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Everybody’s Danish - Fred A. Nielsen
By fred | October 11, 2008
Let’s forget about politics and go back in time to the early 1940’s, I was around 12 or thirteen years old then - the war years, my Danish / American Dad’s decision to raise chickens and pigeons for eggs and meat. Well - we got the eggs, hundreds of eggs, never did get any meat. Chicken on our menu ‘never’ did come from our back yard - the reasons why? A look back in time. Uncle Fred
CHAPTER (Smart pigeons, & one tough little chicken)
During the war years a lot of stuff was on ration, meat was one thing. Anyway Dad got this brain storm that we were going to have chickens and pigeons. We were going to raise them, the chickens for eggs and meat, and the pigeons for roast squab, a tasty dish in Denmark when he was a kid.
We had room in the yard to make the chicken coop, not a heck of a lot - but squeezed it in, with a nice little room for the chickens to lay their eggs, and stay protected and warm at night. Next to it was the small pigeons coop.
The pigeon deal did not last long, at the most a year or so. Oh we had several bunches of squabs (baby pigeons), we must have had at least twenty of them. Then one day Grandma was trying to feed them and somehow left the door to the cage open. Soon there were all the pigeons on the telephone wire above the yard. All we did was add to the wild pigeon population.
Now here we should discuss pigeons, don’t believe everything you hear or read. I am mainly referring to the so called “homing pigeons.” Dad figured if we were going to get pigeons we might as well get homing pigeons, and that if one or two got away that they would always be easy to catch as they would always want to stay home where they had been fed, and raised.
Homing pigeons are cute - they are sort of blue gray, with a little white blended in. They seem to be smart too. They knew us and would start to coo, and get excited when we come around the cage figuring we were bringing more food. Fat, these were well feed, overfed, as were all the chickens, our cat, no one went hungry.
One day at the evening diner table Mom mentioned something about feeding the chickens and pigeons - Grandma Marie said “Helga, I already fed them twice today.” Dad said “I gave them a bucket full when I got back from the route today.” Mom said “Fred, did you feed them today?” I had to admit before going to school, I went out to see them and they all looked at me like they were starving, so I have them a bucket full of feed. Now to keep the chickens and pigeons up to prime they should have been feed two buckets of feed a day. That day they had conned us out of five buckets. Tell me animals are not smart!
The day that Grandma made the mistake to leaving the pigeons cage door open - Dad was in the store when the news got to him. He said “Don’t worry, they are homing pigeons, just leave the cage door open and by night they will fly down and go back in because it’s their home, and they know food it there. We filled the food bowl inside the cage up to the brim, we even sprinkled a little of their food grain around the outside of the cage. No way!
We did not raise any dumb birds. The telephone wires that about a dozen of our pigeons were sitting on were only about forty or fifty feet from their cage. They just sat up there and seem to be saying, “Come down, do you think we are crazy? Up here there is freedom, room to fly, spread our wings and enjoy life, to hell with you guys and that tiny cage you want to keep us in.”
We finally went in the house, and were peeking out the back window watching, after all Dad said they would go into the cage. The next morning we noticed that all the feed we had scattered around the cage was gone. We couldn’t be sure that the pigeons had eaten it because our Banti hen, Henny, always had free range of the yard, so she may have eaten it all.
We were getting worried the pigeons would probably starve. We were wrong. Pigeons do not starve, they will eat almost anything. There are thousands of them in the cities, they will eat grass and weed seeds, bugs, worms, insects, anything they can get - you name it. And there is always water someplace. The funny thing was that some of them did sort of hang around. There always was a few on top of the house, garage, store, or chicken coop. And if we did throw some feed on the ground outside the chicken coop they would come and eat it,—–but go back in their former home, that little cage—–never! So don’t ever tell me a pigeon is dumb, I call it smart, very, very, smart!
For all the years we had the chickens, whoever fed the chicken, always dropped a handful on the ground outside the chicken coop, and most of the time a few of our freedom loving, free spirit pigeons would be there to say thanks for lunch.
All the time we did have the pigeons, we never did have the squab dinners that started the whole idea. Who the hell was going to do the dirty and kill one of them, not me, not Mom, not Grandma, and so Dad was elected. When told we were getting far too many pigeons in the little coop (cage), Dad agreed, and said “I’ll get some squabs for a nice dinner next week, when I have time.” Pop had time for about every thing else, for some reason he just didn’t have time for killing pigeons.
One day I saw him standing out by the cage, and I figured this is it. Dad just kept looking, and looking, and looking - then he kind of shrugged his shoulders and walked away. So much for the big moment of killing pigeons for dinner, just wasn’t in Dad to do the dirty.
How did we get the chickens? Einer Knudsen, Dad’s friend the dairy man, had some chickens on his farm, and told Dad he should get a hen and let her lay some eggs, them when she started to ‘sit’ and was getting ready to hatch them, take the eggs away some night and stick in some baby chicks from the farm supply store. The chicken would think the chicks were hers and bond to them and they to her, and she would raise them.
I don’t know how Dad screwed up, but he came home with this fisty, little Banti Hen. She was a very independent little thing, tough as nails and with time became family.
Our 16 pound cat “Kitty” soon learned that this was one tough little lady, and he soon decided to leave her alone, he tried once, besides Henny not backing off, being ready to fight, Mom gave him a lecture in no uncertain words. Do not tell me animals cannot understand, after Mom told Kitty off he never again tried to go after Henny. In fact in their later years, Kitty and Henny were sort of buddies, she would be scratching in the dirt looking for something to eat just a foot or two from Kitty laying in the sun. She knew he was no threat – of course Kitty knew that Henny was family he could get in deep, deep trouble if he even tried anything bad. They existed together, never in fear, I have to think each respected the others position in the family.
Henny was first put in the chicken coop, but for some reason that didn’t work for long. She soon had the run of the yard, and she never in all her years left that little yard, she was never again put in a fenced area. Oh, sometimes she would go through the fence to my friend Marvin’s yard, but that was it. I guess the reason that she was aloud to run all over the yard was that the big chickens in the chicken coop might step on her baby chicks so Dad figured it was better to let “Henny” have the run of the yard with her brood, and when she didn’t have chicks leave her alone.
A small box on some bricks to keep it off the wet ground if it rained, with a water proof roof Dad made, was her home on the side of the house.
Now there were other cats in the neighborhood and once in a while a stray dog would wander down the driveway and into the back yard. Several times one of them would figure - here is a nice easy feathered “lunch”. They soon found that Henny was not “lunch” for anything, or anybody. If you wanted some nasty pecks, and deep scratches you could try it, but the neighborhood animals soon found that she was too tough and let her alone.
I guess Dad realized that he may have goofed in getting a small Banti Hen like Henny to raise the chicks, because the chickens he wanted to raise for meat and eggs were Road Island Reds. Reds are very large heavy chickens and produce very large eggs. Each Road Island Red when full grown was at least three times the size of Henny. Anyway, Henny finally laid a few eggs, tiny small eggs and started to “set”. She was going to raise her first family. Of course, without a roaster the eggs were not fertile so she was really fooling herself. Dad and I went to the farm supply and picked up eight baby Road Island Red chicks and that night reached under Henny (she squawked a little) and inserted her new chicks. She must have wondered how in the hell the eggs hatched so fast, but then maybe she just figured that was the way things were.
The next morning we couldn’t wait to go out and see what happened. Did she bond with the chicks?- or did she reject them, we had been worried about this all night. There was Henny scratching a hole in the dirt looking for a worm or two for her new brood. She would find something and give a cluck and all the chicks would run to their new Mom looking to see what morsel Mom had found for them. Proud, she was cock of the walk, “look at the fine bunch of chicks I have” she seemed to be saying.
As the chicks grew however, it got to be a riot watching her and the chicks. When only half grown, each of the Road Island Reds was several inches taller and weighted probably twice what she did. But she was still Mom to them, she ran the show. When something would scare them, they would all run to Henny - she would fluff out her feathers, and spread her wings, and each of these big clunks would try and get under her wing, etc. for protection. At night she tried to cover all of them with her wings in their box, at best if a chick could get just a couple of feathers over him or her it would be happy. Some would just stick their heads under Mom’s wing, or chest, or backside. She was one tiny mama with eight very large chicks.
This tiny lady raised seven or eight batches of chicks, all big Reds. We had to agree that there was not a mother like her. She made sure all her chicks were well fed, if any got into fights she was right there to stop it and establish order, one hell of a Mom.
One day she had a fairly new brood of little chicks, they were in Marvin’s yard, for some reason, and we were watching them. In the sky we saw a hawk circling. What the heck a hawk was doing in the middle of Los Angeles is beyond me, but it was a hawk. We didn’t realize that something was going to happen until we saw it start to dive, then we realized it was after the chicks. We both yelled “Henny, watch out!” and she did.
That hawk was met ten feet off the ground by a very mad mama chicken. There was a tangle of feathers, and all of a sudden the hawk was flying away, and was flying away as fast as he could go. You could see that he figured he could get a meal a lot easier than having to fight for it. Banti’s are so light that they can fly at least ten feet in the air something we never saw Henny do before or again for that matter. Not one of her chicks was hurt or even touched. I picked up Henny and checked her over because we saw some blood on the ground, but she looked fine.
When the war was over we got rid of all the chickens, most were getting old, so Dad asked his buddy Einer Knudsen to take them out to his dairy - but not Henny, we just couldn’t do it. We figured she was getting old and deserved a rest, plus she was “family.” You do not get rid of family.
We figure Henny was about six months to a year old when we got her, she was over fourteen years old when one morning Grandma wondered why she wasn’t at the door waiting for breakfast. She had died peacefully in her sleep that night in the same box home she had lived in and raised all those chicks years ago. I never heard of a chicken living that long before, or since, but she did. She had carried her weight, did her job, had a long good retirement, and where ever a chicken heaven is, I’m sure that is where Henny is now.
Topics: THIS & THAT from Uncle Fred |