Gallant Galinhos e Galinhas
Han Solo lives; Salma Hayek has died
We took it as a good omen that the national symbol of Portugal - the Rooster of Barcelos, said to represent faith, justice and good luck - is so extravagantly represented on our property, which features more than two dozen galinhos (and a dozen plus galinhas) at last count.
When we first moved here I would try to tell people that we had at least fifteen roosters on the property, and they would give me a strange look and disagree, assuming I was miscommunicating in my pidgin Portuguese.
You have fifteen chickens, you mean, they would gently correct me. My Uber driver laughed outright. Impossible! he said. You can’t have more than two roosters, they would fight all day! So I took out my phone and showed him a picture and the car swerved as he looked too long. Just wait, you’ll see them, I told him and sure enough when he pulled up to the property they were lined up on the wall.
Why so many?! he asked, taking out his phone and snapping photos. He even texted them to his wife as we stood there chatting.
I shrugged. Selvagem, I said. Eles sao com propriedade. They are wild, they came with the property.
In general, roosters are a symbol of new beginnings. In some cultures they are said to represent fidelity and punctuality, though I don’t really get either association. Roosters don’t just crow with the sunrise - they crow ALL THE TIME. Midnight, two in the morning, three in the morning, four in the morning - it is a constant crowfest from no later than 4:45a til at least 7:00p. They will quiet down for a few hours as they begin their nightly roost, then the cacophony starts all over again.
And fidelity - well, maybe. Roosters and hens do tend to pair up, and roosters are definitely protective and tend to eat last, waiting til the hens are all taken care of. But the moment a rooster mounts a hen, a crowd forms as the other roosters try to take a turn. It’s kind of hideous to watch. Occasionally a hen will reject the advances of a rooster and be pursued around the courtyard. GO GO GO! I’ll tell her, doing my best to trip the rooster up.
Roosters are said to represent confidence, good luck, protection, and honesty. In the Chinese zodiac people born in the Year of the Rooster are deep thinkers, capable, and talented. I have read that that in Christianity the rooster is a symbol of the passion of the Christ, but this was never covered in my years of Catholic school and daily churchgoing. The only mention of roosters in my catechism was the famous conversation during the Last Supper, when Jesus predicted Peter would betray him three times before the cock crowed. Later I learned the rooster weather vane, or weathercock, appeared on every church by edict by the Pope as a reminder of Peter’s betrayal.
When we first viewed the property by video we could hear crowing in the background. There are some chickens on the property, Mario the real estate agent said. When we arrived to see the place in person, there were half a dozen roosters and hens hanging about the gate at the foot of the driveway - apparently some nice older ladies in the village have been feeding them on the regular by throwing lettuce, sandwich bread and uncooked rice over the fence. They also cut plastic water bottles in half and filled the bottoms with water. Before we moved in we stayed in an airbnb in the middle of the village and would walk over to the property to work on it, sashaying through town in our Carhartts and carrying our weed whackers and chainsaws. We got a lot of funny looks. We went to the nearest little supermercado and bought unsalted sunflower seeds and some bird food, figuring it was close enough to chicken feed. We spread it on the top of the wall and the whole flock crowded around eating ravenously. They were noticeably thinner in those days.
All of that was February of last year. A lot has changed since then, and you can measure our progress in visible ways for example, the palm trees that bracket the front gate to the palaceta are no longer heavily bearded with dead fronds, and the English ivy that covered the steps that lead up to the cottage on the highest point of the property - and the part most visible to passers by - has been removed. The two-foot-high weeds that dotted the driveway and the front courtyard, pushing apart the tiles, have been trimmed - repeatedly. I wouldn’t say we’re winning the war on weeds but it’s definitely a draw. The garage is no longer cracked on the surface with chunks of concrete falling off, the doors covered in graffiti - now it’s freshly painted, the facade smooth. The exterior wall has been painted white, so that our new mailbox with our name and house number (15) are visible to the mail carrier. Perhaps most notably, the h has placed solar lights all over the property, so that at night, the previously spooky unbroken darkness is now dotted with bright lights that illuminate the cottage steps, the palm trees, the courtyard, the quinta road.
People are definitely noticing.
It’s good to see lights when I look over there at night, my neighbor Jonas tells us.
My wife and I are glad to see a lady of her stature being attended to, says another neighbor, Ricardo, a man who is as elegant as his speech.
But the biggest change is the flock, which is larger since our arrival both in terms of the size of the flock and the size of the birds. The birds are bigger because of their twice a day feeding; the flock is bigger because some of the babies of last summer’s peeps have made it to adulthood.
One batch of chicks survived almost totally intact - now there is a plurality that have known nothing but life with us as their benefactors. Born last summer, their mama, a beautiful dark brown hen with black tail feathers by the name of Salma Hayek, kept her peep as far away from me as possible. When I appeared with food, she led her six babies away, always skirting along the edge of the driveway. But once they were too big to sit on, and were on their own to roost at night, they banded together with a young white rooster I named Sette, and flouting their upbringing would race each other to see who could get to me fastest when I appeared with food. Sette was the only surviving chick of one of the other summer peeps; a few months older than Salma’s chicks, he was a natural leader, bringing the babies to water every day.
I had thought all six of Salma’s babies were hens but one turned out to be a rooster - a unique one, equal parts blonde and Italian (both colors of rooster are actually Leghorns). He is on the smaller side and independent, usually in the company of his hen peepmates. He was the first of the flock to enter the house when we left the front doors propped open on hot days. He was also the first of the flock to be picked up and carried around like a cat; he likes it and will stand on my shoe waiting to be picked up, or hop up on my knee when I am sitting, leaning in to see what food I might have on my person. I named him Alphonse because it sounds elegant; the name means “ready for battle” which is not his style, he tends to hang back and not mingle with the other roosters, often eschewing feeding time with the flock to enter the house looking for a handout.
There are really two distinct flocks - the eastern flock is a dozen strong, with two blonde* roosters, seven Italians, and three hens. They hang out in the campo on the eastern side of the property and the driveway, and retreat to the neighbor’s yard, where she keeps a few nesting boxes.
The northern flock contains twenty-eight in total - seventeen roosters - only one blondie - and twelve hens that were recently reduced by one. For a few weeks now I have noticed Salma Hayek is missing. I searched for her in places other hens have gone broody or hatched eggs but did not find her. I wondered if she’d been stolen. While executing the dirty job of draining the koi pond, Tiago came over with a message. Uma galinha morreu, he tells me.
I only know the word morreau (died) because I had to learn it last summer, when I lost my daddy. The word itself now makes me sad.
A hen? Or a rooster? I ask, just to be sure. It would be impossible to know which young Italian bachelor it was - there are at least half a dozen that so closely resemble each other we refer to them as a group - the Italian gang, or the Brothers Kellogg. A hen, Tiago confirms. Drowned, maybe. And so the mystery of Salma is, sadly, solved. I wish I know what happened to her - it may be that she was sitting on eggs in the koi pond and became trapped by water during the spring rains.
We have gained the trust of this tough little feral flock over a series of steps. First we relocated their hangout from the bottom of the driveway to the wooded area that runs along the northern side of the big house, which faces east. That wooded area is about a half acre and contains a dozen trees, many bushes and plants and the koi pond, which is maybe ten feet deep and twenty feet wide, ringed with coral reef walls and containing a ten foot coral reef fountain. The portion of the forest that abuts the front courtyard I have nicknamed Chicken Flats, because there is a large clearing where I fed the whole flock twice a day - at 7a and 2p.
I fed the chickens here mostly to keep them away from passers by who expressed an interest in buying them. I don’t want to sell them - it seems wrong to separate a flock that has lived wild for so long. Anyway the "interested purchasers” turned out to be murderers and thieves - they stole one rooster, and killed another in an attempt to steal it. No way am I going to risk my chickens going to riff raff - their lives have been hard enough already, they deserve to live to their death in permanent retirement from scratching out a meager existence in harsh conditions whilst evading predators. They are a big happy family and have survived so much together - long hot Portugal summers, cold rainy windy winters.
The Great Chicken Relocation took awhile - even though the regular feedings brought the chickens to the front courtyard during the day, they still move down to the foot of the driveway to roost in the trees at night. The high branches give them a good vantage point, able to see anyone dropping food over the gate of a moring. Typically they begin their roost about five in the evening, starting on the lower branches. Once the sun falls they move to the higher branches. There they roost quietly until about midnight - after that, they may or may not be quiet most of the night.
The rooster crow is, on average, about 80 to 90 decibels. If they are right next to you - like Alphonse or Potsy, who come into the house to search for peanuts and crow in triumph when they get them - it can reach 142 decibels. For perspective, a chainsaw produces about 120 decibels, a level of noise that requires ear protection. It turns out chickens themselves don’t need the protection - when a rooster opens its beak fully to crow, its ear canals are partially closed off and protected from the sound. So their crowing is only damaging to me and the h, never them - which is a heck of a way to express gratitude for regular feedings, if you ask me, but oh well.
If it rains the flock will abandon the tree and take cover under the bushy canopy at the western most edge of the backyard forest, where the bushes grow low and thick and are difficult to penetrate. In wet weather some - not all - will emerge for their regular feeding, the hens looking small and vulnerable, the roosters slatternly with bedraggled tails, like fancy ladies blasted by a water hose, their Sunday best hats now hanging down their backs.
Moving the flock to Chicken Flats was only an interim plan. After our first month on the property, the h mostly chainsawing and weed whacking and me mostly burning what he sawed and whacked in a burn barrel in the middle of the driveway, we discovered the property had something even the realtor didn’t know was there - a chicken coop, complete with three buildings and a courtyard that rivaled the one in front of the palaceta. A massive fig tree had draped its branches over the buildings; brambles had crept up the hillside from the swimming pool, knocking down the coop retaining wall and covering and blocking the door so completely it wasn’t visible until the h had gone after it with this chainsaw for the better part of a day.
The discovery of the coop solved the mystery of the origin of the chickens - they had always lived in the castle, as Shirley Jackson might have said. The chickens I was beginning to recognize and call by name - Al Capone, Jackson Pollock, Shaun Cassidy, Betty White, Salma, Goldie Hawn - were all descendants of the chickens who had lived on the property some thirty years ago.
The man who farms the land across the street, Alberto, confirmed this; once the h had liberated the coop, Alberto came over to have a look. I made this door, he told us. For the family that used to live here. They had chickens, rabbits, and goats.
Operation Chicken Relocation Redux involved moving the flock from Chicken Flats to the coop, once we had it ready - this was months of work even after the clearing of the bramples and trimming of tree branches, as the coop was full of ancient chicken crap matted to the stone floors, and weeds that towered over me. It was a matter of some urgency - when I first started feeding the chickens in Chicken Flats, we hadn’t planted anything yet. Now the planters that line the front courtyard and the gardens are full of flowers that Alberto has given us. We planted most in the fall, and the chickens pecked or trampled nearly all of them. But after a rainy winter and spring they are flourishing again, and I want to keep it that way.
You have to stop feeding them down here, Alberto said.
But they just stand around wondering where I am, I said. I am a softie. I found it very hard to drop food in the coop courtyard with only a few chickens pecking around me, knowing the rest of the flock was waiting for me in Chicken Flats - or even on the front porch - wondering what happened. Sometimes I’d relent and drop food at the halfway point, on the pool patio, which only succeeded in causing them to gather there, refusing to go any further. Why should we, they seemed to be asking me. Why all the steps when there is this nice flat bit right here, not too far from the yummy plants in the front yard?
They’ll learn, Alberto laughed.
And they have. After three months of feeding the chickens in their magnificent tile courtyard, I now have most of the flock attending each feeding. In the morning they loiter around the back door, perching on the walls that line the kitchen courtyard, discussing me in low voices.
When I emerge with my white salad bowl I yell “Chickens!!!” and bang a plastic cup against the bowl, bringing everyone running. They follow me as I wend my way up to the courtyard: a left at the pool, up the steps, down the walkway toward the fruit orchard, a sharp right up the steps and past the lower pool house, up the steps past the upper pool house, then up a final set of steps to Chicken Kingdom.
The sound of twenty eight roosters and hens following you chatting about what might be for breakfast is a very amusing sound, and if you ever visit me you can carry the food and hear it for yourself, but be careful - the young Italians have a way of running ahead and tripping you up on the steps, and the hens literally get under your feet as you walk. If you stop, they all stop, gathered in a feathery mob at your feet waiting to see what you’ll do next. It’s like being a rock star, pausing between one song and the next, the fans riveted.
In the chicken courtyard I have laid out a series of twenty plus roof tiles, like a feeding trough, spaced to discourage squabbling though I am learning that no amount of spacing will accomplish this - roosters police each other, keeping one another away from favorite hens. The hens meanwhile get right down to business - they are always the first to feed, and often gather around the same roof tile so that their lifted butts form a giant feather duster. It’s hard to get a count because once all food is laid down, individuals move from tile to tile looking for a place they can eat unmolested by one of the older roosters - Sean Cassidy, Jack Black, Jack Tripper, Mr. T - who patrol the perimeter and are always the last to feed.
When it rains, I scatter their feed inside the coop, to get them used to the idea that *there is actually a place that they can stay dry*, they do not have to run back to crouch under the dripping canopy. So far this has been met with limited success but I am sanguine. It takes chickens awhile to catch on to new things, not because they are stupid but because they are cautious, caution being the better part of valor when you have spent a lifetime fending for yourself.
As I write, little Han Solo cheeps around the floor at my feet. I of course have no idea if he is really a he, but for some reason his energy just seems male to me - he is demanding and confident and excessively noisy, though he quiets down when we pick him up and let him explore around on the floor. Soon he will hop onto my shoe and I will hold my legs out straight so he can hop down the freeway to my lap, where he will try to stand on the warm keyboard, which I forbid (chicken poop don’t you know) and then hop up my body to crawl in the space behind my ear, where hair hangs like a wing. Later I’ll take him outside where he scratches the dirt like his momma taught him, pretending he is finding food. I’ll scatter some chick feed under leaves so he actually does find some, then pick him up when the roosters start to gather in curiosity.
I have no idea what I’m going to do with little Han. For now, he lives in a box with his warmer, food and water. I have located his momma, who was chased one night from her nest with her two babies by a predator, which got one baby - I found little Han alone and screaming one morning. I think we’ve identified the predator - an exceptionally large rat was spied sidling down the driveway curb. I hope he enjoys his last few days on earth; the h has his pellet gun leaning against the wall by the back door.
I have actually located Han’s momma, one of the three hens in the eastern flock, but she doesn’t seem to want to be reunited with her chick, for reasons of her own. It’s all for the best I suppose - the rains have returned this week, along with a temperature drop of twenty degrees, and momma would not have been able to keep little Han Solo alive in this weather. Han, all unaware, sits confidently on my shoulder, twittering in contentment. Or, perhaps he is thinking deeply, as the legends suggest.
What am I going to do with you? I ask him. Are you going to protect me? Or at least bring me good luck? He cocks his little head, pecks curiously at my glasses, then climbs under my chin where it is soft and warm and goes to sleep.
*roosters with light feathers are called buffs, but to me they look like breakout stars of boy bands with their showy beauty
Great chick lit.