get married, which I have avoided up till now, I hope to have a wedding as original and full of life as this one. I'm not one to really believe in "marriage" per se, but I think that if it comes over you that its the thing to do and that yours will be the one to last, its probably worth a shot. I guess i think that marriage is best left to those who are seriously co-parenting and older people who have lived enough to be able to predict their future feelings. Sometimes I think that with age comes a sort of settling down and giving up. Most men seem to be really ready to commit when they can no longer lie about their age successfully on Match.com.
I'm still waiting to see what happens, but life isn't like, you're out there in the chicken muck and Sam Shepard comes by from the farm up the street, smiling past that dead tooth, and hes the one.

This clip gives me a little hope for the kids who are gonna take over this place...I hope they know that these moments of joy can be fleeting, and that the real hard work is still to come!



h/t Jill...Brilliant at Breakfast

Onward and upward...
William has been playing alot of Rock and Roll music this summer, and he just finished a camp at The Paul Green School of Rock Music, which was a performance boot-camp. For the first time he agreed to be lead singer, and he was assigned Billy Jean!...and Ive got to say that he killed! It was fantastic! I'm sure that he wont allow me to post the video here, if I can even open it, what with how incredibly annoying the formats are, but it was pretty great.
The school will be performing much of Woodstock on August 15th in a park in Bedford NY, just up the road from here; more on that closer to the date. Its going to be a great show, (but Will is not in it!...he is doing a KISS show in the fall and has too much on his plate as it is!) and we will be hanging out that day. I'm encouraging everyone to come. I love this school...the people who work there and the teachers are all fantastic, and it is just so much fun for kids interested in music. It also gives rocker type kids a place to go and a way to connect with kids who are like them. This area is very sporty and if you're not a jock, a geek, or a homeboy, it can be a little lonely....maybe that was just me, because my son seems to have managed to be very popular and very individual at the same time.



Also, in the news around here are two events that conflict with my chicken meetup but...oh well...The Coney Island Preservation folks have a great organization that is trying to work along with developers that want to put some monolith hotels by the boardwalk. There is such a sense of history there and a thriving arts culture as well, so its a balancing act. The preservationists feel that the hotel plans go too far and destroy too much of the vital history of the area. They are holding a rally on Sunday July 26th to address that issue, and if you're in the area you might want to check it out and see if they are reasonable or what...we all want the area improved, but those of us that grew up with Coney Island as a grimy playground year round, want to keep the flavor too. I'd say that its a great time to buy a little beach bungalow out there...too bad nobody has any extra money floating around except for these rich developers!
In any case, I love their page and I love their mailings.



Also, the Greenwich Audubon, which has invited me to have a booth at their September hawk watch, if that makes sense, is having a picnic on July 26th which will feature visiting raptors from their Sharon facility. I love raptors, even if they want to eat my chickens and I'm happy to be involved in an organization that does so much for birds in the wild and that educates the public, and especially children, about this vital part of our environment!

Click on the picture below to see some fantastic pictures of Pale Male and Lola...and their friends, just south of here!

4th Of July Chicken Blogging...Aka. Even the Losers, Get Lucky Sometime....

Morning at the Rooster Ranch! Its July 4th, 2009!




Woostie overseeing the flock. he is very busy since Coo is gone and the frizzle roo is pretty useless for guard duty.

These are two of Woostie's babies that he had with the barred black and white hen, but I think the eggs came from an americauna, from how they are turning out. I think they are both hens!



Ducks are running around like crazy in the morning....and here they are with the a showgirl mom and a Marans mom and the chicksn that they sorta share and swap out from time to time.
This is the showgirl mom looking at Chicken Little, who is best friends with Little leggy, the leghorn at right. These two are from the incubator, so they have no mm to watch over them. I pair chicks like these up in a cage until they imprint on eachother, so they have a group to stick with...otherwise they wander and can disappear....Little and Little Leggy are the sweetest babies I have right now. They are not afraid of me and Leggy was actually stepping up and perching in the barn last night. Im afraid that Leggy might be a rooster from how he plays.





Ducks in danger!! Actually thats my lifesized, 3D coyote watching things, and scaring predators off!

This is one of woostie's girls taking a dust bath.



Coyote!! Oh My!

This Marans mom is co-raising Beauty the frizzle chick. This chick has unbelievable markings...Marans mom didn't hatch this one, but she has adopted it, so thats good...neither active, outside moms are really the best moms, so I try to keep an eye on it as much as possible. This is one special looking chick!









Little Leggy and Chicken Little Love eachother and they stick together. Chicken Little also loves the ducks so can often be found cuddling with them.










In the barn later on, Woostie and his hens....Turken hen is a particular facorite of mine...they are an old breed and they are at the root of what becomes showgirls (cross that with a silkie and voila! I'm sure its not that easy, but thats the general idea)....



This is the Japanese Bantam and her Japanese Bantam Aracuana chicks...she has six surviving from the original 9, which is pretty good considering that she had them in the woods and they lived there for the first couple of weeks of their lives! She has decided to move into the barn, which is better, but she sure is nasty to the other chickens. She is the chihuahua of the coop!


Here is the frizzle roo and one of my americuanas








Here are some young aracuanas. The black one is Coo & Mrs Coo's baby. In the corner to the right is one of the the ducks.
Beauty chick and her other mom...they are also sharing a black Japanese Bantam chick but he is very good at not getting photographed. he probably appears on the edges here somewhere.








Meanwhile, inside the house, inside the brooder, we have the Showgirl Show!...I am having so much fun hatching these little eggs that its hard not to pop every on under a broody hen or in the incubator! They are fragile little things, so I tend ot take them inside if they hatch in the barn...and I have a bunch in the incubator with my tolbunt frizzle polish eggs, waiting...waiting...




In case you every wondered what a Showgirl's butt looks like! Well their neck ain't the only nekkid thing on 'em!

Cuteness daily...Just hatched and not even photographed yet is a splash showgirl with a light yellow head and wings and a dark brown body. It still remains to be seen if any of these will frizzle. I also have a new silkie this morning in the nestbox out in the barn, under the frizzle mom, wh has been incubating for me all spring! She is a great sitter but not a great mom, because she ignores chicks that hop down and stays on her eggs. She is supposed to follow the chicks when they leave the nest, and then whatever eggs are left...oh well...or I put em in the incubator....
Thats it for now...Happy 4th everyone...enjoy your BBQ!

....I was so wary then
The ugly American
Thinner than oxygen
Tough as a whore
I said you can lie to me
I own what's inside of me
And nothing surprises me anymore
But forests in Germany
Kids in the Tuileries
Broken-down fortresses
In old Italy
And claiming his victory
Shrouded in mystery
He went running away with me

Back in our home New York
Walking these streets forlorn
We all in our uniforms
Black and black
Doing that slouch and jive
The artist must survive
We've got all we need we cried
And we don't look back
Thinking we had it made
Poised for the hit parade
Knee deep in accolades
The conceptual pair
But ever the malcontent
He left without incident
Vanished into thin air

Now I am always amazed
Words can fill up a page
Pages fill up the days
Between him and me
But the vows that we never keep
From bedrooms to business-speak
Make me remember how cheap
Words can be
And the letters I wrote you of
Were those of the desperate stuff
Like begging for love in a suicide threat
But I am too young to die
Too old for a lullaby
Too tired for life on the ledge

But I had a dream last night
Of lovers who walked the plank
Out on the edge of time
Amidst ridicule
They laughed as they rocked and reeled
Over the mining fields
Coming to rest on this ship of fools
But he just took polaroids
Of her smile in the light
Of the dawn of the menacing sky
And before they went overbaord
She turned and held up a card
And it said Valentine


-
Polariods....Shawn Colvin

Saturday Night Chicken Blogging

There was a certain luminous quality to the air today...it was probably the dangerous fog and showers that gave the lawn and the birds an otherworldly glow; the new Green Day playing and the hundred or so eggs found by the guy mowing the lawn...I knew that there was some sorta problem with the girl's output, but I couldn't find where they were laying!

Its been a hard end to a week of torture, or not, and yes they are still...and I've been feeling more and more lost out here, texting this or that to no one really, and reading the Twitters of the tech guys...just floating through it all. Meanwhile, the chickens move throughout their days as living impressionism, scratching through the leaves up the hill into the woods.

As Will and Chris took the eggs into the woods to throw them at trees, I took some pictures of the flock and stopped by Sandy's grave to spread ladybugs in the garden....



This is the Polish hen...She is very friendly and beautiful, always follows and wants to help with projects around the barn. She was hilarious trying to help me hammer nails with her beak.





This girl is a real honest-to-goodness turken. I love the way these look. They are bred with silkies to make showgirls.



This is Woostie the Roo. he is a Golden Campine. The frostbite on his comb from last winter healed up pretty well. he used to have more points on the back but now its smooth.




...and here is one of his hens.





This is insane frizzle polish. She came to me via eggbid, and is such a character....totally beautiful and seemingly in her own little world. I always find her roosting outside alone at night. I have to carry her inside because I'm too afraid to leave the door open, even to the triple screened chicken porch.




These are the new frizzles. The woman who sold them to me as youngsters had an inkling that one was a roo...and you kow what? she was right! He doesn't crow...not yet anyway...if he does then he will have to go.


This is mama broody hen and her two little babies. I dont know how she gets them up on the roost or the ladder, but she does. They get around pretty well for tiny things.




...One of the babies looking out from under her wing....pretty soon he was sleeping like that!




These are the 3 araucana miracle easter icebox chicks! They also figured out how to get up on the ladder pretty early, and they roost in a row, as they seem to do most things. They are pretty hilarious and really scrappy in a world of huge chickens.




The hope is that one will come out barred like their mom was, but I dont know when that becomes apparent. Im just happy that they are rumpless, indicating that my Coo is the dad.

Crazy chick was hatched along with the araucana miracle chicks. Its unclear what type he is exactly, but he grew very fast... and at a point last week came up totally lame...more like paralyzed. I did the vitamin thing that I do, and Crazy is now up and around and almost good as new...a little foot palsy remains. I dont know if its viral or its vitamin related, but this does respond to intensive B vitamin therapy. I hope this chick makes it...he has quite a spirit and was so funny hanging with the three little araucanas, two times their size! I can imagine that he would like to be perched with them on the ladder right now; I just moved him back to a cage in the barn (from a tank in the kitchen.)



A nestbox full o' showgirls and one silky...believe it or not there are 3 chickens in there and one is a roo!




More hay than usual on the roost shelf makes for a nice picture. They all have their spots and when they all come in at night its really nice how they lay on eachother and go to sleep. Of course they have a light that goes off at 9-ish and a radio playing all the time...tough life in chicken land...


Comfy in the nest boxes!




Some days you feel like an eagle....