It seems a good bet that if there is a chicken in residence anywhere where there has been a culture of reading children’s literature out loud, the name Henny-Penny is naturally a popular choice for that fowl. Oddly, it isn’t true for the other names in this old English Folk Tale. When was the last time you heard somebody call the Thanksgiving bird, “Turkey-lurkey”? Or how about “Goosey-poosey” and “Ducky-daddles”?
They just don’t write them like they used to. Now the plot has to have dragons, demons, light swords, aliens — one small Foxy-woxy doth not a villain make.
The story of our farm’s Henny-penny has taken an interesting twist, nonetheless. When she was last the subject of a column, she was sharing the backyard with two sheep and two semi-retired roosters and this arrangement worked for awhile.
Three changes occurred, however, which needed to be addressed. The first is that Henny-penny is no spring chicken any longer. The second is that she has always been on the passive side of the emotion chart and she has gotten exceedingly good at opting out of uncomfortable situations. Thirdly, she is getting thinner and thinner.
It was time to interfere again in her life to sustain that life.
“Henny isn’t getting enough food because of the rats feeding at her bowl,” I commented the other day to my daughter, Sarah.
“And, the roosters keep hopping on her and she is too old and weak. If I had my druthers, I would bring her into the kitchen and let her stay in a little pen.”
There was a moment of quiet and then Sarah replied, “Why don’t you?”
So, in about 15 minutes we had a kitchen chicken settled in a pen, with newspaper floor, a laying box with wood chips, a water contraption and a bowl of chicken feed. Every sound of the kitchen was foreign and her one seeing eye would reflect some small alarm. Soon, however, she accepted the fact that the electric beater wasn’t going to beat her, and the house cat wasn’t the least bit interested in her as a possible meal.
This morning, as I was having my coffee, I thought about her life and how the one drawback to living in the kitchen was her lack of seeing creatures of her same kind, as she always did in the backyard. She enjoyed looking through the chicken wire at the rest of the flock who resided in the official chicken yard, among whom were the very birds that had nearly destroyed her the day she was attacked.
“Birds of a feather flock together” takes on a new meaning when one solitary hen of a different breed, in this case an Araucana, is alone and at the bottom of the pecking order. If she hadn’t been removed from the flock, she would have been killed by the gang of hens who, out of the blue, decided to annihilate her.
I recalled how she would lay an occasional blue egg on the grass in the back yard, only to have a smart crow fly down from his watch in the oak tree and devour it. Perhaps Henny might be interested in setting in the box in her kitchen pen if it contained eggs? How about three from the coop?
I chose three eggs of different kinds: a dark brown, a light brown and a white, and set them in her box. How long will it take her to be interested in them or will she ignore them totally? Within 10 minutes she had settled her feathery self over the eggs and seemed quite pleased.
As I write this story it is late for farmers and chickens — 10:30 p.m. — and she is setting on those eggs. If she continues, they should hatch in 21 days and won’t we all be surprised.
I’m afraid that she and her new chicks will have to be moved to a secure cage what with Mr. House Cat sauntering through. Ignoring a full grown hen is one thing but refraining from snacking on a tiny creature that looks an awful lot like a bird, no way.
George the Cat would morph into Foxy-woxy in a heart beat.
Renee Kiff weeds and writes at her family farm in Alexander Valley.
