Chickens

Typically around the penultimate week-end in January, we have an avian theme to the Dead Good Blog, to chime in with the RSPB's 'Big Garden Birdwatch' event. But given all the little garden birds have been blown away by thirty-six hours of Storm Éowyn, that only leaves me chickens to write about, and eggs. Let's crack on.

Of course, it's also Burns Night, so the first thing I did before sitting down to write this was to Choogle the Internet so see if there was any connection between the celebrated Scottish poet and these latter-day descendants of the dinosaurs, a poem perhaps, or an interesting fact such as "Robert Burns owned a pet chicken called McNugget to whom he would recite verse each morning in return for a wee egg." Sadly and surprisingly not. The closest I came was to stumble upon his 'Sonnet Upon Sonnets,' a play on the number fourteen. I won't reproduce the whole thing here, just these two salient lines:

              Your hen hath fourteen eggs beneath her wings

              That fourteen chickens to the roost may fly

That made me wonder if Burns knew anything very much about chickens at all, as a clutch of fourteen eggs seems highly improbable. I suppose he must have been more of a haggis man.  I decided to investigate egg laying statistics a bit further on your behalf.

free-rangers in the snow

It would appear that a chicken (or more correctly a hen) can start laying eggs from about eighteen weeks old, depending on the breed. Some start as late as twenty-eight weeks. Peak laying capacity normally occurs around the seventh or eighth month, and a layer's first year is its most productive. The world record for the number of eggs laid by one hen is 371 eggs in 364 days (with time off for Christmas).

After the first prolific year, a hen's productivity gradually tails off by on average 15% per year, so that by the time a hen is six years old, she is unlikely to be laying many eggs. Again, this depends upon breed. Some types can continue producing at eight or nine years old, but they are very much the exception.

Temperature and time of year also influence laying rates. A chicken needs about fifteen hours of daylight to give her enough vitamin D to help metabolise calcium in the body (without which there is no shell). And hens lay best when the temperature is in the range of 12 to 23 degrees. So summer months tend to result in higher yields, though many commercial poultry farms use artificial light and heaters to boost production in winter.

There are hundreds of different breeds of chicken worldwide, and though white and light brown are the main colours for egg shells, there is considerable variety, including cream, dark brown, pale blue, green and speckled, as the box below illustrates. Then inside, yolks can vary from almost white up to a rich orange tone, though shades of yellow are by far the most common. And what nutritious little packages they are, for those not averse to eating them boiled, coddled, poached, scrambled or in an omelette - such as I will be enjoying as soon as I've dispatched this Saturday blog.

the many colours of chickens' eggs

Of course not all chickens are bred for their egg-laying capabilities. (Vegans and vegetarians look away now.) Of the 33 billion chickens in the world, the majority are bred as meat, white meat being healthier than red meat. Chicken is the UK's favourite meat. And in the USA (bizarrely) some restaurants even list chicken as a vegetarian option! I'm happy to eat it, but will always opt for free-range produce if possible. By the way, as of today the world's human population is just over 8 billion (8,201,490,228), so chickens outnumber us by a ratio of 4:1.

Coming back to that throwaway reference I made earlier about chickens being the descendants of dinosaurs, I believe this to be true, in as much as all birds share a common ancestry going back to the theropods of the late Triassic period, saurischian dinosaurs characterised by hollow bones and three claws or toes on each foot. Scientists have even experimented with attaching long tails to chickens in order to model how tyrannosauroids might have moved. It is thought that theropods were carnivorous but appear to have become largely herbivorous and insectivorous through the aeons, and maybe that is how they managed to survive the great extinction, by down-sizing and living off scraps.

All of the hundreds of modern day breeds of chicken can trace their most recent origins back to the bankiva, or red jungle fowl of south east Asia (a close relative of the pheasant). The red jungle fowl became domesticated as recently as about 8,000 years ago and regional varieties have been carefully bred and farmed for millennia to accentuate desired characteristics. Chickens are generally sociable, inquisitive and intelligent birds and often make great pets, which is something I try not to think about at mealtimes.. 

coming home to roost

I decided to Choogle the Internet one last time to verify the provenance of the phrase about chickens coming home to roost, which I've always assumed is a metaphor for karma, in the sense of bad deeds rebounding. There's a strong case to be made for its literary debut being in Chaucer's 'Pardoner's Tale' (printed in 1390):

              And ofte tyme swich cursynge wrongfully retorneth agayn to hym that curseth, 

              as a bryd that retorneth agayn to his owene nest.

though it could well have been in use as a colloquial phrase much earlier than that. Anyway, it's the stepping-off point for my latest poem. 

Farmer's Chickens
A hot-throated wind had been screaming all day,

bending trees low making telegraph wires to ring

and the sky a dark threat, so I wasn't allowed go

to school or play out neither, just fret those hours

through afternoon. Farmer arrives home, so soon

we hear shouts from next door over the whine of

the wind then crashes like something's getting all

bust up in there and pa says it's Farmer's chickens

coming home to roost and ma says Farmer's wife

got every right and I think of that party game: the

farmer wants a wife, we all pat the wife, the wife

wants a dog...I always wanted a dog, not allowed

then those shots and just like that the wind drops

and there's just that awful sobbing that don't stop

even after the cops pull up and I asked if Farmer

done killed his chickens because I never knew he

even had any, then ma hugged me so tight it hurt

and said one day I'd understand. Well that night I

dreamed of blood and feathers everywhere and it

was so quiet when I woke up in a hot sweat. I felt

all alone in the world and the bad stuff was right

close by in the shadows, like the men I sometime

saw visiting at night next door but if Farmer had

chickens, they were maybe just buying his eggs?  

Thanks for reading, S ;-)