Barbara Wood's Home Front: First came the chickens, much, much later, the egg Barbara Wood's Home Front: First came the chickens, much, much later, the egg (January 21, 2004)

By Barbara Wood

My husband says it was the best egg he's ever eaten.

I hope so, because we figure it cost at least $500.

Last week our chickens laid their first egg. Brenna found it in the coop while feeding them. The rest of us were so excited we took photos and the little white egg took a place of honor in our refrigerator until Dan fried it up for breakfast.

We waited a long time, and worked hard, for that egg. Brenna got the chickens as a 4-H project in March. They were ordered from a catalog and delivered on St. Patrick's Day as tiny balls of fluff. We rigged up a box with a heat lamp in the garage and coddled the chicks until they had real feathers, had outgrown their box, and could survive in their coop.

There were five of them -- two Buff Laced Polish, two Golden Campines and a Silver Leghorn, all handsome "show chickens" Brenna planned to enter in the county fair.

The Leghorn, who turned out to be a rooster, is no longer with us. We found out he wasn't a hen early one morning when I woke to what resembled the sound of someone being strangled in our backyard. "Uuuuuurky, uuuurky, ooooooh" he feebly croaked. Apparently roosters have to practice to get it right.

Fortunately the backhoe operator working on our driveway offered to add the little rooster to his flock, so we didn't have to learn how to pluck a chicken.

We took to calling the others "the blonds" and "the redheads." The Polish (the blonds) have a funny little crown of off-white feathers on their heads that appear to cover their eyes, making it unclear if they can actually see. The Campines have copper-colored heads, and a black and copper striped body, and seem to all the red-headed members of my family to be way smarter than the blonds.

The Polish can't fly as well either, a fact made clear one day when I watched one try over and over to flap her wings hard enough to fly up to the bunny hutch where all the other chickens were munching bunny food. Apparently it didn't enter her head to walk up the ramp to the hutch as the other three chickens had done.

We worried a little about how our Labrador retriever puppy, Moose, would share his yard with these birds, but they seem to co-exist quite peaceably. And now that we've fenced in our vegetable garden, they won't be able to eat all our tomatoes again next year.

And if we get a few more eggs, the cost should go way down. We figure the chickens cost about $15; their food has cost about $50; the heat lamp, feeder and waterer, another $35; and wire and lumber to fix up the coop and make it safe from predators, about $400 more.

Next week we plan to order four more chickens. This time we're getting only the type advertised to lay lots of eggs.

Barbara Wood writes from her home in Woodside, assisted by three red-headed children, a chocolate lab, four chickens and a black bunny. Her column runs the third week of the month.

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