All Hail the Heirloom Hen

We let our first broody hen sit on two of her fertilized eggs as an experiment. And we were pleasantly blessed with a miracle of life as our first two chicks, Guavaberry and Pebbles, hatched a little over a week ago after being incubated naturally for exactly 21 days by their mother hen Wilma, whom has been diligently caring for her small brood ever since, teaching them all they need to know to find food and drink, keeping them warm and safe from harm. All hail the heirloom chicken breeds that not only still know how to care for their own, but that do so completely independently of, and really in spite of, human intervention!

The majority of poultry in the world, raised for commercial purposes, have been so regressively bred from their ancestors that their very survival as a species, their instinct to mate, to lay, to incubate, to hatch and to raise their young has been almost completely bred out of them. The majority of commercial poultry are extremely dependent on the intervention of humans for feeding, the treatment of illnesses, insemination, and electrical incubation so that even though they remain biological beings, commercial poultry have been transformed into little more than commodities in a system of food production. The widespread prevalence of these human-dependent breeds makes small-scale poultry raising difficult and expensive in costs, time and energy. But through the internet and special interest community groups, stocks of heirloom breeds are becoming more and more available to all aspiring self-sustainers the world over.

Thankfully, finding and raising fairly self-sufficient heirloom breeds of chickens or other domesticated farm animals and seeds is still the norm in southern Chile, which has made our forays into the raising of poultry one more of observation rather than aggressive intervention. We receive an egg a day from each of our hens all year round with our only feeding being a little handful of grain in the morning and again before sundown. They graze on grass and insects and their egg yokes are a deep orange from the natural diet. With a rooster at the lead, our few hens graze freely among the forest undergrowth under watchful protection and come home every night to roost in their coop. This is the way chickens were raised in all those old idioms repeated down from our great-grandparents, where the animals on a farm lived in a rather cooperative exchange with humans, at least more so than can be found on the modern, large-scale industrial farm. Come Spring, any visit to the farmer’s market in Valdivia is a colorful display of heirloom eggs for sale, blues and greens, every shade of brown and cream laid by hens of a whole range of colors and patterns. It leaves much to aspire to. In the meantime, a toast to our dear Wilma and her beautiful instinct toward motherhood and the raising of two healthy chicks!