A little Pennsylvania Dutch rhyme goes:
On kee un geil hov ich mei frait
un aw on goota seiOn hinkel iss wull net feel gelt,
Ovver meer hen see aw dabei(Of cows and horses I have much joy
Also with good pigsOn chickens we don’t make much money
But we have them with us too)Why don’t chickens lay eggs at night? Because at night they are all “roosters.”
As noted last week, early Pennsylvania’s chickens were a tough and mongrel breed able to fend for themselves and endure winter’s cold. Being easy to transport and feed, they were included with the cargo of many early expeditions to the new world. They were brought to Pennsylvania by the Dutch and Swedes and later the English, so by the time William Penn landed in 1683, there was a “great store of poultry” in the province.
In the early days, there were no chicken houses, the hens being left to fend for themselves around the farmstead. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, various chicken houses, coops and shelters began to appear.
An essential feature of chicken houses was the roosts, which were best made in a specific way. Chickens instinctively want to get off the ground at night and roost in trees. On the early farms, there would have been a favorite tree near the barn where the whole flock of chickens roosted year round. When a chicken flexes its knees and settles down to sleep, tendons in the legs naturally cause the toes to tighten and grip, so the bird can hold on to a branch without muscle exertion. The best branches for roosting were a few inches in diameter.
Taking advantage of this natural tendency to grip, the top corners of square laths fashioned for roosts were rounded off, mimicking the rounded branch that the bird’s foot is adapted to gripping. The laths were nailed onto frames about 18 inches apart, the frames mounted four or more feet above the floor, and on these the birds would sleep, perched tightly together and often tucking their heads under a wing.
The instinct to roost in trees is strong. More than a half-century ago, on my boyhood farm, when we might have had a thousand or more pullets (immature chickens) “on the range” during the summer, the ridges of the range shelters and all surrounding trees were full of roosting chickens at night. They would gladly forego the inside roosts in favor of the high branches.
The bane of outside roosting at our farm along the Minister Creek was the raccoons that would climb the trees, panicking the chickens into flying down where they would soon be caught, killed and carried away by the same raccoon that had scrambled down right after them. My father was convinced that encasing a few feet of the trees’ trunks in a tin sheath would prevent the raccoons from climbing. The fact that the raccoons still took chickens whenever they wanted didn’t shake his confidence in the system.
To try to chase hundreds of chickens into protective shelter every night was impossible, since they had an intense instinct to roost high off the ground. The only way to stop the raccoons was, unfortunately, to shoot them. At night, when the chickens would scream in panic, we would release a small dog that would promptly tree the raccoon, allowing us to spot it with flashlights and dispatch it. There was nothing else to do.
The time to catch chickens for transport was while they were roosting. In early September, when it was time to move the pullets from the outside range to the laying house, they could easily be picked off the roost at night, with little squawking or flapping, popped into crates, and then released in their new quarters.
Keep reading next week for Part III of “Hinkel und Oyer.”
The Historian is produced by the New Hanover Historical Society. Call Robert Wood at 610-326-4165 with comments.
