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Front Porch: Chickens peck away at the meaning of life
I give updates on Miss Chicken – usually just twice a year so as not to overdo it for those who aren’t much interested and hopefully often enough to satisfy her very vocal fans.
As most of her fans know, Miss Chicken has been living in a lovely home in Spokane Valley with many other rescue chickens after her first year as a feral fowl in my neighborhood. It was an open adoption, so I get to visit as often as I wish and have also become friends with the human who rules the roost. I recently brought a friend out to Joan’s house, the second such visit in two months, and we sat beneath the apple tree and hand-fed treats to the flock of 16.
Miss C had always been stand-offish, hard to get close to and rather feisty. She’s quick with a peck if something annoys her, but now, in her mature years, she has finally become social with other chickens and will allow herself to be held and even petted. She finally trusts her environment.
But back when she foraged defensively through my yard, I’d sometimes cut cucumbers into small pieces and scatter them on the ground. She loved them, although in truth she probably would have loved any chicken-appropriate tidbits offered to her. She’s been at Joan’s now for nearly six years and occasionally I’ll bring along some cut-up cukes when I visit and toss them on the ground for her and the other chickens.
When I was there two months ago, she ate from my hand. When the other chickens got bored and moved on, she lingered and continued eating. On last week’s visit, Joan opened a gate so the chickens could move from their usual small yard to the bigger one with clover in it. All but Miss Chicken headed for the clover. She came to me.
Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but I could swear she recognized me. When I offered her that same snack from earlier years, she stayed and ate her fill. She was soon joined by one of her daughters, a banty named Maggie that Joan brought home a couple of years ago for Miss C to mother. It has been a happy journey seeing how this doomed-to-die baby bird thrived under the right kind of care. Another lesson from the chicken coop.
After a while all the girls moved into the clover. But when Joan brought out some scratch, the flock came back to have their fill, and we were surrounded in chickens.
Joan is convinced that chickens remember people.
Did she actually remember me? I looked up chicken memory online and found a number of sources, from the Humane Society to online magazines and blogs. It seems chickens can recognize about 100 faces, be they human or bird, and can remember which people have treated them badly.
I learned a few things that don’t exactly bear on the subject of memory, including this chicken joke: Why did the rubber chicken cross the road? Answer: To stretch her legs. Apparently chicken lovers have a good sense of humor.
But I also learned that chickens were the first birds to have their full genome sequenced, that they are the closest living relatives of the tyrannosaurus rex, that they outnumber humans on earth by at least 3-1 and that they show empathy.
There was something so touching for me, to think that this chicken, whose life I have largely been absent from for six years, might recognize me – even if it’s just for an association with yummy chow. I’d always thought of chickens as, well, you know, bird-brained.
Over the years I have learned what wonderful pets they are and how remarkably different and beautiful their varieties are. Previously the only difference I understood about chickens was between baked and fried. And now I know that Miss Chicken and her feathered friends have much more depth than I thought.
But then that’s true of us all. And I do know that it took a bird brain to remind me of that.
Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net. Previous columns are available at spokesman.com/columnists/