Things we do in the dark

The most exciting thing I’ve done at the farm so far has involved tromping around the pasture in knee-high rubber boots well after dark with nothing but a weak headlamp to guide me.  No, we’re not sneaking up on the farmhouse down the road, nor am I planning my escape from this place (at least not yet!) – we’re moving chickens.  Which sounds pretty boring until you get to put on warm clothes, turn your headlamp to the infrared setting, and slowly creep up to a mass of perched chickens and snatch them away one by one.  I’m telling you: it’s the most fun I’ve had in weeks.

The reason I’ve become a midnight chicken snatcher has to do with the “pastured, free range” part of my description of the Brightwood chickens.  Since the hens scratch around in the grass and weeds all day (rather than live in cages, or within a gigantic coop with a tiny door leading to the outside as most “cage free” hens do), at some point they exhaust the insect and seed supply of any given pasture.  In order to allow the pasture to re-grow, and to keep the hens well fed, we have to move the chickens.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Moving the chickens involves dragging their houses (where they lay eggs and sleep) to a new pasture, and then keeping them there.  Chickens are creatures of habit and tend to return to the places they remember, setting up a steady stream of wayward hens who need to be caught and returned to their new locale.

The chickens and their roosting/nesting houses

This is where I come in – former city girl, now accomplished chicken-catcher.  Before we began this operation, there were three groups of chickens: the main group of hens & roosters who roamed a large pasture, an enclosed pen for a few mother hens and their baby chicks, and a group of adolescent chickens who had full access to the front yard and whichever pastures they wandered to.  The adolescents needed to be merged with the main chicken herd, but moving their roosting house out to the new pasture with the other houses wasn’t enough.  Each night after the move they’d return to the spot where their house had once been, send out some confused coos, and finally perch themselves around the base of the trees in the front yard.  We’d show up with our red lights and long sleeves and grab them from behind, tucking one under each arm like a football, and head for the new pasture.  We did this three nights in a row before the hens stopped coming back to the front yard, where there was no longer any food, water, or shelter.

Still, some of the chickens don’t get it.  In the past two days, I’ve carried the same hen back to the new house three different times!  Chickens are easy to catch at night; once the sun has gone down, chickens become strangely docile.  They hardly squawk when we snatch them up under our arms and an entire house of 70+ hens will happily sway on their roosting perches as they are hooked to a tractor and dragged a few acres away.  But during the day, catching a chicken involves nets and running.  Usually the only option is to carry them by the legs… upside-down a chicken is as calm as if it is dark outside.

The wayward hen

Later that same day...

And again the next morning

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