Election Day

My legs are sore from walking and knocking on doors. I've talked to a lot of township residents in the last few weeks and I'm once again impressed at the many paths that our residents take in their pursuit of happiness. That drive to live our lives with as much authenticity as we can possibly create, coupled with the capacity to not just tolerate, but to appreciate our neighbors and their unique paths is the key to the economic revival of our township, our region, our state, and our nation.

Sounds hyperbolic, I know.  It’s been that sort of week.  New York suffers under Sandy and suddenly climate change is back on the table and the federal government is competent and people appreciate it.  Here in Leland Township, events have been iconic in a more positive way.  Leland School’s boys soccer team won game after game in their post season until they had claimed the title of 2012 District and Regional Champions, or as it was explained to me “one of the four best teams in the state”.   Their last game was on Halloween in Big Rapids, which left three team members who are also in Mr. Wodek’s  civic class precious little time to complete the required six hours of volunteering on a political campaign.

That’s how I ended up with “bodyguards” on my last weekend of campaigning door to door.  I like going door to door with students, especially on foot. One day we walked from my house down M-204 to M-22.  The next day we walked east from my house into Lake Leelanau.  While we walked, I talked about the the history of the road and the homes, the people who live here now and the ones who are gone.  We met a mom who remembered when Austin’s dad was her oldest son’s soccer coach. We met a 92 year old man who missed keeping chickens in the village. We visited Bad Pony, one of our fledgling internet businesses and, next door, The Washington Building, where Doug Fierberg took time out to give us a tour of the national law firm that they run out of his Lake Leelanau office.  We saw a pileated wood pecker, Provemont Pond, a hidden barn, boots planted with cactus.  Carol Drow told us about her solar panels, "Been there since Jimmy Carter was president!" Simon Dyer turned off his leaf blower long enough to share his comparison between US elections and elections in his native Ireland. 

Sometime halfway through the first day, one of the guys said, “Wow! Everybody here is connected!”  Of course, that’s the point of my patter, the point of the walking tour, the point of going door to door, the point of civics class, the point of serving in local government.  We are all connected, by blood, or by history, or by economics, by sharing the same roads and parks and fire department and lakeshores.

My challenge as supervisor will be to foster that sense of community, and to see where it leads.  The loose ends can be woven in by encouraging our residents to shop locally, by making opportunities for young people to come back and establish their careers and families here, by making township government open and accessible to everyone, not just as a place to complain when things go wrong but as way to meet their neighbors and collaborate to solve problems and create whatever comes next.

I thank all who have helped me along so far, the folks who encouraged me and bankrolled me and advised me and opened their doors and took time to ask good questions and tell me about their lives.  I especially enjoyed the high school students who accompanied me along the way. I hope they have absorbed the idea that governing is not just about winning arguments or elections. 

   

I’m optimistic about the results of today’s voting.  The results for local races will be available at Leelanau.cc  after the polls close, absentee ballots are all fed into the machine, and the township clerk reports the totals to the county clerk’s office. Vote today, and thank our election workers when you do.

What was for Dinner

Richard fixed the balky basement light switch just in time for "eat out of the basement season". We usually eat out of the basement this time of year because paychecks are small and heat bills are big. We have potatoes, canned vegetables, salsa and pickles, frozen fruit, frozen chicken and fish.

Tonight I had some leftover Cuban black beans that the neighbor had brought us. To go with it I made the "Skillet Corn Bread" recipe from The Joy of Cooking, enlivening it with fried onions, rehydrated dried garden peppers, cheddar cheese, and a freshly fried bits of the bacon ends I bought on sale at Gabe's Maple City market last fall.

The meal looked like it could use more vegis and protein, so I got a jar of home canned salsa from the basement, heated half of it on the stove, and poached eggs in it while the cornbread finished up. The chickens are seeing the days getting longer and laying eggs accordingly, so it's a challenge to come up with new ways to eat eggs. It was a nice meal, quite colorful for mid winter.

Lots of News, No Pictures

The wine fest is tomorrow, and the parking lot is ready in the nick of time! Wednesday night I was at work on break when I read in both the Northern Express and the Leelanau Enterprise that the community of Leland was so resourceful and cooperative that we had figured out how to hold the wine fest at the harbor despite the delays in actually finishing the harbor project. Rains on Monday and Tuesday had meant further delays and the wine fest site on Wednesday had looked like piles of dirt with curbs. As I went back to work I worried that the printed congratulations may have been premature.

But then I saw the project foreman watching some guys play a slot. I tapped him on the shoulder.

"Do we have asphalt?"

"Tomorrow. Eight in the morning."

Asphalt went down as promised, and set up for the wine fest should be going on as I type. I have no picture, as I am in Evanston today, picking Liz up after her junior year at Northwestern. We'll miss the wine fest, but we intend to take in the Chicago Blues Fest tomorrow. (See The Leland Report for a crazy photo)

Liz wanted baby chicks when she got home, and I finally got a hen to commit to brooding a clutch in time for the first two little ones to hatch out yesterday morning. I hope she'll be a good mom and keep them safe until we get home. I wanted to download some pictures, but this morning my computer had an ominous "System file 22 corrupted" message on the screen. Good excuse to leave town and come back with Liz and her computer. It was a beautiful day to travel. Life is good.

Swine Flu News

Readers might have wondered why Effect Measure has held the number one spot in my "Blogs I'm Reading now" list. I started reading Effect Measure, an epidemiologists' blog, when I was interested in avian flu and backyard chickens. Mainstream news outlets were desperately trying to take an evolving science story and fit it into the "beginning, middle and end" story formula, preferably with a gripping headline that would get us tuning in again tomorrow and the next day. Effect Measure's editors were engaging in a more collaborative investigation that was much more interesting and to which I, as a backyard chicken keeper, could occasionally contribute some practical observations.

Now, with the swine flu news getting similar treatment, I recommend Effect Measure to readers who want up to date news and science without the premature conclusions. I'm also stocking up on Lysol spray, decongestants, garlic, and chicken soup.

Produce Under Snow

The garden at 8 pm -- not yet dark but certainly dusk.

We had yet another snowstorm early Sunday, with a fresh new 6 inches of wet snow. The sun is high these days, as high as it is at the end of August, but it never seems to burn down to the bare ground of the garden. under that snow there are parsnips and carrots overwintered, arugula, parsley and French sorrel ready to poke through, and a big crop of rhubarb gathering up all the snow melt moisture. I have already been cutting chives, thyme, and oregano from the bed up by the house, but that got covered again on Sunday.

The warmest bed, down by Richard's shop, had lettuce and arugula already sprouting from seeds that fell off the bolted plants last fall. I'm trying to figure a way to start parsnips inside (in toilet paper tubes?) since they grow so slowly that they tend to get lost in the weeds. Spring harvested parsnips are a sweet and tasty treat, even if they didn't come in early spring when we are craving garden produce.

We are still eating canned tomatoes, dried tomatoes and peppers, apples held in the basement, dried apricots, pickles from the gallon jar in the fridge, frozen blueberries, cherries, and pesto, and garlic from the basement. I'm ready to plant peas as soon as I can find some bare ground. The chickens are really thinking spring -- they're laying at full tilt and I'm hoping it warms up enough to put a broody hen on some eggs.

The Dirt on Kids

Two new articles about parenting came out yesterday, verifying my suspicions about workaholic parents and dirt. The first, from England, details a study that looks at childhood well-being. The headline, Selfish adults 'damage childhood' pretty much says it all:

The aggressive pursuit of personal success by adults is now the greatest threat to British children, a major independent report on childhood says. It calls for a sea-change in social attitudes and policies to counter the damage done to children by society. Family break-up, unprincipled advertising, too much competition in education and income inequality are mentioned as big contributing factors.

The report itself is not likely to be popular, as it points out the detrimental effects that divorce, two working parents, and too much competition in education have on kids. The report's recommendations are interesting:

• a civil birth ceremony conducted by a registrar in which parents publicly accept the responsibilities of parenthood


• free parenting classes available around the time of birth


• free psychological and family support if relationships struggle


• rules making it easier for parents to stay at home to rear their children

And

• abolishing sats tests and league tables in English schools


• a ban on all advertising aimed at the under 12s and no TV commercials for alcohol or unhealthy food before the 9pm watershed


• stopping building on any open space where children play


• a high-quality youth centre for every 5,000 young people

I'm not sure about that last one. I think the high quality play environment ought to be in one's backyard with a parent watching out, but not too close.

This brings us to the second article, sent to me yesterday by Liz. I'm sure she was thinking of the low cost play space she and Shelagh enjoyed when they were young. We had a sandy bank in the yard, and if they begged Dad, he would bring over a shovel and loosen the sand to make a pile to play in and a hole to excavate. The "dirt pile" was a major draw in our yard; kids would get a glimpse of the dirt pile from the back seat and they were all over it, down on their knees and getting dirty before anyone could say no. Often there was a dog or a chicken helping to dig, that's how the they came up with the summer "Chicken Circus" in which chickens would ride on bike handle bars and "fly" though hula-hoops.

I'm sure some readers are clucking to themselves at the unsanitaryness of all this. The article Liz sent, Babies Know: A Little Dirt Is Good for You is provocative, but it might gross you out:

Ask mothers why babies are constantly picking things up from the floor or ground and putting them in their mouths, and chances are they’ll say that it’s instinctive — that that’s how babies explore the world. But why the mouth, when sight, hearing, touch and even scent are far better at identifying things?

When my young sons were exploring the streets of Brooklyn, I couldn’t help but wonder how good crushed rock or dried dog droppings could taste when delicious mashed potatoes were routinely rejected.

Since all instinctive behaviors have an evolutionary advantage or they would not have been retained for millions of years, chances are that this one too has helped us survive as a species. And, indeed, accumulating evidence strongly suggests that eating dirt is good for you.......

.....“What a child is doing when he puts things in his mouth is allowing his immune response to explore his environment,” Mary Ruebush, a microbiology and immunology instructor, wrote in her new book, “Why Dirt Is Good” (Kaplan). “Not only does this allow for ‘practice’ of immune responses, which will be necessary for protection, but it also plays a critical role in teaching the immature immune response what is best ignored.”

One leading researcher, Dr. Joel V. Weinstock, the director of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said in an interview that the immune system at birth “is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction.”

He said that public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they “also eliminated exposure to many organisms that are probably good for us.”

“Children raised in an ultraclean environment,” he added, “are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits.”

I must admit that it's kind of fun to hear the "ultraclean environment" moms getting scolded for once. They should give up some cleaning and volunteer a little more.

The idea that being infected with intestinal worms conveys an immunity to disease is really new:

Immunologists now recognize a four-point response system of helper T cells: Th 1, Th 2, Th 17 and regulatory T cells. Th 1 inhibits Th 2 and Th 17; Th 2 inhibits Th 1 and Th 17; and regulatory T cells inhibit all three, Dr. Elliott said.

“A lot of inflammatory diseases — multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and asthma — are due to the activity of Th 17,” he explained. “If you infect mice with worms, Th 17 drops dramatically, and the activity of regulatory T cells is augmented.”

In answer to the question, “Are we too clean?” Dr. Elliott said: “Dirtiness comes with a price. But cleanliness comes with a price, too. We’re not proposing a return to the germ-filled environment of the 1850s. But if we properly understand how organisms in the environment protect us, maybe we can give a vaccine or mimic their effects with some innocuous stimulus.”

In the end, we weren't going to keep all of those germs out of the baby's mouth, anyway. It's nice to know that letting them out of the car seat and into the dirt was what they really needed all along.

Mr McFluffers Goes to School

The second hand store cage was too small, so our raised-from-egg chicken, Mr. McFluffers, will be appearing in this weekend's production of Fools in this lovely brass cage complete with a stick perch scavenged from the playground at Leland School. You can see from the photo that the cage was originally topless, but we wove a new top for it from fishing line.

Life in the theater is not all glamor and makeup. Here Mr Mc Fluffers sips some water amid the hubbub of final carpentry work on the upturned cow prop downstage and Mr Cox tuning the piano upstage.

Fools will be presented this weekend only:

Saturday, November 15 at 2:00 pm and 7:00 pm

Sunday, November 16 at 7:00 pm

Leland Public School • Performing Art Center

Tickets $8 adults, $5 students – available at the door or in advance by calling 256-9857.

As mother of the chicken, I had a special seat at the dress rehearsal. I was impressed by the expressive and tightly knit cast, hilarious dialogue, and one very talented hen. Don't miss it!

Fools

From the school newsletter:

One weekend only! • November 15 & 16

Leland High School Drama presents Fools, by Neil Simon. Directed by Jeremy John Evans.

Saturday, November 15 at 2:00 pm and 7:00 pm

Sunday, November 16 at 7:00 pm

Leland Public School • Performing Art Center

Tickets $8 adults, $5 students – available at the door or in advance by calling 256-9857.

This story, by Neil Simon, takes place when Leon Tolchinsky, an ambitious young school teacher, arrives in the village of Kulyenchikov, and discovers that the town is suffering under a 200-year curse of stupidity. The curse was cast on them by none other than Vladimir Yousekevitch, after his son’s fiancé was forbidden to see the younger Yousekevitch by her father, who found out the boy was illiterate. She subsequently was made to marry another man. If Leon can’t educate the fiancés descendent within 24 hours of his arrival in Kulyenchikov, he, too, will fall victim to the curse. The curse can only be broken if he can educate Sophia…or if she marries a Yousekevitch!

Hilarity ensues as this fast-paced comedy with quick and witty banter takes place on our Leland Performing Arts Center stage. As always, our Leland productions are brought to you in part by the generous donations of the Verdier Circle of Friends.

The Och family's contribution to this production is......a chicken. Jeremy called me a few weeks ago to ask if they could borrow a chicken, in a cage, for the character who is trying to teach a chicken to talk. The chicken is easy to come by, if a bit challenging to wrangle, but a cage suitable for a Russian village is something else. I think I found a candidate at Jaffe's consignment shop in Lake Leelanau, a cute ornamental cage. Now if the chicken will only fit inside.....

The Future of Livestock

I've been revisiting livestock issues in preparation for an invitation to speak at next week's American Livestock Breed Conservancy conference in Kalamazoo.

I first became aware of the livestock breed conservancy back in 2005 when I was writing about avian flu, and watching TV footage of culled flocks in Hong Kong headed for the incinerator.

Keeping chickens is a sort of window to the wider world. The everyday chores of caring for poultry is something that humans have been doing in similar fashion for most of recorded time. It is also something that is done, with little variation, almost everywhere that people live.

It was hard to stop thinking about those first bird flu reports from Asia. I saw fleeting images of beautiful birds on the evening news as they told of killing all poultry in whole provinces. At first I wondered how many interesting breeds of chickens were going extinct.

Later, I became worried that we were destroying the generations of intellectual property, and the secret to the avian flu problem, in this wholesale culling effort:

Each breed is the result of generations of breeding. I suspect the smarter, thriftier birds are the result of breeding that spans human generations, not poultry generations. There are countless more varieties of chickens, a different variety living in each little corner of the world, bred for centuries to best suit the microclimate and needs of the people who live there.

This is the old-fashioned method of genetic engineering: selective breeding and cross breeding to secure the traits that are favored. In good times, you might breed for a fancy tail. In bad times you might breed for survival in famine or resistance to the latest disease.

Now, confident that the only answer is in gene splicing, we are depopulating the country sides of their locally-bred chickens, in a losing battle to contain the virus. The disease is devastating to flocks; the birds look fine one day and the next morning 80 to 90% are dead. One wonders if the clue to flu resistance in poultry lies in that small sliver of surviving birds, the ones that are being culled with the rest. Or maybe it lies with the flock next door that appeared untouched by the disease but was culled anyway.

The first images of avian flu showed us armloads of chickens, held upside down by their feet, on the way to incineration. As someone who has catalog shopped chicken breeds, I wanted to shout: "Wait! What kind of chicken is that? Show me again, right side up! What a cool bird!"

Just those few short years ago, it seemed that, except for a few of us hobby farmers and the tiny boutique foods market, the trend would continue towards out-of-sight, out-of mind, larger and larger factory farming operations. All cows looked alike because they all were alike; in 1997 it was estimated that 60% of our dairy cows came from the same four breeding lines. Every commercial specie of livestock had been bred to be the most efficient at turning cheap corn into edible protein. Traits like ability to forage, curiosity, even the common sense to get out of the rain took a backseat to feed conversion or disappeared altogether.

That was then. These days, avian flu takes a back seat to bigger problems. Cheap corn is no longer cheap -- beyond the lunacy of trying to run automobiles on corn-based ethanol, there is a new awareness that corn yields depend on large doses of nitrogen fertilizer and that nitrogen fertilizer is made from ever more pricey natural gas. Feedlots are implicated in the rise of new, deadly E.coli strains. Climate change, and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester CO2 is front and center, and we are looking at the role of pastures and grasslands in global carbon sequestration. In the US, our current food production is dependent on the rapidly depleting aquifers of the western states; we use our expensive fossil fuels to move food long distances to the food producing areas of the 1900's which are now covered with homes on one or two acre lots where the fertile soils and abundant rains now grow shrubs and lawns.

I'm intrigued by a comment that I read in a discussion of home food production. A person familiar with the history of her suburb noted that the original lot size was meant to provide a family with the land they would need to raise most of their own food in gardens, orchards, and with some small livestock. Last summer we saw many families return to gardening in response to higher food and fuel prices. If trends continue, we may see many more backyard poultry flocks, rabbits, or even milking goats.

If you see suburban poultry, goats, or even pigs these days, chances are it's a 4-H project. 4-H has fostered the relationship between kids and livestock for all of its 100 year history, even as the bulk of us have moved away from the traditional farms. Rabbit and poultry projects are ever popular for small yards, and there are new projects like Horseless Horse, Small Pets and Goldfish for kids with no yards at all.

The traditional large animal projects prosper around here. Northwest Michigan Fair's livestock auction signed up 125 new buyers this year, not surprising considering the renewed interest in eating local, and knowing what you are eating. Where else can a person choose meat for the table by perusing growth, feed, exercise and medical records of each animal and interviewing the person who raised it?

Kids learn responsibility, business skills, grace under pressure, time management, teamwork, and a host of other skills from working with livestock. 4-H folks have been extolling these character building themes for years as the rest of the world asks why we want to keep doing something as old-fashioned as raising livestock in our backyards.

Lately I've been rethinking the purpose of making sure that kids get experience raining livestock. When I think of the challenges facing us, I want to everyone -- our leaders, our families, our communities, our kids -- to have as all available tools. When policymakers are working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while ensuring our food supply, they need to know a lot about cows, not just that they produce methane. Community planners need to recognize that backyard food production is part of the health of a community and not just reflexively zone out livestock because they want to head off potential factory farms. If times get really tough, we could send our 4-H livestock kids, leaders and alumni out to the suburbs to teach people how to feed themselves from that good farmland under those lawns.

Two Chicks

Momma is clucking gently as she shows them how to find food and water. If she gets spooked, she squacks and they scurry under her wing for protection.

Hatching Hen

Today I am quietly observing my broody hen, a Partridge Rock, who has been sitting on a clutch of eggs that is starting to peep. The first chick is trying to work its way out of the shell. I can hear it peeping from within its shell; hopefully is will have enough energy to emerge, hopefully the other eggs will hatch out soon, hopefully instincts will kick in and the hen will care for her brood.

At the Northwest Michigan Fair

This is Clucky, a silky hen who was displayed at the fair by Krystal Bancroft of Thompsonville. This year's poultry barn featured several young ladies who were enthusiastic about talking birdcraft to visitors. Clucky has raised a few broods, and one of her offspring was on display as well.

We watched the lamb showmanship competition. These girls were waiting for their turn in the ring.

Showmanship is the way you work with your animal. The kids were in the ring for 20 minutes with no halter or leash, just controlling their animals with their hands and bodies. Competitors need to know how to handle their animal, presenting it for the judge and the audience so that everyone gets to see the animal in the best light. You could be a good handler but still have trouble in this competition if you haven't taken the time to work with your animal and make it comfortable and used to being handled.

Nani and her dad showed up while we were watching the showmanship competition. Richard decided that there should be a similar competition for parents and their kids, where you have to enter the ring with your kids without resorting to bribes or electronic devices. Nani's dad, a horse trainer by trade, thought that was a great idea and the two dads had a good laugh over the idea.

I had resigned myself to a corn dog lunch when I saw this table of local produce from Cherry Capital Foods. For the price of a corn dog, I got a pint of nearly perfect raspberries. Cherry Capital Foods is a new distributor of local produce and farm goods. Maybe that's where I'll sell my rhubarb next year. Taste the Local Difference was co sponsoring the booth. Fair food is what you make it!

Fair is about food, where it comes from and who grows it. This goat poster made me laugh with its "look your dinner in the eye" theme.

More on what people do with chickens

This is the Denizli Horozu rooster of Turkey, a breed that has been bred for its long crow. I had no idea this sort of bird existed until I saw it on YouTube, and even then I thought at first that it was a joke.

But, as the Turkish Ministry of Culture tells us in this oddly translated page, the roosters of the city of Denizli are a local treasure, providing a sense of place from dawn's first crow.

The sound of Denizli roosters are classified according to the tone and clearness. According to sound tones they are divided into 3 groups: İNCE, DAVUDİ, KALIN SES. Davudi (bass) voice is between high pitched and deep voice and is the only sound close to deep voice. According to clearness, they are divided into 4 groups, namely: SAD VOICE, SHRILL VOICE, WAVY VOICE (FUNNY VOICE).

Crowing of Denizli roosters is performed upon use of all abilities. Crowing is divided into 4 groups depending on body position during crowing, which are LION CROWING, WOLF CROWING, HERO CROWING, PUS CROWING.

A good Denizli Rooster must have: alive apearance, long and strong legs and neck, wide and deep chest, sharp and sloped toward head tail. The same features are true for the chicken. The crowing period of Denizli Roosters in the first year must be 20 to 25 seconds.

The article contains a refutation of rumours that Denizli roosters are a result of crossbreeding with Albanian birds and a local homily,

Each rooster crows at its own place,
But Denizli Rooster crows everywhere.

These people are passionate about their local breed of chicken!

Humans and chickens have evolved together since prehistory, with many interesting local variants. I have felt an urgency about publicizing these variants since I read in 2006 about a plan to fight avian flu by replacing the world's infinite variety of chicken breeds with a new genetically-modified flu resistant strain. The idea starts out innocent enough, but it is the sort of cultural misunderstanding that starts wars.

It seems crazy, but I really think I can promote peace by raising awareness of the world's peoples' chicken practices.......

Chickens and Baseball

First the rant:

In 2002, our president was lying to us, to Congress, to all sorts of our (now former) allies about weapons of mass destruction and the rest of the reasons why it was necessary to start an unprovoked war. He also lied about how much it would cost and how long it would take, leaving us broke, stuck, and in ill-repute among our community of nations.

In 2002, Roger Clemens was directing his trainer to inject him in the buttocks with chemicals that he hoped would allow him to keep throwing strikes.

One of these men is now being hauled before Congress and asked uncomfortable questions, as a prelude to a perjury trial. As pathetic as Roger Clemens looked yesterday, I think that the real chickens are sitting in Congress, trying to distract us with this sideshow.


And then there's this:

The only good thing about the action on Capitol Hill yesterday was that it diverted attention away from the NY Times sports section piece about baseball players and cockfighting. It is no surprised that baseball players would be involved in cockfighting in their home countries. Roosters do fight, almost compulsively, and cockfighting goes on all over the world, with different local variants.

One of the underlying themes of this blog is "What Americans just don't know about chickens." That's why I published an account by a fellow casino dealer Dale S. Yeazel about visiting a cockfight with his in laws in the Philippines.

The locals move out of my way in order to give me a prime space to watch. There were no women or girls present. Everyone then starts to shout to the ringmaster in the center of the ring. Obviously they were making bets on either the white cock or the red one. I wasn't going to bet on the first match but after a couple of minutes the ringmaster looks at me and says; Hey Joe, you want to bet three hundred? I said; Yes, three hundred on the red one (pointing to the cock on my side of the ring). He waved his hand and with a smug expression indicated I had no bet. He then looked at me and waved his hand towards the opposite side of the ring. I then realized that since us bettors weren't laying odds or giving up points, he was trying to even up the betting at my expense. A minute later he asked me if I want to bet 500. I said yes and again pointed to the red bird. He waved off my bet and then grabbed himself in a Michael Jackson fashion, as if to dare me to bet on the white cock. Meanwhile the referee is writing down the bets in a spiral ring notebook.

The other man in the pit (the referee) then held a bird in each hand, faced them towards each other and released them. My bird scored the "dim mak" the other bird didn't die but was obviously unable to continue. This however, being a "fight to the death" the referee would grab a bird in each hand and face them off again. This process was repeated until the white cock was deemed to be dead.

The NY Times article describes another variation, without the casino dealer's attention to the intricacies of booking a bet. I'm not quite sure how a woman could write this story, since women aren't usually part of that scene. The last image in the article, that of a stray dog making off with a rooster's head, tells me that the rest of the rooster was someone's dinner that night.

There are plenty of reasons why a baseball player attending a legal cockfight in the Dominican Republic should not be seen in the same light as, say, the Michael Vick dogfighting debacle. For me, the two most compelling reasons are that you can't condemn the cockfight without making a judgement about someone else's culture and the fact that I can't keep my own roosters from fighting. I only have one rooster right now, and he will fight the dog, or Anna, or me, unless we smack him about once a week. If I didn't have the luxury of ordering sexed chicks from the hatchery, I would have many more rooster fights in my yard, until it was time for chicken dinner.

The Meat Birds

If you were reading last spring, you'll remember our cute new chicks, ordered from Murray McMurray and living under a light in the garage. My aim was to have a laying flock small enough to subsist mainly on household food scraps, since feed has been so expensive. We had friends who also wanted a small flock, and so I ordered 10 Cornish Cross meat birds to make the 25 bird minimum order.

The meat birds were something of an afterthought, but I was curious about what they would be like. We have killed and eaten our too-old-to-lay-anymore flocks, with varying success. It took me years to figure out how to cook those "tough old biddies". I wondered if it was possible to raise meat as tender as what we bought in the supermarket, or, as the animal rights people claim, if you had to confine chickens to small areas to get that sort of meat.

I have raised mail-order chicks more times than I can count, and I approached the job like a cook with a familiar recipe. I skimmed the direction, but I didn't worry too much, especially since it was May and the weather had warmed up. But raising those Cornish Cross birds was a very different chicken rearing experience. They simply have no "off switch" on their appetites. They would eat until they passed out with their heads in the food dish. Here is a picture of the difference in size after only a few weeks. We had some that had leg problems at only ten days. I had to ration the feed more closely and give them extra B vitamins.

Our friends had wanted some banties, and I had worried about the big meat birds picking on the little banties. I turned out to have the opposite problem. The meat birds were so sparsely feathered and moved so seldom that the smaller more active chickens started picking on the meat birds' bare patches. When we moved them out to the barn, the laying breeds readily took to running up and down the ramp to the outside pen, but only a few of the meat hens could make it. My account of their behavior at that time read like this:

I've had quite a time trying to keep their breasts from being soiled by laying in dirty straw. When I put this bird down to take a photo next to a normal sized hen, it pooped a copious pile, then immediately lay down in its own poop, as if it couldn't fathom the idea of making a choice where to lay down.

This is what they looked like at 8 weeks. We didn't time the project very well, as they should have been slaughtered then, but we don't like to slaughter in the heat of summer. When we did slaughter in September, they were huge, and I wasn't sure if they would fit in the freezer, so we only did the roosters. We had 5 roosters to kill, but they were so delicate that one died the night before, apparently from the stress of being caught and carried. So we killed 4 roosters, and I thought it was great because the hens started laying eggs the next day, well before our laying birds the same age had begun to produce.

Cornish Cross are not a laying breed, though, and my plan to keep some meat "on the hoof" instead of in the freezer was a bust. Very soon those hens were laying very large eggs and two got "egg-bound" and died. One more died of no apparent reason, it didn't even get sick, just died one night. The last hen is still in the barn, not very mobile, but surviving along with the layers.

I would characterize the whole project as a flop, except for one thing. The meat was amazing. I saved the smallest rooster to roast whole, all 13 pounds of it, and it was our Thanksgiving dinner. The meat was tender and nearly without fat. I packaged the rest of them as legs, skinless split breasts, soup bones, and stock. With three of us home now, one split breast, about a pound and a half of meat, makes a meal with leftovers. I was wondering if we could raise meat that wasn't as tough as an old tire. What we got was some of the best chicken I've ever eaten, meat that makes those supermarket birds look third rate.

Would I raise these birds again? Probably not. With the price of corn going so high, it makes more sense for a backyard bird to grow a little slower and be less dependent on the feed store. If I was growing grain for market, and had lots of corn to spare, I would raise Cornish Cross chickens again, but start them later in the year so that they would be slaughtered in October. And I would--duh!--read the instructions and follow them to a T.

Do I think that breeding these birds is intrinsically wrong? No worse than the over bred specimens in the dog world.

Before the Storm

Today was a warm January day, with a wicked cold front expected tonight, so I let my chickens out to forage while they could. The one red hen who always pecks my hand came up on the porch and pecked at the door, like she was knocking. Then she settled down on the porch next to the cat, watching the snow melt. They reminded me of the cat and hen that shelter the Ugly Duckling for a while in the old Hans Christian Anderson story.

I watched them from the kitchen, where I was making enchiladas out of the meat, fat, and stock from a spent laying hen that we butchered last year. That frozen chicken, tough and skinny as she was, will still feed us four more times: chicken pot pie, enchiladas, chicken soup with egg noodles, and egg drop soup. I had to cook her in the crock pot for six hours before I could even pull the skin off, let alone the meat, but the stock is extraordinary.

The chickens were much calmer this evening, having enjoyed the day outside. I locked them in tight, as the temperature is expected to drop from 45 degrees at dusk to a low of 9 degrees tomorrow morning, with 40 MPH winds.

Anna wore her PJs inside out tonight in hopes of a snow day. I could use one, too.

Leelanau Feed and Seed

I was overjoyed to find out that we were getting a feed store in the village of Lake Leelanau. Over the years, the village has added businesses, useful businesses like the gas station, doctor's office, and insurance company. Eventually, as the price of gas has gone up, I did so many errands locally that I was driving the 22 miles to Traverse City solely to buy chicken food.

Leelanau Seed and Feed opened this week, as I gave the last of the layer mash to my chickens. I picked up a bag of a layer mash produced in Standish, Michigan and a bale of straw. Owner Rebecca Kalchik is still experimenting with her inventory, but she aims to provide for all animal needs, and even had a display of fish food behind the counter.

Leelanau Seed and Feed is open Monday through Friday, 9:30 to 5:00, and Saturday 8:00 to 2:00. Their phone number is 256-0093. They are on the main drag in Lake Leelanau, one block west of NJ's, with parking in the alley.

People, Chickens, and Videocameras

Since I posted my “Yardbirds 2007” video to YouTube, I have been checking out what sort of chicken videos other people post. I’m not surprised to find out that other people are fascinated enough by chickens to video them doing chicken things. Lots of people document their rooster’s first crow, much like the baby’s first steps. I was surprised, however, to look at the background in these clips and notice how many people keep chickens inside of otherwise normal American houses.

And then there’s this one. Why on earth would you paint your rooster’s toenails such a pretty shade of red? There were lots of comments on this one, ranging from “How cute!” to shrill lectures on the dangers of nail polish. I figure there are a lot of different people in the world, many more than even I could imagine….

Misidentified Chickens

Silver Spangled Hamburg Rooster

A commenter on my YouTube chicken video told me that I had misidentified my rooster, that he is really a Silver Spangled Hamburg. I had never heard of a breed called Silver Spangled Hamburg, but a quick Google search brought me pictures of the breed and they looked a lot like my rooster. He had come to us as the "exotic chick" bonus in our shipment from Murray McMurray hatchery, and I had identified him as an Egyptian Fayoumis (below) based on the descriptions in the hatchery catalog.

The Fayoumis has a more upright carriage and an upright comb, while the Hamburg has a rose comb and is a little heftier.

I had another, more more embarrassing, chicken misidentification experience with Harry Houdini, a chicken that I agreed to adopt during an early morning phone call. I thought that Harry was a confused rooster; she turned out to be a very fancy and flighty hen. I was so surprised to find a page of Brown Leghorns and see that my "rooster" was a hen!

Now I have a Buttercup hen, another Mediterranean type breed. She is also fancy feathered, but flighty and she seems always on the run from the rest of the flock.

Chicken Citizen

(Note: Working with videos and Blogger presents some new challenges. When I went back to this post to add the "books" label at the bottom, I didn't wait for the video part to load correctly. When I reposted, the entire post was blank. I've reconstructed it as best I can.)

Al Gore, in The Assault on Reason, asserts that it is the one way nature of television that has propelled the downward spiral of democracy in America, and that the progress of internet technology in allowing everyone to contribute ideas and opinions to the idea marketplace that will eventually lead to a rennaisance of democracy:

Consider the rules by which our present public forum now operate and how different they are from the norms our Founders knew during the age of print. Today’s massive flows of information are largely only in one direction. The world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation.

Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They absorb, but they cannot share. They hear, but the do not speak. They see constant motion, but they do not move themselves. The “well-informed citizenry” is in danger of becoming the “well-assumed audience.”

I can't wait. As soon as I read that, I said to myself, "I've got to learn how to post videos!"

This is my first attempt. This is a video of my chickens roaming the yard on a rare sunny November day. The hens are Black Australorps, Partridge Rocks, and Speckled Sussex. The two Speckled Sussex always go everywhere together. The rooster is our "exotic chick" from McMurray Hatchery. We think it is an Egyptian Fayoumis.

You can see my stray grey hair blowing across the lens, and you can hear me breathing. The rooster does a great job of strutting his stuff, you can even see his slate blue feet. I thought he would crow, but he never did.

At the end, the Rhode Island Red comes up and pecks my hand. I don't know why I was so surprised, she does that every time I go in the barn.