Our flock in Footscray, in Melbourne’s inner west, consists of the popular ISA browns. They have been bred to be good layers but tend to become egg-bound – unable to push a soft-shelled egg out. When this happens, their internal organs become infected until their combs wilt and they grow lethargic.
I watch YouTube videos and massage orifices with lubricated gloves and bathe the chickens in warm suds with limited success. I change their pellets and add crushed calcium into their feed. I take one bedraggled soul to the vet and am addressed with the solemnity reserved for a grieving dog owner. The vet expresses her sincere condolences and offers me a private moment to say farewell and collect the incinerated remains. The back yard becomes something of a burial ground.
Still, the assembly line keeps going.
We distribute surplus eggs to neighbours and friends and anyone who visits the house. We are repaid in baked goods – brownies and banana cake and citrus loaves and cookies. These trades seem to be in our favour but I do not refuse them.
One of the chickens is broody and we stick a fertilised clutch of eggs under it. One hatches – a little yellow ball of fluff who grows into a large, zealous, vocal rooster-wannabe with blond tips on her pale feathers. We call her Bolshie.
Our neighbour Sandra looks after the chickens when we are away. Sandra reminds me of Sister Michael from the TV show Derry Girls. She dishes out acerbic zingers with the ease born of a lifelong teaching career. “I’m on my way to old-lady pilates,” she says as she strides past with a rolled up mat under her arm. She delivers a snack for my roost – mealworms writhing in a container of papery detritus. The chickens go rabid over it. They love surplus pumpkins and figs and blocks of lard and watermelon collars.
They seem to have cast-iron stomachs and will eat almost anything except citrus and onion skins. They rotate their laying areas through the pen even when their hutch is cleaned regularly and fresh hay restocked. I come across a surprise clutch next to the fig tree and carefully tip each egg into a bowl of water – if it floats, I am told, it is rotten. The eggs are all different orbs, like micro-speckled galaxies, and the yolks are luscious and deep orange. One lays a fairy egg, a third the normal size, which is yolkless.
The chooks like shaded undergrowth, the low-hanging capsicum and hops vines, and mounds of soil where they half-bury themselves and have a dirt bath. We refresh the flock with some younger chooks, gradually introducing them to the veterans by way of a divided wire fence over a number of days. When they are merged into the same pen, Bolshie doesn’t survive the shock of being supplanted. She is struck down by a sudden illness and grows blind and caws overnight to death.
Sandra spots an opportunistic crow stealing our eggs and smashing them open on the bitumen road to suck out the yolk. We hang some old CD discs on a string, hoping the pendulous shine will deter the thief.
A baby mouse runs through the pen, attracted by the scraps of food. The chickens descend with a vengeance, pecking at its little body as if playing a wild game of pinball. Over the summer, the flock is penned into a gravel-lined run to protect a harvest of cherry tomatoes from sharp beaks and T-Rex collagen infused claws. Throughout the day, their clucking and scratching and raucous announcements of eggs being laid form a backing track to our domestic lives. Their poo is hearty fertiliser for our vegetable patch, which is mostly abandoned but produces a variety of heirloom tomatoes and pumpkins by way of seeds preserved in their excrement.
Our luck runs out in autumn and a fox ascending from Maribyrnong River gets the whole flock. My chickens barely make a sound. One of them splutters in surprise at five o’clock in the morning and we see it from our bedroom window fluttering one frenzied wing as it is carted away.
The internet says there are up to 16 foxes per square kilometre in Melbourne – they are not content with the mangy rabbits slowly loping around the wetlands. The second night after the plunder, the fox returns for a chicken carcass dug into the ground. It leaves a ribcage in the vegetable patch, picked clean except for a few brown feathers.
There is something forlorn about consuming the last eggs of a recently dead chicken. I feel like I am eating a eulogy. I assure myself that the chickens lived a good, back yard ranging life, and that a short life lived well is better than a long life lived in a cramped cage. Sandra entertains no such sentiments. She recommends a book about preparing for death, death-cleaning and death-celebration.
We line the chook pen with wiring along the ground and the roof. The pen is lush with weeds and brassicas which have bolted. We are prepared for the foxes and crows this season. Now all we need are the chickens.
Lily Chan is a writer based in Naarm. Her first book, Toyo: A Memoir, is currently a prescribed text for the HSC
