I'll bet you didn't know that chickens had a culture. I didn't before we moved my daughter Jane's little flock of mixed Red Jungle Fowl and some Bantam hens onto the back porch area. We moved them last winter because of marauding raccoons that broke into the chicken pen and killed all the big Buff Orphfington chickens. Also, it was too cold for them out there. You wouldn't think it could get cold enough here in Southern California, even in the mountains, to cause the death of chickens, but my friend Carmen says it happened to her chickens. So we moved them to the back porch. It isn't really a porch, just a set of steep stairs to the ground, and a shelter with several windows and a couple of doors built around it as an afterthought. The chickens are safe and happy there. We can peek out of a little window in the kitchen door to keep an eye on them when they get noisy.

And do they ever get noisy! Sometimes there is such an uproar we are certain we are going to see raccoons or a snake has gotten at them. The noisiest of all, of course, are the two roosters that compete with each other in which can crow the loudest. Both roosters came as unhatched eggs mothered by a little black Bantam hen when Jane acquired her first few chickens.

Since then that same black hen has hatched a duplicate of herself, and some other colorful eggs from other mixed breed chickens. Thank goodness there were no more roosters out of those eggs! The last five hatchlings were all hens. In color and design, they range from red with other color patterns in the feathers, to all black, to one absolutely all cream-colored little half grown hen. I can't imagine where her genes came from. All the others are variegated colors of black and white, red and gray and white, or all black. The roosters are both a classical pattern of bright brown bodies, iridescent green tails and big red combs.

We have had chickens since last fall when Jane decided she had enough of her allergy problems from inorganic eggs. She feeds these chickens with organic feed. Now the flock has grown to 14 in all. There are two roosters, Peep and Big Red, and a dozen unnamed other members of the chorus. The culture I mentioned comes from their predictable actions. We get as many as six eggs a day, but other than the two black hens, the other hens don't try to hatch their eggs. The original little black Bantam hen and another duplicate of herself that she hatched last fall, do all the mothering. They sat on five eggs side by side in the laying box to keep the eggs warm, and once the eggs hatched, together they ushered the babies around and protected them from any danger from the rest of the flock. The babies are now about half-grown but they still have their two little black guardians with them at all times.

Unless you are partial to barnyard sounds, I don't recommend keeping roosters. Big Red and Peep are prone to sound their Cock-a-doodle-doos any time of the day or night. They see the night light through the window in kitchen door, and I guess they think the sun is rising. But the biggest hullabaloo is when a hen lays an egg. We have come to recognize the cause of all their jubilation and call it the Egg Song. Not only the mother of the egg, but all the hens give a 'sqwaak sqwaak sqwaak SQWAAK kuck, and the roosters keep crowing. What a racket! After many flying trips to see what was wrong, we finally realized that is just their way of celebrating a possible new member to the flock. Little do they realize we will be scrambling that egg for breakfast, or making baked custard within a day or two before it grows into a chicken embryo.

If chickens weren't endowed with their puny chicken brains, they might appreciate that at least they, themselves, are in no danger of being eaten by us. We are almost vegetarians, Jane more than I. I grew up on a farm and after a chicken was about a year old and her laying prowess began to slack off, she had her head chopped off. She ended up as roast chicken for our Sunday dinner or when guests arrived unexpectedly for dinner.

My mother was never at a loss when we had unexpected guests. She would just put hot water on the stove to boil, excuse herself, and run out the chicken house. She would grab a couple of the oldest hens, chop off their heads on the chopping block, and before you knew it they were dipped in boiling water to make plucking the feathers easier, gutted and cleaned and popped into the oven. Produce from our garden, home made preserves, and pies made that morning or the day before if it were Sunday, made a fine meal. She usually pressed fresh vegetables and preserves onto the guests to take home with them.

But I digress. That is old-fashioned people culture. We were talking chickens here. I just wanted to point out that given half a chance, chickens have lives of their own too. Those pitiful chickens, forced to lay their eggs in confined spaces in the big, long metal barns that you see, never have a happy moment. No rooster-led 'Egg Songs' for them. That's why when Jane and I used to buy our eggs, we insisted on buying eggs from free range chickens that were allowed to live a little while as chickens were meant to live before they were slaughtered to please our appetites. Sometimes I feel really guilty when I am enjoying fried chicken or roasted chicken with stuffing. I wish I could learn to like tofu a little more.