The Departure of Brown Betty

             

Brown Betty is the hen to the left of the waterer.

   Brown Betty was hatched here in an incubator in 2009. She was part of the mass hatching that my husband and I did, for the first time, the year after our youngest son died. We were determined to make this place a farm, just as we believed our youngest son would have.  We did everything so carefully that the hatching of fertilized eggs which normally yields a 50% viability, yielded 100%. (I will admit to helping two of the chicks get out of the eggs, when they might not have emerged otherwise.) Both those two I had helped, later died of cardiac anomalies, which leads us to consider whether leaving the weaker chicks in the eggs might be the kinder action to take, but one never really does know.

                    Brown Betty was not one of the largest hens, but she was not one of the smaller ones either. She was a maternal hen, and I noticed that she was helpful to each set of chicks, even when only one or two were hatched each year, even when we weren't deliberately hatching any. Brown Betty was good to chicks even when they weren't her own.

                    This year, Brown Betty would already be nine years old. One afternoon, in the past couple of weeks, we went out and fed all the chickens, and she was there at the feeding trough. A short time later, there she was dead at the side of the trough. There were no markings, she was afebrile, no obvious infection, nothing. All I can think is that she collapsed and died of a heart attack. Chickens do have heart attacks sometimes. I am glad that she likely did not suffer and likely died very quickly.

                      This morning Brown Betty was buried in a nice spot overlooking the poultry family she had known for her long life. Somehow, she had eluded foxes, possums, raccoons, and birds that occasionally plucked a rooster from the yard, and then broke their necks and carried them off as food.  She will be missed by chickens and by human beings alike.