The first thing my chicken did when she hatched eggs last month was hyperventilate. This same chicken that, for the previous three weeks, had been sitting perfectly still with a look of determination, but as soon as there was suddenly peeping and miniature versions of herself running around underneath her, she was looking around in a panic, as if to say, “Now what?”
Just like a human parent. A father, at least.
I’m still not 100% sure she knew this would happen.
And ever since then, she’s been in a mode of constant panic: the panic of someone who realizes that their kids are woefully unprepared for a world that wants to chew them up. The panic of someone who has just brought multiple children into the world in a single day, all of whom could walk on Day One and do not understand the word “No.” The panic of someone who just now realizes that her kids can fit out through the bars of her cage even though she cannot.
I could not have known that until after they hatched. That’s on me.
It was a little different last year. As I may have written before, my daughter, who’s a kindergarten morah, brought home a chick from school last year, which we named Yapchick. And then the next day my son brought home another chicken – Baby Mo – because chickens who live alone do not stop chirping. Chickens who live with others do not stop chirping either, but they at least stop between chirps to fight over food. And then that same son brought home a third chicken, which we named Henshe, giving us an odd number of chickens so they could vote on stuff. Though Henshe turned out to be a rooster. (Everyone was named before we knew their genders.)
Yes, there’s some amount of work that goes into keeping chickens – mostly in the form of Googling stuff – but then we get eggs! Mostly. If you want as many eggs as possible, all your chickens have to be kosher. Which mine are not. Yapchick is kosher, and Henshe is kosher, though he refuses to lay, but Baby Mo is some weird breed of mini-chicken (she’s about a third the size of the others) that no rav that we asked had ever seen before.
But it’s a good thing we keep her around, because apparently, she’s the only one who’s willing to sit on Yapchick’s eggs for the three weeks necessary to hatch them. Because as it turns out, a chicken has to make a conscious choice for motherhood, whereas Yapchick wanted to focus on her career.
As it turns out, chickens don’t just sit on their own eggs. They actually sit on as many eggs as they can find – even ones that are clearly too big for them – because apparently you can’t count your chicks until they hatch.
She started off sitting on nine eggs, and two of them hatched. They are not technically her babies, but I don’t know if she knows that, and I don’t know if she cares. That’s not how chickens work. If you hatch the eggs, you’re the mommy.
I think it will maybe dawn on her at some point, when the kids are bigger than she is, but most of my kids are taller than my wife, and my wife still insists they’re hers.
There are definitely benefits to having a mother raise your chicks over raising chickens yourself that you hatched in an incubator.
For one, the mother is a heat source. Chicks get cold, because instead of feathers, they’re made of fluff. And when this happens, the mother sits down, and they all take a break under her wings. In the old days (meaning last year), I had to make sure they were under a heat lamp, which was also a light lamp, so as long as it was on, the chickens thought it was daytime. We would cover the bin for the night, and they’d be in there with the lamp, running around all overtired and cranky. Whereas nowadays, when we turn off the lights, the mother gathers them under her wings and it’s bedtime.
For as long as that lasts. By the time they were a week old, she was basically fitting one chick under each wing, and their heads were sticking out. They’re just basically wearing coats. It’s good Hashem gave her only two chicks, instead of nine.
They could still fit through the bars of the cage, though, at that point. We have them in the house for the first few weeks, in a dog cage that we found on the side of the road. And here’s why:
There was no dog in it, baruch Hashem.
The coop is a maze of levels and ramps that the babies aren’t ready for yet.
I have not yet figured out a good system for the food. The babies aren’t supposed to eat the adult food, because it has too much calcium. And that isn’t a big deal because I could put it out of reach, but the issue I discovered, once I started bringing the babies out during the day sometimes, is that the adults keep polishing off the baby food. (“Yum! We used to eat this all the time! Remember? Why did we stop?”)
Experts recommend that you remove the mother and babies for the first few weeks, probably so the babies don’t start following the wrong chicken around.
Because the mother also teaches them about life. For example, she teaches them what to eat. Literally. She doesn’t just say, “Okay, all this food you can eat,” and gesture vaguely at the pellets. She picks up each piece of food and drops it directly in front of them one at a time: “This one’s good… This one’s good… This one’s good…”
I don’t know what her plan is if she drops something because it’s not food.
But this is as opposed to human babies, where the mother tries to teach them what to eat, but the baby prefers to taste whatever’s under the couch.
I do not recommend having chicks if you also have babies.
That said, raising chicks with a mother is definitely the way to go.
For one thing, I love the cooperation. They’re not fighting over food. I give them a slice of challah, and the mother rips into it and gives each baby a piece, they each run into a corner to eat it, and then they come back for more. And she tries to eat in between, if there’s time. Which there is not. Just another reason it’s better for her not to have nine babies.
(I’m not judging people who have nine kids. I’m saying that maybe don’t have nine kids all on the same day.)
For another thing, there actually is a bedtime. At some point, things get quiet. Well, quieter. The peeping is muffled by wings, somewhat. I actually think it’s hilarious hearing them peeping after lights out. Like that used to be my headache, and now I see the mommy sitting on them with an expression on her face like, “Ugh, go to sleep already.”
This must be what being a grandparent is like.
And if you’re tempted to pick up a chick after that time of night, the mother will peck you. Hard. She also tries to peck us if we interrupt her lessons to pick someone up. Which is one downside to using a mother, I guess. If you just have babies, you can hold the babies. If there’s a mommy, the entire time you’re holding the babies, the mommy is trying to peck you, and the babies are trying to get back to the mother.
We also bring in a lot of new people to see the babies, which makes her nervous. And those people want to hold her babies too. She doesn’t know these people. And we’re like, “Don’t worry; this is our neighbor from across the road.”
“Well, I don’t know her. Why would I cross the road?”
We spend a lot of time explaining to people how they’re all related. And everyone’s like, “Wait, she’s not the mommy? But who laid the eggs?”
“Okay, again, from the top: There’s the biological mommy and there’s the surrogate mommy…”
“But they don’t know she’s not their mommy?”
No. No kids know who their mommy is. They’re told, “I’m your mommy,” and they go, “Alright. Do you have food?”
Then they ask if we’re making a kiddush or a sholom zachor.
“I don’t know. What do we serve? Chickpeas?”
Of course, that’s their way of asking what gender the babies are. I thought I knew.
With the older chickens, I spent a lot of time last summer holding them up and staring at them at awkward angles, trying to determine if they were boys or girls. I don’t know what the chickens thought of me. I never knew what I was seeing, and nothing looked like the pictures, so whenever I picked them up, they were like, “Oh, great. It’s the awkward angles guy again.”
But this year there was another way that I heard about, based on how the wings are shaped the week that they’re born, and using that method, I determined that the older chick is a girl and the younger one is a boy.
And that allowed us to name them. I started thinking about Jewish names that are related to birds, and I came up with Faigy and Yonah.
My wife doesn’t like Yonah.
“He’s not a dove,” she says.
So we call him Roovy.
Anyway, as time goes on, I’m thinking more and more that we got it backwards. Faigy’s definitely bigger and has started developing a comb. It’s very possible that we’re going to have a rooster named Faigy.
We’re not switching the names now, because we could be wrong about being wrong. I suppose we can switch them later, once we’re sure. But I like keeping the wrong names, as a monument to the fact that we still have no idea what we’re doing.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
