We hadn’t planned on hatching baby chicks. We assembled a flock of laying hens and proceeded to gather each day the eggs they offered. And then a rooster accidentally found his way into the assemblage. And then another one.
It happens.
Even then our practice continued without alteration; attentively gathering each day’s ovaline deposits without concern for possible fertilization. It takes 21 days of carefully temperature controlled incubation to hatch an egg, and that simply wasn’t going to happen. Until a trio of brooding hens had different plans.
The design of our coops includes an interior roosting area, elevated a foot off the ground and accessed by a ramp. Each evening the chickens ascend the ramp, after which I lower the hatch and raise the ramp, thereby securing the flock until they are released with morning light. Beneath that elevated roosting area is a foot-high crawl space the chickens use for shade or relaxation. Or, as it turns out, brooding. Unnoticed by me for some number of days, one and then two and eventually three hens secreted themselves at the very back corner of this crawl space; well out of reach and sight. When I did finally spy the girls in their hiding place, my first thought was sickness - that they had removed themselves to die. Several mornings I released the flock, expecting to find the worst underneath. Every morning, their brightly alert eyes confounded and relieved my fears. And then it hit me: “I bet they are sitting on eggs, far enough way that I can’t collect them.”
And so it was that a week ago we noticed a tiny puffball of a newly hatched chick, moving in the wake of the older hens. One single hatchling. Our first thought was to capture the new arrival and relocate it in the brooder where we had raised a group of purchased chicks last winter. The mothering trio, however, thought otherwise. They were in charge of this little one. Anytime either of us drew near they shuttled the chick back under the coop — with reinforcements. On our first venture out to take stock of this new arrival, fully 12 of the older hens crammed into the “run”, shoulder to shoulder, like a football line, barricading the three “mothers” and the chick behind them just to insure that we couldn’t interfere. In the ensuing days, the threesome and their ward explore the chicken yard in an expanding circumference, pausing from time to time to allow the chick its rest. We watch as it climbs the neck of its primary “mother” to nestle between her shoulders; slipping down beneath her wing at the least sign of concern.
And I audaciously believed for an instant that I knew better than they how to raise a chick.
A week has passed, and the chick is noticeably healthy and growing. The “mothers” and their extended community are incarnating the wisdom that the rest of us have largely forgotten: that it takes a village to raise a child. It is too big a job for any one of them to accomplish alone. Collectively, they pay attention. Together they see to its access of food and water. In concert they watch the skies and monitor the fence line for the least hint of predation. That new little puffball bobbing around among them is “their” shared responsibility, and they are impressively, conscientiously, taking their job very seriously. Once upon a time our own neighborhoods behaved like this - our schools, as well, and faith communities. The very fabric of our society was woven from precisely such conscious threads of interdependence and mutual responsibility. Today such notions sound merely quaint; dangerous even, or perhaps simply too expensive or too much bother.
I do my best to stay out of the way of these resident experts - far enough away to not raise alarms, but close enough to observe. It’s humbling to be taken to school by these feathery creatures with a brain the size of a walnut. But, then, maybe it isn’t the size of one’s brain that matters as much as the capacity and suppleness of one’s heart.
Either way, I’m deeply grateful for the education and the example. I have much to learn about caring.
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