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Overview
Each day, Bob Sheasley leaves Lilyfield Farm and heads into the city. And each day, he brings along a basket of eggs for his coworkers at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Depending on the breed of hen, these eggs may be white, green, rose, blue, or as brown as chocolate. And they are all deliciously fresh, a taste of the rural way of life that people have enjoyed for millennia, one in which chickens have played a supporting role for nearly as long.
In Home to Roost, Sheasley tells of the intertwined relationship between humans and chickens. He delves into where chickens came from, what their DNA tells us about our kinship, how we've treated our feathered fellow travelers, and the roads we're crossing together. This is a story of agriculture and human migration, of folk medicine and technology, of how we dreamed of the good life, threw it away, and want it back.
Modern farming has changed the lives of both bird and man over the past century. But backyard farmers like Sheasley offer hope for a return to the pleasures of locally grown food, as diverse as the chickens he's raised on Lilyfield Farm. With wit and personal insight, Home to Roost examines of how our lives can be changed for the better, with something as simple as a backyard coop.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429986526 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/08/2008 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Bob Sheasley is a farm boy in the city. A lifelong Pennsylvanian, he grew up on a 100-acre dairy farm in Old Order Amish county. He works at The Philadelphia Inquirer and lives with his wife, son, and three daughters in their 1830s farmhouse, where he keeps a coop of fifty or so chickens.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SPRING
A Season to Sow
With a hearty buon giorno and a kiss to my cheeks, Ulisse Aldrovandi greeted me in his garden. I heard a soft braawk as a hen fluttered into the old man's arms, studied me suspiciously, then buried her head in the fur of his tunic. He stroked her with a fingertip.
"She's a darling," I said. My interest pleased him. He smiled, and his eyes smiled, too — round eyes, and kindly.
"So gentle and mild," he said. Some hens are warm and social, he told me; others are peckish and eat their own eggs. His was a hen of the companionable sort. She seemed, however, not to care for the company of other chickens, staying near her master. She would sleep only among his books, when he was nearby, he told me. If he shooed her away, she would lie upon her back — heaven knows why.
The Renaissance man and the neurotic chicken — perfect together.
"She reminds me of one of my own favorites," I said. "A little Blue Cochin, with feathers on her legs, who comes all the way from China. I call her Blue. We ordered her at the Agway this spring, and dozens more — breeds from Egypt and Holland. France, too."
Aldrovandi seemed dumbfounded. "Such specimens must have cost a fortune," he said.
"Just a few dollars each," I said. "Blue, she follows me around, and roosts on my foot when I'm lying down in the hammock with a book. She's not exactly tops in the pecking order, that girl. Maybe it's those feathers; she looks like she's wearing bloomers."
He nodded knowingly. Hobbling toward a bench, he invited me to rest there with him. The terraced grounds were alive with his passion: The old professor, mostly bald now and gray, had spent many youthful years organizing expeditions to collect specimens from afar. Here in the garden of the villa Sampolo, between hedges of boxwood and laurel, amid statuary of draped angels and naked gods, some of his rarities had sprouted for the new season.
And it was not only here, in a stream valley at the foothills of the Apennines, that he nurtured them. He was a scholar eager to share. Besides the botanical garden in Bologna that he established for the edification of his students and the public, he had also assembled his "theater of nature" with more than eighteen thousand specimens of flora, fauna, and minerals that showcased the world's diversity, including seven thousand preserved plants. He developed a way to dry plants on paper so that the impression appeared painted. These he called his "dry gardens." Spending large sums to procure seeds and specimens and to hire artists to draw them and assistants to help him record all that he observed, he amassed eighteen volumes of color plates with three thousand drawings.
"Nihil dulcius quam omnia scire," an ancient Latin proverb, was the philosophy that had driven him since youth — "Nothing is sweeter than to know all things." His interests were comprehensive indeed, leaning to the bizarre. Among the volumes he wrote was Monstrorum Historia, a history of monsters and monstrosities, of freaks and abnormalities — all part of nature. Shortly after his death, his cabinet of curiosities was expanded and opened for tours, with a dwarf serving both as guide and as an exhibit.
And Aldrovandi didn't always have a grasp on reality, as we understand it: His displays included what he purported to be the remains of a miniature dragon that might have perched upon his hand. After his cousin was appointed pontiff, a fearsome dragon appeared in the Bologna countryside, according to reports. Aldrovandi wrote that he had personally inspected its carcass and determined that all would be well for the new pope.
"See over there," Aldrovandi said, nudging my arm. He pointed to his thriving porno d'oro. That marvelous vine, he told me, came from seeds he obtained from the New World. We could not imagine, he said, what further wonders awaited us there. The seeds sprouted, now, in gardens throughout Romagna and beyond.
"The plant has stalks and leaves similar to the eggplant," he pointed out, "with fruit like the golden apple." The Spaniards had found it growing in the tropical highlands of the lands they had claimed, and there were those, he had heard, who were now partaking of it, who had overcome the fear of poisons within.
The Italians will be making the most of this one, I thought.
We sat awhile in the vernal light, and he asked if I'd like to see his library. I helped him to his feet and he took my arm, with his hen still roosting on his wrist. He led me slowly into the house and through the oaken door.
He had catalogued and described it all, so that no one might ever forget, he said. He pointed to the volumes surrounding him: It was his life's work, everything he had been able to learn. Pulling down a well-worn volume, he hunched over it. I could make out Aristotle's name on the spine. He opened the tome at random and peered at the page, his finger trailing down it.
"So many have tried to tell us," he said. "Great beauty lies around us, waiting for us, but so do dangers ready to pounce in the night. We must explore, and learn all we can of the world we inhabit." He stroked his moustache, which draped over his ample sideburns and fringe of beard.
"And respect it," he added, gazing at me. "There are dragons all about." He straightened himself as best he could, closed the book with a thud, and led me back outside.
I heard water gurgling, somewhere, and I thought of my own little garden. I wondered how Ulisse would tolerate the weeds. I imagined him relaxing in our garden. Suzanne would slice him some heirloom tomatoes, though he might not dare eat them, and I'd tell him about the new brood of baby peeps we were raising, under a heat lamp in the farmhouse, near the woodstove and the pile of old blankets where our potbelly pig, Sophie, sleeps next to my easy chair, where I rub her bulging belly with my toe as I sit writing at two o'clock in the morning.
Aldrovandi, I think, would think this fitting, and he'd find me to be accepting of his eccentric and secretive hen, which sleeps only amid his books, late at night, in his library. I think my little Blue might feel just as comfortable roosting on his foot.
I don't think my world would bewilder him, so much as fascinate him. I'm sure he'd ask to borrow my ballpoint, study it a moment, and start scribbling furiously. Everything seems to have enthralled this man who knew so much.
And I'd be proud to fill him in on what he might not know.
Joy in the Morning
* * *
I awoke to twitterings, soft scratchings, and, somewhere, a voice. "We need a coop."
Squinting at the silhouette by my bedside, I became conscious of curves and angles, then corduroy and cardboard, and a cascade of red coalescing into the tresses of my new wife, a beauty in a work shirt holding a box over me. A box brimming with life.
We'd dreamed of raising chickens — someday, someday. Up since dawn that March morning, Suzanne had visited a Quakertown farm supply store where hatchlings by the tubful skittered under heat lamps. Overcome by spring, she decided that someday was here: She brought home fifteen newly hatched peeps.
I arose early each day in that delicately lovely spring of 2004, priming myself on caffeine and waiting for the sun to rise to a decent height. I didn't want the neighbors down the way to awaken to the whacketa-whack racket of my hammer. I know what it's like to suffer construction noise. The woods and meadows that surround Lilyfield create an idyllic illusion that is too often shattered by the growl of dozers trying to make better use of Worcester Township's open space.
Peeps need the warmth of their mother's body and the protection of her wing, and since the boxful of them that Suzanne had brought home had never seen the grown version of their species, together we became the surrogate hen. In our farmhouse kitchen, we attached a heat lamp to the edge of a large plastic tub, lined it with a few inches of wood shavings, and set up a feed tray and water dish inside. In went the peeps, which made themselves at home in an instant — no shy moments of trepidation, just a dash for the feed tray, filled with a special mix for hatchlings.
That first spring, we raised several breeds, including some old-time barnyard classics: Buff Orpingtons, an affectionate bird with golden plumage; Silver-Laced Wyandottes, whose silvery white feathers are laced with black edging; and Barred Plymouth Rocks, a zebra of the chicken family, painted in wavery lines of charcoal and white.
We also raised a few Americanas, which matured to be thick-necked and wild-eyed. They are derived from the Araucana, a rare Chilean breed. Both breeds lay eggs of blue or green; hatcheries sometimes sell Americanas as "Easter eggers." Our Americanas look nothing alike. One turned out calico, a crazy quilt of coppery white and iridescent blackgreen. One is golden with black fringing, and another white with charcoal fringing.
That's how it is with chickens. Within each breed are several types of feather patterns and colors: laced or barred, penciled or cuckoo; black, blue, red, or buff, to name a few. Our Wyandottes are silver-laced, for example, but they also come in such varieties as golden-laced and lemon-blue. And many breeds of chicken have a smaller, "bantam" version.
One of our peeps was unlike any of the others, though we think she came from the Americana bin at the farm store. We named her Tim. Four years later, we still don't know what she is. I don't really want to know. She's golden brown with red highlights. Her bright red comb flops over her right eye; it hangs there like a latex glove attached to her head as if she were about to do a Howie Mandel routine. Believing that Tim was an Americana, we expected that she would produce bluish green eggs when she and her sisters began laying in September. Tim gives us white ones.
We worried and fussed over Tim and her sisters. Suzanne scrubbed their water bottle daily and added medication that promised to keep them thriving. We played with them until they lost all fear of us and hopped readily into our hands to be fed. I found myself getting up at 3 A.M. to check on the heat lamp, and learned that peeps do a good job of regulating themselves: Too hot, and they move to the shadows at the edge of the tub; too cold, and they move closer to the light, or huddle in a heap. They do tend to clog up their water dish with wood shavings, though, since even in peephood their instinct is to kick and dig, as if looking for grubs.
I soon noticed another instinct: They disliked shadows gliding over them. The peeps in our kitchen knew nothing about hawks and such. No mother hen had taught them the ways of the wild. Peeps don't know what makes a shadow, but they cower from it nonetheless. If you tease them with a sharp braawk, they scurry for cover, then freeze in a tableau, each with one eye staring upward. Softly say buck, buck, and they resume pecking. You could do this repeatedly, if so inclined. Their instincts guide them when their brains otherwise fail. It's their wiring for survival.
Suzanne warned me from the start: Those fifteen chicks would likely end up as a brood of seven or eight. She expected to lose about half of them to sickness and predators. She figured a half dozen hens would make a good starter brood, so she'd purchased twice that many.
We lost none. In that first spring, not one of the peeps succumbed to the dread maladies that one reads about in how-to-raise-poultry books. We never had to inspect their anuses to make sure they weren't pasted shut — which I imagine could lead to dire consequences, explosion perhaps. None of our peeps failed to thrive or grew lame. They did grow larger and hungrier; some turned bossy and others passive, depending upon temperament, as they jousted for dominance. The hellions among them took running leaps across the tub and jumped atop the feeder and even made it to the tub rim, playing king of the hill.
After a couple of weeks, we carried the brooder tub out to the yard and let the peeps venture out to explore in the grass, keeping the tub nearby in case they needed to retreat. As they became acclimated to the outdoors, and as the weather warmed, we ceased to worry much about them. No predators came with honed teeth and claws to claim their heads. When their bag of starter mash ran out, we bought them some grower pellets, but what they really wanted was the assortment of creeping things they sifted from the soil. As the weeks progressed, they foraged and fed themselves with little help from us.
Our brood included thirteen pullets and two cockerels — that's what hens and roosters are called early in their first year, after they've grown feathers but before they've matured. As peeps, the males and females can be next to impossible to tell apart, which leads to cross-sexual name selections, such as "Tim." Each bird soon distinguished itself as a unique being. Suzanne became partial to a buff that she named Buffy who jumped up to greet her, in a bustle of wings, and would even try to join Suzanne inside her car. Buffy trotted after her, but this was not love, exactly. If you feed a chicken out of your hand, such are the consequences. Four years later, long consigned to the ordinary ranks of coop life, Buffy is still an unusually cordial hen — a sign, I think, of her early favored status.
Fending for themselves as they grew, the chickens instinctively searched for safety at dusk. Since they had no house of their own, they took up nightly residence high in the branches of the weeping cherry tree next to the house. This wouldn't do. I imagined them huddled there still, come winter, as the wind howled and ice glazed their wattles. I turned my attention to completing the coop.
"Now just look at that," I told Suzanne, tossing down my hammer and wiping my brow with my cap. I shook my head and pointed toward the faithful old Ford rusting behind the barn.
"What?"
"Chickens. On the tractor."
She acknowledged my accuracy, then unclipped a tape measure from her belt, measured the windows I'd framed, and frowned. She jotted something on a notepad. Suzanne is never without a tape measure and notepad.
Down by the barn, I was assembling the skeleton of the coop to come, having scavenged old doors and siding and roofing to finish the job. My new bride wanted a coop, and eager to please her I'd set right to work, as the young chickens watched dubiously. I'd sketched a basic design, which Suzanne resketched, and we'd revised each other's revisions until we had the concept of a coop that any chicken should covet. Meanwhile, the chickens took to hanging out on the seat of our ancient tractor.
A tractor is no place for chickens to be roosting. They need shelter, a house of their own, a place where they can find some semblance of security, where they can get up off the ground and away from things that snuffle in the night, where the whistling winds cannot reach them, where they can softly cluck and poop the evening away in peace.
They're not particularly choosy. They'll make do, if need be, with a horse stall in the barn, occupied or not. They'll take to the rafters. They'll even resort to a tractor seat, but a caring farmer wants better for his chickens, not to mention for his tractor.
This project was a balance between Suzanne's standards and mine, with the chickens' preferences unspoken. We worked out the fundamentals. We would build a separate compartment within the coop for feed and equipment storage; the coop would face south to take advantage of the winter sun; the nesting boxes would have a hinged lid that could be raised from outside the coop to collect eggs; the roosts would be installed over plastic tubs that could be pulled out through a hinged flap for easy cleaning.
I've seen coops too foul for any fowl and others nicer than the housing that much of the world's population endures. Suzanne's design skills helped us to avoid the former; my practical bent steered her away from the latter.
"No fowl-house is what it ought to be, unless it is in such a state as to afford a lady, without offending her sense of decent propriety, a respectable shelter on a showery day." Such was the recommendation of the Rev. Edmund Saul Dixon, who in 1849 published A Treatise on the History and Management of Ornamental and Domestic Poultry, which helped to propel the Victorian chicken craze.
A respectable shelter for a lady? I imagined Suzanne on such a showery day, kicking off her galoshes as she entered the coop to admire my work. There, against the west wall, three full rows of roosts over a spacious waste pit. The roosts would be spaced just right, with the proper sloping so that the biddies sitting higher in the pecking order wouldn't soil their sisters of lower status. Each chicken would have at least two square feet of floor space to call its very own. Milady would not only take shelter in such a coop but would seek it out.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Home to Roost"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Bob Sheasley.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
You Come, Too,
SPRING A Season to Sow,
Joy in the Morning,
Trumpet to the Morn,
Crossing the Road,
Homegrown,
SUMMER A Season to Grow,
The Killing Fields,
Desires of the Flesh,
Chicken Noodle,
FALL A Season to Collect,
Joy of Eggs,
One Basket,
WINTER A Season to Reflect,
Kinder, Gentler,
In Sickness and Health,
Home to Roost,
Golden Dreams,
Notes,
Selected Reading,
Index,
What People are Saying About This
“Reading this book is like walking down a quiet corridor of a museum, peeping into this room and that. All manner of curiosities await discovery. Home to Roost is a compulsively readable history of man’s relationship with Gallus domesticus, rich with anecdote, fable, and fact. Sheasley can write, and his lyrical, often droll prose winds around and through the happy maze of fact and fiction he’s constructed. Even as he tackles sobering topics like avian flu and the pathetic physical and behavioral wreck we’ve made of the factory-farmed hen, his affection for chickens, and the people who exploit them, shines through. There’s hope in the gleaming basket of pastel eggs he totes to work, and Sheasley shows by his own example the world he believes hens—and humans—richly deserve to inhabit.
—Julie Zickefoose, author of Letters from Eden