Red Hens and Banties

We started out with red hens, about 8 of them, I think. They were good egg layers and very pretty to see pecking around the yard and the henhouse.
We had a small henhouse complete with nestboxes. We stuffed hay in the nestboxes and soon they had the hay all formed into the shape of their bodies, round and smooth, just like a bird’s nest. There they lay the nice brown eggs which we gathered every day. Sometimes we needed eggs while they were still sitting on their nests, and then we had to reach under them to get the egg. Sometimes they squawked at this, and sometimes they tried to peck the intruder’s hand. I didn’t like reaching under them. Maybe I wore gloves; I can’t remember.

We soon learned that in order for the eggshells to be strong enough so they didn’t break, we had to feed the hens ground up oyster shells in their feed. We had a big aluminum feeder, shaped like a cylinder, with a tray underneath it. As the chickens ate from the tray, more feed would fall from the cylinder into the tray.

We did not succeed in growing our own feed for the hens. Ideally, all the food we gave our animals would have come from our own farm, but we never reached that ideal stage. We bought our chicken feed from the Coop in town. (Truro). We also bought our feed for the cows from the Coop. However, I think in those days the food was pretty healthy and did not have protein added to it. Our chickens got their protein by eating the bugs around the yard. I guess in the winter we gave the chickens fishmeal.

I remember the cold winter days when I had to go out and break the ice in the chickens’ water, which I think was in the same kind of feeder as the grain. That was the hardest part, I think, giving the chickens water in the winter without having it freeze solid. There are a lot of details like this that I can’t quite remember, but I do remember breaking the ice and adding new water.

I didn’t carry the water buckets to the barn for the animals very often. The older boys did that, Randy and Jody. And I guess the banty chickens ate from the same place as the red hens. They all got mixed in together because eventually we had mixed colored hens, not red, but still the same size as the red hens. The banties were smaller than the hens. They were so much fun.

The boys didn’t like having them roost in the barn. They used to get very cross when they reached for a bale of hay from the hayloft and got their hand in some mess left by the banties. I don’t blame them for being cross. Here they were being so good to help out on the farm, and they never complained about their chores. The least we could have done was listen to them and create some sort of new place for the banties to roost.

But I guess the farm work was overwhelming for Dave and me sometimes too. And there was always the problem of not having enough money to do what needed to be done on the farm. We always seemed to collect more animals than we had room to keep them in properly.

So the banties roosted in the barn, and they lay their eggs up in the hayloft. They went deep into the hay, way back where no one was reaching, and they lay their eggs. They had gone “broody” and so they sat on their eggs in the dark of the barn, where no one could find them. Then, one day, we would see a mother banty hen, proudly leading a line of tiny fluffballs behind her. And the boys would groan, knowing there were going to be more banties to poop on the beams of the hayloft. The banties were too small and skinny to eat. There was not enough meat on their bones to bother with. So they just multiplied. And we realized why the MacKenzie family in Lansdowne had offered us some of their banty roosters – for free!

That was the beginning of our banty problem. But they also provided us with a lot of small eggs when the red hens weren’t laying enough to provide us with the eggs we wanted. We used to send TJ up into the hayloft to go on an egg hunt when we needed those banty eggs. I don’t remember that he ever complained about his chore, except I do remember one day when he was climbing around in the hay and fell backwards against a rabbit cage and cut his back. We had to take him to the dr. for a tetanus shot and to have stitches in his back. We felt really bad, knowing that it was our poor farming practices that had caused our youngest to be hurt. Wire rabbit cages were not meant to be stored in the hayloft!

This accident must have happened in the later years of our stay on the farm, when we had practically no income. We were living almost entirely from the bounty of our land and from the animals we had gathered around us. When we told the doctor how the accident had happened, he said:
“Oh, you have bantam chickens! I love them; they are so interesting!”
So we paid him his bill with as many bantam chickens as we could get him to take.

The interbreeding of the red hens and the bantam roosters produced some very lovely chickens, with unusual colors and hens that were laying larger eggs that the pure bantam hens laid. That way we supplemented our laying hens without having to buy new red hens. The red hens didn’t go broody the way the bantam hens did. Maybe we never gave them the chance.

I remember one hen I especially liked. She was a mixture of red hen and bantam. She was white, with black tips on some of her wings, and for some reason, I named her blossom. Eventually, she did go broody and laid her eggs away from prying eyes and snatching hands, and came out of hiding with a brood of baby chicks. I was always enchanted by the tiny little balls of fluff that moved on invisible little sticks of legs. Watching Blossom with her chicks was a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, our neighbors down the road had a problem with a marauding fox. The fox came and killed quite a few of their ducks, leaving them strewed around in their field. I felt that the fox was more important than our neighbor’s ducks, so I didn’t feel very sorry. I had seen the fox sitting at the edge of one of our fields, watching us. I admired him and liked to think of him watching us.

But then one morning I awoke to a squawking outside my bedroom window, next to the barn. I looked out the window just in time to see the fox running away with Blossom in his mouth! It was too late to do anything. I ran out and saw Blossom’s tiny chicks huddled helplessly in the dirt next to the barn. What could we do? All we knew to do was to hope that another mother would adopt them and show them how to find food.

However, as the days passed, it became obvious that this was not going to happen. The other hens completely ignored the poor, motherless babies. We had just about made up our minds that they were going to die unless we brought them into the house and tried to feed them. And then one day the strangest thing happened! One of the bantam roosters became their mother! We couldn’t believe our eyes, but sure enough it was happening!

One of the roosters stopped spending the nights roosting on a beam in the barn. He stayed down on the ground and protected the baby chicks. He tried to spread his wing feathers over them, and he stayed with them all day long, taking them around and teaching them how to find food. This was a revelation. A rooster turned mother hen. Who would believe it if we told them? It was a farm story that we loved to repeat among ourselves with awe and wonder in our voices. Nature was the marvelous mother, knowing best how to help all her creatures survive.

There is another story about the bantam roosters that we used to tell over and over again. This story was not as happy as the mother rooster story. It was a story of the fight for male dominance. Two of the roosters came of age at the same time. And that meant that one of them had to be the boss of the hens. Only one. And so one day they began to fight. They fought for hours, or so it seemed. They fought each other all the way around the house, as we watched from the windows, going from room to room to follow them. They fought on and on. We were afraid that one of them would be killed, but we didn’t dare to interfere. We just watched in amazement at how ferocious they were and how long their stamina kept them fighting. Finally one of the roosters was defeated.

The winner crowed his victory and strutted proudly, though he must have been exhausted. However it was the loser that made us shake our heads in wonder and concern. We had heard the expression, “crestfallen”, but now we saw what it really meant. The defeated rooster’s bright red crest was drooped over to the side. Fallen way down. And not only his crest was fallen, his feathers were drooping as well. He was the picture of humiliation and abject misery. If he could have crawled, he would have crawled away. But as it was, he slunk away and was not seen for a day or so. When we did see him again, he was still crestfallen and unbearably beaten. We were afraid he would die of shame. But he didn’t die. He became a very quiet and subdued rooster, and carefully stayed out of the way of the Boss.

The bantam rooster that we loved the best was a beauty, with colorful ribboned feathers of red and green. We named him Bo Jangles, and it was a perfect name for him. Actually, if we had thought of it, we would have spelled his name, Beau Jangles. He was a proud addition to our barnyard and crowed every morning, standing on a fencepost near the red hens’ house. Little did we know when we accepted the MacKenzie children’s gift that our chickens would become such an exciting part of our life on the farm.

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