How to Touch a Chicken
aren’t these overalls enough?
The first time I was asked to touch a chicken, it was during our first real photo shoot for Milkwood. Our first serious magazine article, where we were meant to be farmers.
While we were indeed actual farmers… representing convincingly as farmers, who also believed in climate change (I know, sounds crazy now) was something that we felt we had to get right, in order to convince others of that same reality.
And so a few days before, I had asked the fancy Sydney hairdresser, because I’d gone to Sydney for a fancy farmer haircut, where I could buy some denim overalls.
I was aware that our seriously scruffy farm attire of weird 70’s vests and way-too-big-even-when-cinched-in but hey there’s lots of pockets Hard Yakka pants might not really be what the magazine piece was hoping for.
I was directed to a retro shop in Redfern, and I found some excellent specimens. And so I had the overalls, and I was ready for the farm shoot.
We asked our dear friends with the very beautiful farm if we could take the pics at their place - partly because it was much closer to the city, and also because their farm was green and lovely, unlike our bare and rocky hill country, in a watershed that we were trying to help rehydrate, but hadn’t managed to, as of yet.
“Just pick up that chicken,” the photographer said, and I froze.
Nick, being a lovely person, picked up the chicken. We got some shots, Nick holding the chicken, me standing there in my new overalls next to Nick. “Maybe pass Kirsten the chicken,” said the photographer, and I froze.
I’m wearing overalls. Isn’t that enough? Surely.
I picked up a pumpkin, instead.
Overalls AND a pumpkin! Enough to be proof of my status as Deep Farmer, yes? Actually no, said the lovely photographer - not the pumpkin - would you try the chicken…?
It was at this point, about eight years into our farming journey, that Nick realised that I could not touch chickens.
Chickens, to me, look like deeply, deeply evil psychopaths that have descended from dinosaurs - heartless, single-minded, evicerating demons who can smell fear - particularly mine. Their beady eyes, their pecky beaks, their scaly legs. They’re basically malevolent dragons in disguise as a bird, who lays breakfast.
I had managed to avoid touching chickens fairly well up to that point, despite us having many chickens. I was fine with eggs, I was fine with plucking dead chickens, I was fine with processing chickens, and fine with cooking chickens.
But touching alive chickens was something that made me want to shriek and flee, as all the voices in my head screamed RUN. RUN, NOW.
And in my 30s, I just didn’t understand that I could verbalize that touching chickens was hard for me. Amongst many other things.
I thought in order to be a homestead-y climate action badass farmer girl, I had to touch all the things, had to do all the things. And I could usually do most of the things… and the things I couldn’t do, I would learn quickly. But touching chickens was beyond the valley of death.
I looked up what this is called, just now… Alektorophobia - an intense, uncontrollable fear of chickens. Also, my teenager just told me that Steve Irwin (the Crocodile Hunter guy) lived with a mortal fear of Parrots! Which is known as Ornithophobia - the abnormal and irrational fear of birds.
Actually, I am quite glad that fear of chickens gets its own distinct name, and are not just lumped in with ‘birds’ - who are, mostly, fine and dandy. It also makes sense, given how scary chickens are.
By the time we shot the photos for that third book, I was no longer in the chicken-touching closet. I had verbalised my fear to at least 3 people on earth, I knew a lot more deep-breathing exercises than previously, and I was pretty sure I could touch a baby chicken, maybe even hold it up and look at it lovingly like backyard-farmers do, to their animal companions.
So Nick scooped up a baby chick, and I held it, and I even patted it, and I smiled, and the sun set behind us, and I was touching a chicken.
Weirdly (but also - of course), I happen to be the family member who cares for the chickens at our place.
I love these chickens. I care for them every morning, rain or shine. I love watching them, love seeing what they think is delicious this particular day. I plant hedges for them, and replant great knuckled silverbeet plants - past their prime but still sprouting leaves - in the chicken run for them to browse over winter.
I love the super-productive chicken-compost system we’ve set up in partnership with the chickens. I love caring for the broody hens, moving them to a warm safe place to chirp over their clutch of eggs for 21 days (their eggs, who are everybody’s eggs, as they gather whatever eggs get laid as their own) and I love watching them hatch their clutches of babies in the spring and the summer.
But touching chickens is still hard. I had always blamed my un-bridled panic on the exterior object (ie the chicken). A bit like characters in greek myth, before the concept of Id and the idea of internal impulses caught on… if you feel panic, it must be the evil monster bird.
Definitely not anything to do with my own internal workings. It must be the fact that the chickens are nightmare monsters. Nothing to do with me and my anxiety and neurodivergence.
Looking back through the mixed-bag of photoshoots over the Milkwood years, by various magazine photographers, I can see that I mostly got away with it:
However, things have improved, of late.
Now - because I am older perhaps, and certainly because I contain both far less fucks and slightly more self-regulation, I can actually touch a chicken as long as I have long-sleeved overalls on and gloves and a hat and eyeglasses.
Which is not, I guess, actually touching chickens, but I still feel pretty triumphant.
I’m thinking all this as tonight we are catching chickens. It has been a summer season of many new baby chicks, now that we have Eric Eriksson-son, the Quamby rooster who ‘works’… as the chicken parlance goes, for fertility.
By the end of the season, all the cutie-pie chicks are grown, and that means we usually have a whole lot of young roosters. Young roosters are beautiful and brave and wild and fabulous, but in any flock of chickens, one rooster is plenty.
When there are many roosters, as there always is at the end of a season of chick-raising, the young roosters will either fight, or in our case this year, all become great friends. But regardless of that, they will all try and ‘step’ on the hens as much as possible. The hens are not delighted by this.
The head rooster, who currently at our place is Eric Eriksson-son, is also not delighted by this young-rooster energy, and it’s just really not good for chicken run harmony. So the young roosters need to go.
So this evening, our friend Billie is helping Nick wrangle the three new young roosters, who have all just started to crow, into pet crates, so they can go to Billie’s house. The easiest way to do this is at night, after they’ve all gone to roost in the coop. It’s a flappy, squawky business, extracting just the birds you want by head torch with all the chickens protesting loudly, but it works.
At the same hour this evening, we have Colin arriving, to try and extract three young Quamby hens from the henhouse. The Quambys are a Tasmanian breed, and last winter Colin gave us a new Quamby rooster (Eric Ericsson-son) who, as said, as been a lovely flock-steward, and who also ’works’ (hence, the baby chicks this season). In return, the plan was to give Colin some of the young Quamby hens in autumn.
So there’s three young Quamby hens to find in the chicken house, three young roosters, and maybe even these two other big, beautiful black hens that we inherited from Bud, who have vehemently refused the attentions of Eric Eriksson-son, and clearly need to go to our friends’ house, to live in a girl-gang, un-harassed.
Strangely, as I’ve recently been fronting up to such things as my CPTSD, I find that I can apply the lessons of (slightly) better self-regulation to things like touching chickens. I might even help out, tonight.
Which surely is the whole point of therapy, right? Not everything is fixable, sure, but still…
Anyway, the moral of the story is: it’s now many years later from that first time. I have been through many pairs of overalls.
I’m still deeply in love with chickens, and sometimes, on a good day, I can touch them. And I would consider that progress and healing, and perhaps the ultimate growth I might expect in this lifetime.
Viva la evil dinosaur monster birds, who lay breakfast. Thank you for the learning.
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Viva la evil monster dinosaur birds, who lay breakfast indeed. And well done you. Complex trauma is real, and this is no small thing.
What a great, entertaining piece! So fun to read. I totally get it; I was chased one too many times by our overly zealous rooster as a kid and have a fear of them as well. That's why we raise quail!