March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Kitchen chicken finds new roost to rule> As Portland family nurses struggling hen back to health, she gets free range of their hearts

PORTLAND — Louise will spend Christmas with us. She isn’t a relative. She isn’t anyone’s mother.

Our friend Louise is a chicken. To be more specific, she is a 4-year-old, gold-colored Buff Orpington hen. She has a red comb and wattles. Her eyes are yellow-brown.

Louise is a free-range chicken whose range is our kitchen floor. She’s lived with us for the past six weeks. She will very likely stay with us until spring.

It was my wife, Jane, who brought Louise in from a cold chicken house to our warm kitchen. I’ll tell you about that later.

But first, more about our chicken.

Though I call Louise our kitchen chicken, that’s not entirely accurate. If anyone forgets to close the door to the living room, Louise quickly becomes a whole-house chicken. Then she tears leaves off my angel-wing begonia. She picks sleepy winter flies off window sills. She sidles up to our 10-year-old son, Jim, who plays with LEGOs in the living room.

“Mom,” he yells, “Louise is out of the kitchen.”

Then we come running, because there’s a fairly nice Oriental rug in the room, and Louise isn’t housebroken yet.

The fact is, we spend a lot of time cleaning up after Louise with paper towels. And we’ve been washing the kitchen floor more often, usually with pine oil.

But make no mistake. Though Louise isn’t house trained, she’s no dumb chicken.

She knows that food comes from the refrigerator. When Jane heads for the refrigerator, Louise slips and skitters over the floor to get there first. At mealtime she stands next to the kitchen table, waiting like a dog for handouts.

Louise drinks from the cat dish. She prefers cat food to chicken feed. She likes tortilla chips better than anything else.

From her first cackle at sunrise to 10 at night, when she walks into her softly padded box, Louise is a part of our family. And, yes, she lays eggs. They’re medium-sized eggs with cream-colored shells. She leaves them next to our wood-burning stove.

Why let a chicken in the kitchen? Why keep it indoors six weeks? Why write about a hen in the house?

Because Louise is a special chicken. Maybe her story is a Christmas story.

Six weeks ago, Louise was just an unnamed Buff Orpington chicken living with nine other hens and a rooster in our chicken house. Then she turned sick. Very sick. She couldn’t walk. She wouldn’t eat or drink.

I’ve seen a lot of chickens die in the 27 years I’ve kept chickens. Some get pneumonia. Some become crop-bound from eating too much of the wrong things. Many depart from a common form of chicken cancer.

In many cases, there isn’t much a poultry keeper can do for a sick hen. I expected this one to go within hours.

So I was surprised, on coming home from work the following day, to find the sick chicken in front of the wood-burning stove in our kitchen. It was early November. The weather had just turned very cold.

“I brought her in because she’s going to die, and I couldn’t stand to leave her in the cold chicken house,” said Jane. “Just let her stay.”

Like many creatures near death, the hen had lost control of bodily functions. Her feathers were plastered with mess. She smelled.

The next day, while Jane was out shopping, I gave the hen a warm-water bath in our turkey roasting pan. Jane’s blow dryer did a fine job drying the chicken’s feathers.

“You’ve killed her,” said Jane, when she saw the bedraggled chicken, too weak to lift its head from the floor.

But this chicken wouldn’t die. She was on her feet the next day, pecking feebly at tortilla chips. In a week she was much stronger. She slurped down strands of spaghetti. She chased our cats away from their dishes, so she could eat their food.

For a while we called her Lucille Blue Seal, in honor of the chicken feed manufacturer in Massachusetts. Then Louise stuck as a name.

Today, Louise is thoroughly bonded to us. She stands under the kitchen table at meal time, pecking us on our elbows if we forget to give her treats. She follows Jim around because she wants companionship. If I sit cross-legged on the kitchen floor in the evening, she climbs onto my legs and roosts.

Louise has gained about two pounds. Her comb has turned bright red. She lays an egg almost every day. Twice, she’s used the cat box.

But in many ways we would like to see Louise back in her chicken house. We use a lot of paper towels cleaning up after her. We’re buying extra tortilla chips. A house is no place for a hen.

But this morning it was zero outside, and Louise is used to lolling around in front of the kitchen stove. Besides, she’d get depressed living with common old chickens.

So we’ve faced the situation bravely. We have a hen in the house for winter. She’s our kitchen chicken. She’s the hen Jane saved from the cold.


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