How we fill our nests

Not with the one thing we truly need.

I wasn’t sure I’d get chickens again.

The first time we tried to raise a flock, I lost my favorite feathered friend when she was only 8 weeks old and then the rest of the flock shortly thereafter to predators.

This was all before they’d even started laying eggs.

I wrote about the experience last year in an essay, The year of dying. Yes, I am sometimes (often?) this dark. Maybe it’s my inherent trait as a Scorpio, as we tend toward the death-and-decay end of the spectrum. Or maybe it’s a learned setting from too many adverse childhood experiences followed by the challenging times in which I’ve lived as an adult. But I’m not here to depress people, as these days you don’t exactly have to turn over any stones to find reasons to get down, and in fact, our global elites now think you should just off yourself if you’re feeling a bit blue, which is yet another reason to walk around like Eeyore.

I did it, though. This spring I welcomed another flock of chickens into our backyard homesteading lives.

And the very first day, when they arrived, as a matter of fact, while still in the box, for God’s sake, one of them perished.

Was smooshed to death. By Chaco, the cat.

I can’t blame him. He’s a cat and does what cats do, which is fight to slip himself beneath a heavy, hinged cooler lid to fall onto a mailer box of chicks, smashing them inside. Then he sits on it, trying to figure out how to get their box open even though it’s a) smashed and b) held shut with plastic mailer ties.

The cheepie-cheep noises drove him to this insanity.

You should have seen the look on his mischievous little face when I lifted the cooler lid. He’d got what he wanted, into the cooler, only to find that it hadn’t worked out that the chickens were then his. Plus, he was now trapped himself.

The chicks were in the cooler in the first place because the cooler is my DIY sourdough proofing box, and it has a Himalayan salt lamp inside (works beautifully for sourdough—more about this in a future post). The perfect place, or so I thought, to stow a box of chicks fresh from the post office while I rearranged their brooder for the freak weather occurring the day of their arrival: snowy sleet. As Prince once sang:

The day we’d put the brooder together, it was ranging up close to 80°F (for you Brits, that’s shorts weather here, yo), and I worried they’d be too hot. Seriously, just three days later, I’m panicking because the red lamp isn’t moving the needle enough on the thermometer in my outdoor brooder. We don’t have a garage, and I think Chaco has proved at this point that we can’t brood chicks in the house, so the brooder is inside the outdoor mobile coop. I’d moved the lamp in closer, but it hadn’t warmed up enough by the time I brought the chicks home from the post office, which is how I wound up with birds in a box inside a cooler in a house where a goofy feline could apparently fall on top of them and execute death by smashing.

It was just the one. The rest of the flock is fine.

I mourned that flattened chick and gave her new life in our closed, longterm composter. She’d had what I imagine was a rough journey by mail truck, in a box with her sisters, a confusing spell at the local post office, another trip in a car, and then the whiff of a cat-infested household, only to be cruelly smashed down at the wee beginning of her life. Her sisters were standing on top of her, clamoring for their own lives, when I finally let them loose in the brooder.

You might right now be thinking how stupid is this backyard homesteader, that she wasn’t better prepared or that she didn’t think the cat could lift the cooler lid.

Believe me, I’ve thought worse about myself. Waaaay worse. A litany of self-loathing that includes the phrase can’t keep chickens alive and that gem of a word, laughingstock.

And this brings me to the nest. The real one. The nest at the core of each of us.