My Favorite Chicken Books - 2020
I don’t know how you spent your year, but more than likely it was pretty much like the way I spent it—lots of time at home. I’m fortunate to have this flock of chickens to occupy my time. There’s absolutely no hardship in spending lots of time with the Hipster Hens. I also have no problem with the time I spend reading books. Of course, books with chicken themes or at least a chicken connection keep finding their way into my hands. Here are my favorite chicken reads from the past year.
Barn 8
Deb Olin Unferth
Graywolf Press
2020
Perhaps you’ve heard the starfish parable, which was written in its original form by the naturalist Loren Eisley in his 1964 book, “The Unexpected Universe,” and has been retold numerous times since by a plethora of motivational speakers. It tells of a man who is walking on a beach littered with thousands of dying starfish that have been washed to shore by a storm. The man comes across a boy picking up the starfish one-by-one and throwing them back into the ocean. The man tells the boy, “This beach goes for miles and is covered with starfish. Your meager attempt to rescue them can’t possibly make a difference.” The boy gestures to the starfish in his hand before tossing it gently into the water. “It makes a difference to this one.”
I don’t know if Cleveland, a character in the novel Barn 8, knows the starfish story, but she obviously understands the concept. Cleveland steals (“releases…delivers…evacuates…”) a hen from a cruel confining cage of the Iowa factory farm where she works. A tiny drop in a large ocean of suffering when you think of the 150 thousand hens in the barn the hen came from – or the million hens on the factory farm – or the 340 million hens in the US. But then, aided by her friend Janey, she takes a few more, then a few more, and eventually they hatch a scheme to liberate the farm’s entire million hens in one night.
While even a million hens are a drop in the ocean, it is a significant enough drop to make people sit up and take notice. But how is such an undertaking even possible? If one can overcome the farm security, one needs a fleet of trucks for transport and an army of people to handle all those birds. And then there is the matter of the final destination. Starfish can go into the ocean, but where do a million abused hens go?
Cleveland and her assembled band of querulous animal rights activists, social misfits and hangers-on have a plan. Will the plan succeed? Will this ragtag band and their million chickens live happily ever after? The answer is in the book.
At Crossroads with Chickens
A “What If It Works?” Adventure in Off-Grid Living & Quest for Home
Tory McCagg
Bauhan Publishing
2020
In 2012, Tori McCagg and her husband Carl began building a weekend get-away on a remote collection of acres in the New Hampshire mountains. The house was off-grid; not hooked to any outside source of electricity. There were solar panels, storage batteries, and a backup generator for those times when their power use would be greater than what the sun would be able to provide.
About the same time, the postal service delivered six peeping balls of fluff to their house in Providence. The chicks grew, and one chick, Rhoda Red, was noted to have “wattles [that] had begun to look more distinct than any shy and retiring girl’s wattles should look. And her tail a bit plume-y.” Shortly after that Rhoda Red was rechristened “Big Red” the rooster. Providence did not allow roosters.
About that time the New Hampshire “weekend” house was nearing completion, and they began to wonder “Does a newly built off-grid house require oversight initially? Just for the first few weeks, to be sure everything is running smoothly...Three, maybe four months? The winter months. To avoid frozen pipes.”
Thus, in November 2012 Tory and Carl filled a rental truck with their belongings, including their hens and a lustily crowing Big Red and drove to Darwin’s View. The move became permanent. The story of what happened next is the story of their lives—both the humans and the chickens.
McCagg tells her amusing, poignant and very personal story honestly and contemplatively. A theme that runs throughout the book is her despair at the decline of our planet as the world changes to “something we oxygen-dependent, temperate-temperate creatures cannot survive in.” McCagg suggests that, “the only difference between this sixth extinction and any other is that it is human caused.”
If you care about our planet and living in a sustainable way, you’ll enjoy this book. To be clear, it’s a memoir, not a how-to book. But if you’re looking for a memoir that you can enjoy and learn from, this is one—a life well lived contained in a well written book. What more could you want? Oh…chickens? You want to read about chickens? Well, bingo.
(Read my full review of this book in Farmer-ish Magazine.)
Chicken
A Declaration of Love
Moreno Monti and Matteo Tranchellini
teNeues
2020
You’re probably familiar with the term “chicken math.” It’s the idea that regardless of how many chickens you originally planned to own, or how many you actually now have, you’re at the farm store and how can you possibly leave without that cute little chick that’s looking right at you and peeping your name – and maybe five of her sisters? I have a chicken book math problem with the books of Monti and Tranchellini. With the acquisition of the beautiful Chicken: A Declaration of Love, I think I’ve got them all now. Until, the next one comes out, of course. Like their previous books, this one is filled with gorgeous photographs of gorgeous chickens. The photos in this book are interspersed with essays by Anne Jacoby and Michael von Luttwitz about the domestication of the chicken, chicken cognitive traits, chicken vision, and all sorts of other topics totally fascinating to those of us who like looking at books of chicken photographs.
While their previous books were large format art books and perhaps priced for the collector, this latest book is available for a bit over $30 - maybe more affordable for the average book buyer. This book is not in any way some sort of bargain-basement knockoff, though. It contains the same opulent photographs as the previous books; page after page of chickens with their diverse colors, patterns and amazing feather-dos, all posing like professional poultry models. We chicken appreciators are lucky that these two talented and amazing photographers are chicken appreciators themselves and continue to captured images that they share in their beautiful books.
What’s Killing My Chickens?
The Poultry Predator Detective Manual
Gail Damerow
Storey Publishing
2019
Gail Damerow has drawn on her encyclopedic knowledge of all things chicken to write a number of fascinating and educational books on various aspects chicken keeping. This latest book takes a broad and deep look at all the animals that prey on our domestic chickens. Damerow takes a CSI approach and instructs you how to take an analytical view of the carnage after a predator attack to determine which predator attacked your flock. You’ll learn to assess the wounds on dead birds, to look for tracks, trails, and scat, to note which body parts are missing, the time of day the attack occurred, and the patterns of predation. The book also provides in depth information on each predator that includes pictures and range maps. In addition, there are two chapters focused on the practices and strategies you should have in place to secure your coop and run. Finally, there are “case histories” interspersed throughout the book; personal stories by Damerow and others about predator attacks suffered by their flocks.
If you own chickens or other poultry, this is an important book for you to read. If you’re a poultry keeper who reacts to a predator sighting by reaching into the closet for your trusty Winchester or by heading out to grab one of the traps hanging in the barn, then this book is especially for you—so you can learn how to protect your poultry while having a minimal impact on the natural world around you. Damerow writes in the book’s preface, “…Wildlife was here first. We, along with our domestic poultry, are the intruders. Because we introduced poultry into this forest, it’s our job to ensure that our birds are not more enticing and easier to obtain than the predators’ normal and natural fare…A predator’s attack is the fault not of the predator, but of the poultry keeper. Those of us who undertake poultry keeping take upon ourselves the obligation to keep our birds safe from harm.” From a book copiously filled with important information, that philosophy is perhaps the most important thing you can learn.
Sonya’s Chickens
Phoebe Wahl
Tundra Books
2015
You’ve got to love Sonya for the way she loves her chickens. Sonya’s papa comes home with three baby chicks and tells her that it’s going to be her job to take care of them. Sonya takes her chick-tending job very seriously, and tells the babies, “I’ll be your mama.” Soon the chicks are following her everywhere, peeping loudly as they go. And in her loving care, the chicks grow up, become full-grown hens, and Sonya waits for that first egg.
This, unfortunately, is where Sonya’s Chickens takes a traumatic turn. In spite of Sonya’s best efforts to make sure her hens are tucked safely in their coop each night, and in spite of her diligence in latching the coop door and carefully shutting the gate, one night a fox finds a spot where the siding is broken and forces his way into the coop.
I realize that this is a kids’ book, and fiction, but oh how I wish that Sonya’s mama and papa had read Gail Damerow’s book on predators (see the previous review). I’m sure that then they would’ve fixed the hole before the fox found it, and this disaster never would have happened.
As it is, Sonya finds two of her hens cowering in the coop rafters, and one hen is completely missing. This distressing tale comes with a life-lesson, and it is explained by Sonya’s papa. He holds her close and explains that just as Sonya and her family and her hens live their lives, the fox must live his life as well. And while the fox often feeds his family with small forest animals, sometimes he feeds them chickens. Just as Sonya’s mama and papa take care of Sonya, just as Sonya takes care of her hens, the fox takes care of his family.
It is a hard and confusing lesson for Sonya, or any child, to learn, and I dare say many children and adults have never learned it. I applaud Phoebe Wahl for taking on the daunting task of explaining the real truth about predators, the natural world, and the circle of life to children. With her simple story complemented with beautiful, bucolic illustrations, she has exactly hit the mark.
Why the Moon Tumbled Out of the Sky
and Other Poems
Poems by R. James Sands
Pictures by Ronan J. Sands
Blue Moose Publishing
2017
When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Rereading this book as an adult, I’ve come to realize that the genius of Stevenson’s book of poetry for kids was that each poem was a meditation on simple, commonplace events, experiences, and ideas that adults had stopped thinking about because the event, experience, or idea was so seemingly simple and commonplace. And upon reflection, I’ve also come to realize that the subjects of Stevenson’s poems perhaps were commonplace, but they were anything but simple. Rather, we adults have become so accustomed to them that we’ve become blind to their complexity.
The same sort of genius is at work in R. James Sands Why the Moon Tumbled Out of the Sky. Each poem leaves me thinking, “Oh, yeah. I remember that’s how I used to think about that – when I was a kid!” Thus, we encounter the incredible height and daunting challenge of the biggest slide, the alarm of coming in from outdoors and unsuspectingly brushing a bizarre insect out of our hair, the thrill of traversing a corn maze, and the terror of being sent on an errand into the menacing darkness of the cellar.
We meet Bullaby Bill, a beetle, who “did what beetles do; / he drank scarab tea / each day promptly at three; / then he beetled a hill or two.” Then there’s the black chicken named Poe who has an encounter with a fox that ends much differently than the chicken and fox encounter in Sonya’s Chickens. “She wasn’t quite a raven, / not even as close as a crow, / she was actually just a black chicken, / her people gave her the name Poe.”
The book’s illustrations by Ronan J. Sands, the author’s seven-year-old son, perfectly display the same innocent appreciation of the world’s commonplace things that the poems evoke. Read this enchanting book to your kids! Or read to yourself and recapture the wonder of childhood.
Peggy
A Brave Chicken on a Big Adventure
Anna Walker
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2012
Peggy is a small black hen who lives a happy, peaceful, and quiet life in a suburban backyard. Then one day, a gust of wind picks her up and transports her to the middle of the city. Most hens would be terrified by this strange new world and would try to find a small dark place to hide or would run in panicked circles in a fruitless attempt to find their way back home. But not Peggy. She relishes each new experience, and she eagerly watches, hops, jumps, twirls, and tastes. Eventually though, she decides that it would be nice to go back home, so some new friends help her find the way. I was totally charmed by this simple story, and was equally charmed by the delightful illustrations. And Peggy exudes so much pleasant personality that you’ll wish she lived in your backyard!
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