Long before I had chickens of my own, I had plans of becoming a Chicken Person. I’ve been a member of backyardchickens.com for a few years, even though I didn’t have any backyard chickens until this spring. Before I even moved to Marfa, I was looking at coop designs, talking to folks about their flocks, and browsing the many many breeds available and learning about their qualities and quirks.
Then, this spring, I lucked into inheriting some chickens from the previous occupant of the house where I now live, and was swiftly inducted into the club of Marfa Chicken People. I’m a small fry in this club, with only a few hens at the moment. But there’s a thing called “chicken math” – it’s a principle known to all Chicken People that your total number of chickens will, over time, increase far beyond your initial expectations. You may think you want just a few, but chick season comes around and suddenly you’ve added 4, 5, 6 more… you get the idea.
For now, there are three sweet hens in my life. I refer to them in conversation as “the girls,” or “the gals.” Sometimes as “my little best friends.” This is a love letter to them. Allow me to introduce the ladies:
Nadine is undoubtedly the boss of the crew. She is the tallest, but she’s also the bravest and most adventurous. Nadine isn’t afraid to approach people, will eat anything thrown in her direction, and likes to cluck around in the rain instead of seeking shelter from the storm. She’s a Jubilee Orpington, a rare-ish heritage bird, covered in white speckles amidst brown feathers with bands of black, which sometimes have a greenish iridescence to them in the sunshine. She also has only one functional eye. Her left eye was injured by a rooster a couple of years ago and now is a strange swirl of milky white and grey. (Her namesake is Nadine Hurley, the one-eyed, drape-runner-obsessed side character from “Twin Peaks”). The eye reminds me of black mother of pearl. It gives her an oracle-like quality, a mystical wisdom. Her right eye, the good eye, is gold.
Andie is second in command, and is a hybrid chicken bred for laying beautiful olive green eggs. She lays nearly every day, and occasionally her eggs have double yolks – she’s a very productive little lady. She has a huge floppy bright red comb on the top of her head, and her neck feathers are edged in bronze. Andie is a bundle of nerves, very flighty, very easily startled, and is always trying to get up high (on the fence, in a tree, on the roof of the coop) so she can have a 360-degree view of things in the yard. Andie is the most assertive of all the chickens in terms of her fastidious efforts to get inside the house. Leaving the back door open long enough to empty out the compost bucket means Andie is already in the kitchen by the time I turn around, pecking crumbs from the grout between the tiles. Andie is the lieutenant – where Nadine leads with a sort of quiet, self-assured authority, Andie enforces the pecking order by annoying the one other chicken she holds power over.
That’s Lulu, the lowest ranked but also frankly the cutest. Lulu’s also a Jubilee Orp like Nadine, and for a long time I couldn’t tell the difference between the two of them if Nadine’s bad eye was turned away. Over time, though, I started to notice that Lulu is rounder, more of the mother-hen shape from children’s books, and that her eyes are ringed with tiny white feathers, as if she has on white mascara. Lulu has a habit of going broody, which is when a chicken experiences something like a phantom pregnancy, becoming convinced that her eggs are fertilized (they’re not) and sitting on the nest all day and night as if she’s going to hatch a chick soon (she won’t). I’m convinced that she does this for attention, because Lulu loves attention. She likes to sit in my lap, peck at my shoes until I pet her, and clean her beak on my shirt sleeves or pant legs. She is also constantly grooming herself and dust bathing – she’s pretty and she knows it, I think.
Every evening I like to bring the girls a snack (dried mealworms, seeds, oats, fruit or veg scraps, leftover rice) and watch them for a while. Chickens like to do a little digging dance with their feet as they eat, and each one does it differently: Andie goes quickly right, right, left, while Nadine prefers to kick with one foot, then the other, backing up slightly and tipping forward like a teapot as she does it.
It’s particularly special when the train goes by during snacktime with the girls; the tracks run one unobstructed block behind my house, and the combination of the train whistle, the happy little chirping sounds of the chickens as they eat, the colors of the train cars (bubblegum pink, forest green, rusty orange-red, royal blue) racing past in the background, the girls’ fluffy little butts sticking up in the air while they do the chicken-scratch shuffle to the sound of the train whooshing by – it’s, as my boyfriend said, “way better than TV.”
Speaking of TV, I’ve been noticing the funny feeling that comes from being fed commercials and advertisements for things that, given where we live, are not available: DoorDash, InstaCart, Wal-Mart and Target, CVS and Walgreens, the list goes on. For some this might be a reminder of what we don’t have; but for me, and I think lots of us, it’s actually a sense of something gained. Mental energy, space, time, money, attention to what might seem mundane somewhere else: the shape of feeding chickens against a passing train. I’ve found spending that surplus attention on my three backyard dinosaurs is a very worthy trade-off.
For those of us – and I think Far West Texas attracts people like this – who enjoy the small stuff, take pleasure in things that others might call boring, and like to just ‘be’ … I can’t recommend highly enough introducing these beautiful, strange, lovely creatures into your life. They’re such a source of joy, and the thrill of fresh eggs isn’t half bad either.
If you’ve got chicken friends in West Texas (or beyond), we want to see them! Send a photo of your chickens to photos@marfapublicradio.org with their name and a description, and we’ll put them on our feed.
