Playing Chicken

      More Letters From Paradise
          Playing Chicken
Once again suffering from "writer's block." The last time, I was forced to write about cabbage.This time I'm going to write about chickens. I know something about chickens.

There are many different breeds, some really funny looking ones such as the so-called Polish, with wild feathers on the top of its head. Then there is the Aracana breed from South America, which lays blue or green eggs. Then there is the Banty breed. Small birds, good mother hens and roosters full of fight. My friend George once had some Banty chickens, and a rooster that used to fight with cars. Note the use of the past tense.

My favorite two breeds are the Barred Plymouth Rock and the Rhode Island Red. They both lay brown eggs. I think that brown eggs are better than white, but I can't prove it. I have raised chickens from baby chicks to adult laying chickens.

When baby chicks arrive you first dip their beaks into some water so that they will know how to drink. Finely ground feed and grit is fed to them. They are gathered under a wide hood with a heat lamp in the center. They soon begin to grow feathers, and in six weeks they are large enough to become a frying chicken. Left to grow they will first produce pullet-size eggs. Then as the chicken ages and continues laying, you now have medium-size eggs, and even later large eggs.

It is not necessary to have a rooster with your flock of chickens, unless you want fertile eggs and baby chicks. There is a pecking order in the flock. The top chicken pecks all the flock. The next chicken below him pecks all the others, and so on down the line. The poor chicken at the end of the pecking order gets pecked by all the others. Sometimes if there is a rooster in the flock, he may become troublesome. My oldest daughter was, as a small child, knocked down by a rooster which then got in her face. I grabbed a 2x4 and made a home run with him.

There are wild chickens here in our state. Not so many here on Oahu, since a guy was paid to catch and dispose of them. On some of the other islands, there are many wandering around. There is an old law here in Honolulu that each household is limited to having only two chickens. And as I once asked in an other entry, "Where are my two chickens?"

And there are few things that smell as bad as a dead chicken  pulled  from a pail of hot water, or a plucked chicken held over a flame to burn off pin feathers.

Have you ever wondered where the chicken in chicken noodle soup came from? Probably not. When all those chickens who have spent their days in cages, and are no longer laying, they end up in soup.

I could go on and on about chickens, but I think that this is enough. We have a house rule in our building that residents can have only one dog. I wonder how they would feel about my two chickens?  

          Aloha
          Grant