READ "Animalish" - by Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean, with Mabel Black Label, an Araucana chicken

At Home on the Farm and in E-Books
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: May 18, 2011 PINE PLAINS, N.Y.

Last Friday Susan Orlean was on the verge of some serious animal acquisitions. Her latest herd of 12 Black Angus cattle was scheduled to be dropped off within days. And the local post office could call at any minute to report that four rare and eye-catching Swedish flower hens were ready for pickup, having been shipped overnight from Florida. READ ARTICLE HERE

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I'm sure they now know each other, now

Merry-Go-Round and Sugar met this week. I think they may have known each other their entire life, they just hadn't met. Sugar was a sweet sweet white bantam cochin and Merry-Go-Round (owned by my friend Susan Orlean) was a silver laced wyandotte, I think.

Sugar was a good listener. She was quite and sweet. This spring she "adopted" a little white leghorn who needed a companion. The leghorn is lost without her. Lola the black bantam cochin seems to be filling in, but not with the same sweetness as Sugar. I miss her.

I'm sure Merry-Go-Round was just as sweet. I hear she was a big talker and very social. She lived with donkeys too. And, honestly, she was a chicken celebrity. I imagine her with sunglasses and a swagger.

Sugar and Merry-Go-Round seem like happy friends. One a good talker with stories of donkeys, the other a great listener who enjoyed the company.

I am so sad Sugar isn't physically at the coop anymore. I bet Susan feels the same way. But as Mom says, we were lucky to have them part of our lives, no matter how long.

The Chicken Show "Chickens make you happy"

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Broadcast Chicken - New Yorker Blog

April 2, 2010
Posted by Susan Orlean
I’m happy to report that my trip to Manhattan to appear on “The Martha Stewart Show” with my chicken Tookie went off without incident. I worried every step of the way. I worried whether Tookie would like the car ride, and whether she’d be happy being in the television studio, and whether she’d act out in some wild chicken-y way on camera; I even worried whether, when she was back home with her flock, the other chickens would sense some fundamental change in her (exposure to the bright lights of New York City and the dazzle of television fame can do that) and, full of doubt and suspicion, turn on her—a sort of chicken version of “The Return of Martin Guerre.”

It turns out that Tookie is a trouper. She sat quietly in her crate on the ride down and in the nicely appointed Martha Stewart dining room, noshing happily on frozen corn kernels and flicking her head side to side each time a production assistant rushed in, waving microphones and headsets and show breakdown sheets.

The one moment that really unnerved me was when I walked out on the set and realized that there were several dozen chickens running around and sitting on audience members’ laps. Chickens, as a rule, are as cliquey as high-school girls, and are quite happy to tear to pieces an unfamiliar bird. The first time I introduced a new chicken into my flock, Tookie was the meanest of the mean girls, clucking angrily, making threats, and showing a lot of pointy beak. During my segment on the show, I sat with Tookie on my lap; there were a bunch of chickens scratching and chatting and making a fuss very near us, and, well within striking distance, a huge feathery Araucana lolling in Stewart’s lap. I could hardly breathe, wondering if Tookie would puff up and start pecking at the bird, or, worse, at Stewart. But miraculously, she sat regally and calmly through the segment. And better still, now that she’s home again, she has settled right back in with her fellow hens, and they with her, as if she had never been on network television at all.

Here’s Martha putting a chicken to sleep:



CLICK HERE to Susan Orlean New Yorker blog

Chicken TV - by Susan Orlean

"I’m bringing one of my chickens to Manhattan tomorrow, to be on an episode of “The Martha Stewart Show,” which Martha—a celebrated chicken keeper herself—is devoting to the subject of backyard chickens. My chickens are not seasoned travellers (note to self: maybe don’t use the word “seasoned” when talking about pet chickens?) so I’ve been fretting about the whole enterprise, which will entail travelling two hours by car from my house to the city, and then several hours in the studio while we tape the show. For the last week or so, I’ve been auditioning to see which of my seven chickens would be the most camera-ready and most travel-friendly. My prettiest hen is Merry-Go-Round, a Silver-Laced Wyandotte—she’s plump and bosomy, covered with a craze of black and white stripes, and has a brilliant red wrinkly comb. She’d look great on television, but she’s bossy and noisy and given to little fits of temper; pass. Tweed and Mabel Black Label, my Araucanas, are somewhat antisocial; when I pick either of them up, they eye me with such deep suspicion that I feel like they can smell omelets on my breath. They’re probably not the right chickens for television. My little bantam, Tina Louise, is so fast and frantic that I’m not even sure I’d be able to catch her to put her in the car. Helen Reddy, my Rhode Island Red, is lovely, but she’s the lowest chicken in the social order of my coop, and I’m afraid if I take her away for a day she’d lose her position altogether.

My rooster Laura is so gorgeous that I’d love to show him off, and for a moment I thought of making him the star. This is a bit of vanity on my part. Most sane people are a little afraid of roosters. Even though they’re not that big, they can pack quite a punch. I have to handle Laura frequently (for instance, I spent a few evenings this winter massaging Vaseline into his comb, to ward off frostbite) and I’ve started fancying myself a bit of a chicken whisperer since he usually lets me pick him up and hold him without incident. The other day, I held him in my arms and started talking to him about the trip, and he was as relaxed as a lapdog. I went back to the house and returned to the coop a few minutes later; this time he chased me into the corner, slapped me with his wings, and tried to kill me. Chastened, I scratched him as my entry. I’ve finally decided to bring my sweet hen Tookie, the oldest of my chickens, the only one of my original four who is still around. She’ll get a bag of corn for her efforts—and residuals, of course. " by Susan Orlean

(Photograph: Tookie, left, and her late sister Beauty.)

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/susanorlean/2010/03/chicken-tv.html#ixzz0kKRSXYC9

"The Chicken Show"

With my friends Jan Brett, Susan Orlean and Traci Torres on Martha Stewart Show.

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"The IT Bird" - @SusanOrlean The New Yorker

Top photo by Tamara Staples: My hen named after Susan Orlean
Bottom photo:  Susan Orlean and me.

THE IT BIRD by Susan Orlean

"If I had never seen Janet Bonney reënact the mouth-to-beak resuscitation of her hen Number Seven, who had been frozen solid in a nor’easter, then was thawed and nursed back to life—being hand-fed and massaged as she watched doctor shows on TV—I might never have become a chicken person. But a few years ago I happened to watch a documentary called “The Natural History of the Chicken,” which opens with the story of Bonney and Number Seven, and for the first time the thought of owning chickens entered my mind. I had watched the film with no preëxisting chicken condition."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_orlean#ixzz0jKB5zZtP

‘The Orchid Thief’ Author Susan Orlean Becomes a Chicken Person

Courtesy: Museum of ScienceFrom left, Terry Golson, Susan Orlean and her husband John Gillespie.

By Matt Saldana, From The Wall Street Journal

Author Susan Orlean (“The Orchid Thief”) never fancied herself as a chicken person. But after moving from Manhattan to the Hudson Valley, she found herself craving her own flock, she writes, “with an urgency that exceeded even my mad adolescent desire to have a pony.” Orlean was surprised to find she was not alone; in a recent New Yorker piece, she describes the resurgence of “backyard chickens” in American cities: “Chickens seem to be a perfect convergence of the economic, environmental, gastronomical and emotional matters of the moment,” she writes. For a price roughly equal to a carton of eggs, one can purchase a chick that will lay hundreds of eggs over the course of five or six years—roughly one every 36 hours, and all, one can be sure, cage-free, local and organic.

This week at Boston’s Museum of Science, Orlean delivered her first-ever lecture on backyard chickens, in which she invoked both AMC’s “Mad Men” (“Can you imagine Don Draper with chickens? The whole point of the suburbs, in its darkest conception, was to deny any association with an agrarian past.”) and Martha Stewart (“You might not think of her as someone who wants to rip the veneer off of suburban living” but she “deserves credit” for making chickens glamorous).

Earlier, Speakeasy caught up with Orlean to talk about the sociology of chicken-keeping, her next book project (hint: it’s animal-related), and Meryl Streep’s bid for a third Oscar.

The Wall Street Journal: Does the chicken movement expose the fault lines of the urban-rural divide, or does it redefine those terms?

People have a very emotional reaction to it. For some people, their whole trajectory has been away from a connection to a rural past. Chickens are one of the sorts of livestock that never had a glamorous association, and never had a lot of money connected to them. They represent the most simple expression of rural living. And for some people, it’s uncomfortable. They moved to the suburbs to get away form that. There’s nothing charming, for them, about having chickens running around.

Even though people approach it for different reasons, do you think raising backyard chickens could be something that unites people?

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Two Chicken Geeks

I could have talked chickens with @susanorlean all day.