Power out, pintainhos out

a chaotic start to the week

Monday the power went out. The h and I didn’t realize it for awhile, as we were mucking out the galendheiro, which was something of a circus. We let both peeps out (Sierra with her nine and Jeannie and her eight pintainhos) and the crowd of them wandered the coop courtyard. Chickens being naturally cautious, they stuck to the perimeter trying to be under - whether weeds, a ladder, a rabbit hutch, a box, each other - as much as possible. Still you could see what fun they were having, free to peck at all the little grass shoots and hervas daninhas and dig holes in the dirt and take dust baths.

Jeannie’s peep climbed around the rockpile of a tumbled down wall, while Sierra’s peep explored the wall that abutted their pen, seeming a little surprised to find the grass was not in fact greener on the other side. The two peeps did not intermingle much except for a cocky little rooster of Sierra’s that I have named Eddie Haskell, who kept walking up to Jeannie’s hens - and once, Jeannie herself - and challenging them to a stare down. Jeannie pecked him in the face and that stopped that business for awhile.

Not one of the pintaihos tried to leave the coop courtyard, though it would have been easy enough - half the wall that borders the coop courtyard and the hillside leading down to the piscina was long ago pulled down by ivy and forget me nots. The little quad squad (i.e. the four chicks we raised inside after the fox attacks of last spring) used to spend the day strutting around the pool, then beat a path up the hillside to the coop for lunch, and I guess they remember that pretty well because as I was hauling a load of chicken shit-saturated wood chips to the fruit orchard to put around the trees (chicken poop makes good fertilizer) I saw my three little roos escorting Sierra down the walkway toward the pool. She looked a little cautious, and I didn’t blame her; normally a hen will avoid going anywhere with roosters where she might be cornered, and the walls of the walkway must have seemed very close after the wide open space of the courtyard.

As they walked the roosters clucked and warbled and Sierra looked around her with interest. I worried a bit that Sierra might recognize her surroundings down at the pool - the Secret Garden is adjacent, and that was her old stomping grounds, along with Betty White, up until January of this year when she first began sitting on her clutch of eleven eggs. Since her peep hatched on Valentine’s Day, Sierra has not returned to roost with the nineteen roosters of the northern flock who call the Secret Garden home; first she was whisked into the palaceta with her babies where they lived for a couple of weeks until the coop repairs and the new chicken run were completed, then she was relocated (kidnapped, I’m sure she’d say) to the place she’s called home ever since. She still doesn’t like the h or me very much, but she has adjusted well to the coop, so much so that when she stopped sitting on her chicks (who have grown to monstrous size compared to Jeannie’s babies), she eschewed leaving the coop and began roosting on high next to Yella Chaz and Han Solo. We’ve let her come and go as she pleases but she always returns to lay her afternoon egg in the nesting box, have a dust bath in the run, and join the fellas on the roosting bar. She’s lived wild her whole life and apparently does not need to be reminded what a good deal the coop is - meals brought to her, not having to fight to get her share, not having to submit to the Italian Gang’s attentions. Yeah, her posture says. I’ll be extending my reservation, if you don’t mind. And even if you do mind. It’s nice here.

The little roos couldn’t be happier now that they have proper rooster jobs. They patrol around, break up arguments among the chicks, and occasionally pile three at once on Sierra, which I always stop if I’m around. One lucky guy at at time, I yell, and Sierra shakes herself all over with great dignity and moves as far away from possible from them. It amuses me that the three little roos mount each other as often as they mount Sierra. Chaz in particular gets a lot of attention, and has been known to hide from his brother and his primo - once in a cardboard box, a traumatizing incident that left him with his brilliant red comb slightly crooked. Other times we have found him in one of the nesting boxes, and his expression is so clearly saying “Shhhhhh!” it’s hard not to laugh. Poor guy, it’s not always easy being the prettiest one.

Whilst power washing and mucking, we took the opportunity to re-configure the coop rooms, now that the babies are all middle schoolers or older, they need more places to roost. Jeannie and her peep absolutely loved the new low roosting bar we installed on their side of the chicken run. On Sierra’s side, the entire peep of nine perched on the folding chair I put in there - three on the backrest, six piled on the seat in a cute circular pattern, so their fluffy little butts all pointed toward the center. Them picking the crappy plastic chair instead of the fine new roosting bars is a bit like kids playing with the boxes their toys come in at Christmas.

I have zero confidence in my ability to sex chicks - the h and I were convinced we had four little hens when the quad squad was being raised in the palaceta…but as you know if you’re been paying attention, three of those little hens turned out to be three roos - Yella Amarelo, Chaz and Han Solo (formerly Cher, Yella Amarela, and Princess Leia). It remains one of the most surprising moments of my life when I was holding Princess Leia her first day in the coop and she gave her first cockadoodledoo. Whaaaaat? I asked her, and she did it again, a little unsure, and with a funny rusty sound like a chicken lisp.

I was so dumbfounded (and dumb) I googled, Do hens crow? But Leia had been originally named Han Solo, so I was actually right when I sexed her the first time, though I didn’t do it based on any criteria other than energy - little Han radiated boy energy, to my way of thinking. I’ve had a lot of time to study pintainhos since then and I have determined it’s mostly true that the roosters are in general more bold than the hens, and are apt to climb higher, run faster and get into things they aren’t supposed to, for example the pantry where the quad squad, led by Han (which I didn’t see but didn’t have to, I am 100% certain he was the ringleader) ate two braids of onions and had oniony feet and oniony beaks for a solid week.

Not all roosters are full of Han Solo/Eddie Haskel dickens, though. Alphonse and Potsy, for example, are two cool cats, strolling through any open door with an air of “I belong here” that is more Michael Cain than Michael Keaton. Still, strolling through the open door of the palaceta is a rooster thing to do - hens sometimes follow, but only after Alphonse had been doing it awhile, and while Alphonse and Potsy allow us to pick them up the wild hens are having none of it and always quickly exit, like girls leaving the frat party before things get too out of hand.

Both peeps were pretty worn out from their exciting day of foraging in the wild and re-entered their clean chicken runs to lounge around in the sun for awhile. Every day Sierra very matter-of-factly pops herself into a nesting box and lays an egg. It’s about a thirty minute process, during which time the three roos and the entire peep of nine stand around the nesting box and/or perch on the nearby low roost bar all in a row, gossiping fit to split. Poor Sierra just wants to lay her egg in peace but everyone insists on standing around outside with an opinion.

On Jeannie’s side the re-configuration of the coop was more profound, and everyone was nervous. Here’s a chicken truism if you care to know: chickens DO NOT like change. I sat on a lawn chair inside the run and hung out with them for awhile, to show them all was well. Also with no power or cellular service, what else was there to do. Jeannie slept in my lap for a half hour, after which one of her little hens decided that looked pretty nice and flapped up to join, eventually settling first on my shoulder as Han Solo did back in the day, then on my head (I was wearing a baseball hat for just this eventuality). Another sat on my muck boot; two more made themselves at home in the woodchip-filled flower pots, which earned them the names Pie (as in chicken pot pie) and Cake.

Some of Jeannie’s chicks - about 2.5 weeks younger than Sierra’s - are still fuzzy with Albert Einstein hair. There’s a rooster with mohair jodhpurs I call Fuzzy Zoeller. The littlest one is almost all fuzz, with a white breast - her name is Tiny Little Tina and she likes to be held between my cupped palms, the warmth almost instantly hypnotizing her.

It was a good day to clean the coop - with no power and no internet, there was no cooking, no news, no online language lesson, no language app, no work. I sat down knowing I could write offline only as long as my laptop battery lasted, then would be thrown on my own devices which is a funny saying considering none of my devices were operative.

The h and I listened to a little transistor radio, but there were no English language stations so my translation skills were being worked overtime. Between the radio and Tiago and Alberto we were able to glean the power/internet outage affected Spain and Portugal and bits of France, Italy and Germany too. All airline flights out of the Lisbon airport were cancelled, and hospitals were operating on generators. As well, business across the country basically ground to a halt. The h and I felt pretty good that we had enough food and drink to last us for a few days and the generator to charge up our rechargeable lights and laptops for working offline…but it was a scary feeling, to be so cut off from the world the people in it. It was like teleporting back to the 1970s in the midwest, when a bad thunderstorm or tornado would knock out the power and the phones for a few hours or even a day, and the only people you could talk to were your neighbors. Except here, it was not just multiple blocks, but multiple countries.

I recognized the words “cyber attack” from the radio announcer, though it was also clear that the announcer was only speculating, and cautiously at that. The talk was not alarmist but not being fluent yet, I took cues from other aspects of the broadcast - the multiple interviews, each person speaking with an unmistakable tension. The Portuguese speak fast (though not as fast as Spaniards), but the pace of speech was different - urgent, no lightness of tone at all

Alberto came over with Rosa to tell us about their weekend in Alentejo and share some photos of their weekend in Alentejo. I asked Rosa if she enjoyed it and was proud ((Rosa speaks only Portuguese) that she understood me well enough to reply very much, yes, but it was way too short. Isn’t that always the case, I said and she laughed and I had to restrain myself from dancing a little jig that I managed this exchange in my adopted language.

Of course the power outage was on everyone’s mind. It’s Putin, Alberto said grimly, and we laughed, but it was an uneasy laughter. Is this what it would be like if someone threw a nuke, the h mused, and a picture of the doomsday clock with its 90 seconds to midnight surrounded by sober-faced scientists leapt to my mind. it’s easy to laugh now that we know it was essentially weather that knocked the grid offline…but in the moment, anything felt possible. The world order has been shaken in the past 100 days, since Trump took office and started his Doge and reciprocal tariff initiatives. With the pandemic barely in our rearview mirror, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, we have entered an era of unprecedented uncertainty.

The h and I went back to cleaning the coop as there wasn’t much else to do. The apartment was strangely quiet, with no background hum of the dehumidifier and all the little sounds that the router, the water heater and other appliances make, sounds that operate just below awareness until they are gone, and you become aware of them by their absence.

I wonder how the supermarkets handled the situation - twelve hours is a long time to go without power when half your goods require refrigeration and your electronic payment systems are shut down. Did they sell the meat and shellfish and prepared foods at a discount?

Tiago and his crew worked without interruption, charging up their cordless tools with the generator to eke out a full day. The darkness when the sun set was profound but also familiar - after all, we lived in the palaceta without electricity for a year, using candles and rechargeable lights and headlamps for what light we needed. Because of this experience we were more ready than most, the apartment well lit, the h busting out the camp stove to make us an evening latte. I was glad to have the rechargeable lights - we have about two dozen in different shapes - but I never expected to need to have them. It was nice to be so unexpectedly prepared.

At 9:20p there was a click and all the lights in the apartment went on at once, the internet router and printer beeping as they came back online. The light was startling, and I had to laugh because it seemed if anything too harsh and bright after the diffused indirect light of the rechargeable lamps.

My mind keeps drifting back to the radio announcer, and how often I heard the word “hospitais”. I hope no one suffered unduly as the power went out mid-surgery or mid cancer treatment. It is sobering to realize how vulnerable we are when you reflect just how much of our lives come out of those little sockets in the wall. It was a major theme of Stephen King’s book, The Stand - not the 99% mortality rate of the superflu that swept through the country in a matter of days, but how quickly civilization broke down among the survivors living in a world without electricity. I happen to be writing a horror short story (Space Weather) at the moment that deals with this theme, and the twelve hour blackout of the Iberian Peninsula has made me wonder if the reason I’m having trouble finishing it is that the horror elements - a dead electrical grid, no internet - require no suspension of disbelief, but rather are all too easy to imagine.

Meanwhile the chickens continue to enjoy their refreshed coop, and we have taken to leaving the doors of the chicken runs open so the pintainhos - some of Sierra’s are clearly teenagers now, with bodies almost like adults despite being just two months old - come and go as they please. To my surprise, they do not attempt to leave the coop courtyard, and often retreat back to the familiarity and comfort of their runs/coops. Jeannie’s peep though has objected to going to bed at night - the h thought it would be a good idea to install the rabbit hutch inside. Something t perch on he said. but it backfired; they hated it and wouldn’t go near it, looking at it with sideways eyes and trembling if you picked one up and brought it close. We moved the hutch out but the damage was done, the peep now hated its formerly safe house and protested loudly at bedtime. I felt terrible pushing them gently inside and closing the door; they stuck their little beaks through the air vents of the door and yelled piteously for me to come back.

Late last night I crept up there with my headlamp to check on them and my light revealed a surprise - they’ve stopped sleeping in the corner of the coop and were all roosting on the roost ladder the h constructed out of thick branches, and which they’ve been ignored for the last couple of weeks. Jeannie was at the top, with seven babies squashed along the top rung. There wasn’t enough room for all of them, though, and Tiny Little Tina sat alone on the rung below her mama and peeplings, fluffed out to twice her normal size for warmth. From the roost next door, Han Solo warbled at me and my light. All’s well, he seemed to be saying.

I’m taking off for France this weekend, and will be gone a week, leaving the h to care for the chickens on his own. It will be strange not waking with the sun to feed the three flocks - it’s not a chore I mind, actually. Today we sat in the coop courtyard planning the tile design of the casita bathroom - well, the h did the planning while I mostly watched the pintainhos running around. Chaz asked to be picked up so I held him for awhile and he slept a bit in my arms. Yella pecked at my shoe, asking for more mealworms. Occasionally I had to rescue Jeannie’s babies as they wandered into Sierra’s side of the coop and then panicked when they realized they were surrounded by much larger chicks than their own siblings. Watching their antics, a few more named themselves - in addition to Pie and Cake and Fuzzy and Tina we now have Eddie and Freddie Haskell, plus Dottie and Lottie, the speckled hen babies of Jeannie and Sierra, respectively. Penny Lane is blonde and elegant and though barely a teenager is almost as large as Jeannie, while Ronald McDonald stomps around in oversized yellow clown shoes and flyaway hair.

The fig tree has filled out with leaves, providing protection from any predators cruising the springtime sky. This morning was overcast but by lunch the sky was blue and strewn with white scraps of clouds. The seventeen chicks chased insects, dozed on the warm calcadas, and pecked at lettuce and Swiss chard the h brought from the horta. Han Solo, Yella, Chaz walked around like benign cops on the beat, occasionally giving Sierra or Jeannie the business but politely backing away if the girls gave a warning squawk. I haven’t even left yet and already I miss my peaceable kingdom.