Story time with Mitchell: Jami, Me, and Chickens. My eleventh-grade science fair project involved egg-laying hens and whether or not the human fertility drug Clomid would increase their production. Jami was my partner, and I wish I could remember which of us thought of it, but that detail escapes me twenty-nine years later. Our Advanced-Placement biology teacher Mrs. Higa said there might be some concerns with animal treatment issues, but her judgment was that we were okay, and if by some miracle we made it to the district fair, the judges would agree that we were in the safe zone. Either that, or Mrs. Higa was confident that there was no way our project could make it to districts and we simply had nothing to worry about. I wouldn’t have been offended if she’d just said that: Jami and I (with our usual third partner Kristy) were pretty much the worst lab team in our class, finding ways of messing up even the simplest lab assignments. Kristy wisely decided on a solo project for the science fair. Once we were sure Jami could get some Clomid from her OB-GYN grandfather, our challenge was getting chickens and finding some place to keep them. My parents live in an Aiea neighborhood whose homeowners’ covenant prohibits livestock, and Jami lived in a townhouse in Makakilo, which provided logistical issues since I couldn’t drive and didn’t want to stick Jami with all the hen-keeping chores. In a move of utter boldness, I asked the school for permission to build a chicken coop on the roof of the administration building, right over the old art room and right outside the old development office. Mr. Harris and Mrs. Hom passed the request to Col. Sagert, and the president of the school said it was okay with him if it was okay with the other involved parties. Once Mrs. Oshiro in the development office was on our side, I knew we’d get permission. We did. Jami and I did research on the care and feeding of chickens, and Jami’s dad built the coop one weekend with materials Jami and I went halvesies on. It was basically a ten-foot square enclosure divided in fourths (we had to keep the hens separate so we’d know the control eggs from the variable eggs), with a hinged, corrugated roof we could swing open so we could clean the coop and refill the shared feed dish. Each compartment had a separate water dish because it was in their drinking water that we planned to administer the drug. You know that long building on Nimitz Highway in Kalihi where the chicken facilities are? If not, you’ve driven past it a million times without ever noticing it--it’s the one in whose parking lot they often have huli-huli sales on weekends. There used to be a few businesses there, supplying slaughtered chickens to the markets. I’m not sure how many are left, but there is still at least one. Jami and I thought that if we were going to buy some hens, we might as well save them from the supper table too, so we called one of those businesses at lunch one day from the phone in Mrs. Higa’s prep room. The guy who took our call in heavily accented English assured us that he could sell us four healthy, egg-laying hens. We tried to emphasize the importance of that egg-laying part, that it was important to our project, and he kept saying yes, yes. The hens would be egg-layers and when did we want to pick them up? There was some reason I couldn’t ride with Jami to the facility to pick up the chickens at lunch the next day; it might have been some kind of meeting I couldn’t get out of. When she got back to school, she carried a small cardboard box with air holes cut into the top. The box was about the length and width of a large laptop computer, and about six inches high. “That’s them? All four of them in that little box?” “Yep. I watched the guy pack them in himself. You’re going to be amazed at this.” We went up to the coop on the roof, placed the box inside, and cut the string tying the box shut. Its fluffy contents looked like it must be one of whatever it was, just this mass of feathers packed tightly into a box, but then the heads appeared, the hens looking kind of surprised, as if they’d been awakened from a very long sleep, but then they stretched up and out, stepping out of the box like clowns from a tiny car, separating themselves into the four separate pets we now owned. They were enormous! Jami was right: I was amazed at how such large animals could be smushed down into such a small box, but there they were. I remember not being at all nervous about just picking the hens up and placing them in their assigned sections of the coop. “Gertrude,” I said, pointing to one. “That one’s name is Gertrude.” “Where’d you get that?” Jami asked. “It just seems like exactly the right name for a hen.” “Fine. I’m naming that one DeNiro and that one Dave.” “Gertrude and Gabriela,” I said, thinking of my favorite women’s tennis player. “Great. We’ve named them. Project complete!” Jami said. The experiment was about six weeks in duration, and it was one of the most annoying six weeks of my life. Jami and I loved our hens, and on school days it was no problem taking turns feeding them and checking up on them. They seemed pretty happy to us, especially at feeding time. Weekends were a pain. We worked out a schedule, taking turns coming in on weekend mornings to give the hens food, change their water, record the data, and do some general cleanup as necessary. Since I was still a bus-rider, for me this meant getting up early and taking ninety minutes to two hours just to get to school. The chicken chores themselves took only half an hour at most, and then it was back home on the bus for another ninety minutes to two hours. Most of the time I guess I didn’t mind it that much, but Jami went on a Thanksgiving weekend trip, and I remember having to get up extra early on Thanksgiving morning just so I could be home in time for my family’s holiday celebration. That was a lonely, rainy trip out and back, and the hens, at this late stage of our project, seemed far less happy than they’d seemed weeks earlier, so it wasn’t exactly rewarding anymore. At this point, Jami and I knew our project was a failure (we wouldn’t see a single egg the entire time!), so we were just riding it out to completion. When the experiment itself was over and it was time to collaborate on the report, Jami and I were confronted with a new problem: what do we do with the hens? Our classmates chimed in with hilarious and completely unhelpful suggestions, most of them involving a barbecue, but we had fallen in love with Gertrude, Gabriela, DeNiro, and Dave from the moment we named them, and there was no way we would allow someone to eat them. Plus, we were just a little worried that the Clomid we’d fed two of them might make them somehow very dangerous to consume. After school one day, we packed the hens into two of those boxes that photocopier paper is delivered in. We tried to get them into one box, but neither of us had the heart to cram them in there so indelicately, as if their dignity at this point could somehow be compromised further than it already had been. We taped the boxes shut, loaded them into the back seat of Jami’s yellow, convertible Volkswagen Beetle, and headed for the zoo without a real plan. What safer place could there be for any bird than the Honolulu Zoo? We sat there, car idling in the zoo parking lot, bouncing ideas off each other. Could we somehow throw the boxes over the fence and just speed away? If we cut the tape down to just one tiny strip, the boxes would probably pop open when they landed, and the hens would be free in their new home. What if one of us paid to get in, then caught the boxes as the other threw them over the fence, and then released the birds? Or why don’t we just walk right up to the ticket counter and say, “We have these four lovely, well-cared-for hens that would make a nice addition to the zoo’s population?” We thought that risked our being told no, and then being left with no reasonable zoo options. We knew somehow that ignorance was our best weapon here, just two silly high-schoolers looking out for the welfare of gigantic, non-egg-laying hens they couldn’t take care of anymore. Jami noticed a small flock of birds in the lawn fronting the zoo. Some of them were hens, although compared to our enormous, majestic, fluffy, white hens, these were kind of wild, brown, and puny-looking. Our chickens would really stand out in comparison once we let them go. I’d never really noticed before how different captively raised chickens were from chickens born wild, but the contrast was dramatic. “What if,” I suggested, “you drive up to that drop-off area and keep the engine running? I’ll jump out, place the boxes in the lawn near those other birds, and then cut the tape?” My thinking was that once our hens realized the lid was no longer secure, they would pop it open, jump out, and celebrate freedom. Jami agreed that this was a reasonable plan, and added that we could go to a pay telephone in the area, call the zoo, and tell them that it looked like four of their hens had escaped. I agreed that in this way we could at least bring the birds to the zoo’s attention without our actually trying to donate them. Once they were aware of the chickens, it was up to them to decide whether or not they would be involved, but they would never do anything to jeopardize their well-being. I left the boxes right at the edge of the lawn and leapt back into the car’s back seat (it was quicker than opening the door and getting into the shotgun seat). Jami took off. We found a pay phone at a nearby park, and I tried to call the zoo, but was told by a recorded message that the zoo closed at 4:30. It was now a few minutes past that. So I called directory assistance to ask if there were some other phone number to call at the zoo, like a zookeeper or someone like that, but the operator assured me that the only number she could give me was the one I’d already tried. Jami and I were a little worried, so we drove past the zoo to try and assess our hens’ situation. From rather far away, we could see all four of them, hanging out with a bunch of pigeons, doves, and chickens, pecking away at the lawn, looking happier than we’d ever seen them. The boxes were still there, quite a distance away from where the hens had moved themselves, the box lids littering the grass near the parking lot. Jami said exactly what I was thinking: “Wow. They look perfectly fine. Let’s go to K.C. and get Ono-Ono shakes.”
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 07:23:44 +0000
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