All Our Food Is Souls: A Homestead Life with Chickens

LifeScapes 10, July 2024

Hello, friends—Here is July’s “LifeScapes” post, celebrating living-in-place, wherever we are on this amazing planet. If you’re looking for the short pieces (fiction and non-), you’ll find them here, on the Short Reads tab. If you’re looking for the books, you’ll find them here. If you’d like to choose which posts you receive from me, you can do that here.

Roxie and Moxie

The MeadowKnoll chicken yard is usually serene these days, a welcome oasis from the storms of presidential politics and climate change. Our Girls—Roxie and Moxie, a pair of elderly Barred Rocks—lead a sedate life, punctuated only by twice-a-day visits from Mom (me), their regular egg-laying trips to their nest box, and the irregular appearances of the bull snakes that like to snack on the eggs.

Sometimes those snakes are insistent about it, too. Last week, I saw a hen on her nest with a snake curled companionably beside her, waiting for that fresh warm egg. When I find these unwelcome visitors, I reach for the handy snake-grabber, get a grip on the snake, and deposit him (or her—I have no idea how to sex a snake) into a garbage can for deportation. Bill will drop him off on the other side of the lake the next time he goes to town.

Awaiting deportation, a well-fed bull snake, having scored 2 or 3 large eggs (see them?) before I snatched him out of the nest box

Snakes and the inevitable scorpions aside, the Girls' lives are usually tranquil. Not so last summer, when Buffie went broody. Buffie (now departed this life) was a large Buff Orpington. She wasn’t Chief Chicken in our little flock, but she stood out as one of a kind. She was normally a very nice chicken, too. Amiable and generous, a kind soul. Until . . .