2 Oz Furry

I have found over the years that chickens become a collector’s item. There are dozens of breeds, each coming in a wide range of colors and sizes. I know this is true for dogs as well, but if you collect dogs you are featured on a TV show requiring an intervention. Chicken’s well, you have “chicken math” on your side, always add, never subtract. After all, once you have twenty is thirty or thirty eight really that different? The food increase is negligible, as are the space requirements. The justification becomes, well easy.

So, over the years we have added chickens (or geese or ducks) here and there because they needed a home, or because we couldn’t resist. For the record, our farm has a business plan. We spend hours planning our flock and its expected contribution to the farm and its bottom line. However, the minute we show up to a farm/ and or chicken swap to purchase our carefully planned additions, our business plan seems to disappear and be replaced with, “Oh my gosh, we really need to add…..as well.”

This is exactly how Bantam Old English Game Hens entered our lives. While reading the paper, I saw an ad for Silkie chicks. Just days before, an unfortunate event with my daughter’s ferret had taken a toll on our newly arrived Silkie chicks. In order to both replace the chicks and elevate some of the sadness around this incredibly tragic event in what had been a very “unpeacable kingdom” within our home, we decided to pay this farm a visit.

The women who welcomed us into her home had chicken math down to a science. Her entire living room, dining room, study, and hallway were filled with heat lamps, brooder boxes and tons of chicks. All colors, sizes and ages. I looked at her husband and thought to myself “Now he takes the cake for understanding husbands! There is no way I would ever get away with anything even close to this.”

The husband sat on the couch, TV remote in hand and just disregarded the strangers in his living room as we peeked into box after box at all the potential new babies. We were there for the Silkies, so naturally the woman was trying to bring our attention to the several boxes which held the birds in which we were interested. Bridget, my daughter, had other ideas. She was mesmerized by a box holding some of the smallest chicks I had ever seen. These tiny balls of fluff were the size of a toasting marshmallow.

Bridget was in love. She knew right away they were Bantam Old English Game Birds. With all kinds of crazy chicken logic, Bridget convinced me we had to have these birds. (Of course not instead of, but in addition to the Silkies) I no longer remember what the logic of having a chicken that laid an egg the size of a walnut and when full grown was the size of a pigeon, was, but there must have been something because we left the house with 5 Silkies and 5 Old English Game Hens.

Fast forward six months. Our little flock was now fully grown and our rooster was beginning to mature. It is common at our house to not name birds until their personality reveals itself. With sometimes well over 100 birds, many of them looking very similar, it would be too much to keep track of so many names. But our Old English rooster was just coming into his name.

Weighing less then a pound, this feisty fellow was learning to crow. A nail down a chalkboard is the best way to describe this tiny bird’s call. He was so enamored by his new found abilities; he felt the need to practice his skill all day long and into the night. Any activity- movement of his hens, car in the driveway, dog walking by, wind blowing, leaf falling, anything would work him up to such a state, you wanted nothing more then to strangle this puny, loud, screeching bird.

But it got better. By one year, he was the proud roo to a broody hen. As soon as fatherhood was upon him, he conjured up the talents of his ancestors (Old English were breed for Cock fighting before it fell out of fashion) and become an attack bird. The pen became a battleground and feeding or watering the Old English required a suite of armor.

You would open up the pen and he would attack. It is embarrassing to complain about getting attacked by a bird weighing less then a pound, but this bird was relentless, and fought with unfettered passion. He became the 2oz Furry.

Now a normal person would have ended this bird’s rein long ago. The decibels produced each day alone would justify his demise. But that isn’t how it works on our farm. The fact is- he is a beautiful bird. He produces healthy strong babies in his likeness, and is a very gentle father and protector of his hens. None of girls loose so much as a feather under his care.

So although he ensures no guests ever want to spend the night at our home and our neighbors wish that they not purchased a house in an agricultural zone, he will live out his natural life waking us up with his screeching, high pitched whine at 3:00am and I will begrudgingly head into battle every morning to face the 2oz Furry.