“On Monday, Farmer Greenstalk dropped his watch down the well … Who will come to the rescue? Would you believe … chickens? Believe it! The amazing chickens on the Greenstalk farm race to help various family members every day of the week … every day until Sunday, that is, when Emily Greenstalk has a little…
In a recent essay on The Awl, Maria Bustillos said something that resonated with me: “The key difference between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Violet Winspear is—the beard, obviously, but in terms of literary production, the difference is that the latter is thinking more about you, the reader, whereas the former is thinking more about himself, the…
Here in California, we have two seasons: rainy season and fire season. Where the edges of those two meet, you have spring and fall, but only briefly, before you get to the main event, both of which last for months. This year, though, we seem to have dispensed with winter and are having a nice…
I’ve been rescuing chickens for ten years, but even now I make mistakes. Witness poor Millie. She was molting for the first time and feeling pretty miserable, so at bedtime I put her up on the “safety platform,” which is just a glorified storage shelf, above where the other birds roost. Since Millie is low…
The autumn equinox has just passed, bringing falling leaves, too much zucchini … and molt. There are feathers everywhere. Egg production is down. And rampant crankiness prevails in the coop. Chickens molt every year at about this time. Some go through a “catastrophic molt,” where they lose nearly all their feathers and run around looking…