I just had to explain what I was cackling at to my roommate. It automatically passes the Laugh Rule.
She found her reluctant fiance, Erstad, brooding out on the rainy moors.
“Is that a baby rabbit?” she asked, observing his huddled form.
“IT’S SIX BABY RABBITS AND YOU CAN’T TOUCH THEM,” replied Ernstad, contriving to look twice his usual size and at least three times his usual fierceness.
“Whoah okay damn,” she said, and backed away.
i’d read the gothic romance novel of ernstad and his baby rabbits like right now
When I was in high school, I was the part-time henchperson of a Mad Scientist.
I’m not exaggerating about “Mad Scientist”. “Riley” (Name changed for his family’s privacy) was a former Medical Doctor, as well as an artist, microbiologist, pilot (as in, designed and flew his own experimental aircraft), magician, computer programmer and musical composer, and had an outbuilding attached to his house where he kept things like his hand-made 3D printer, electron microscope and drone-dirigible assembly devices.
Riley had ALS and was eventually wheelchair-bound, so by 2006 I was being called in on the odd school night or weekend to go out around FoCo and the surrounding mountains. “I need a younger set of legs and someone with no fear of heights” He’d say. Being that I was a very boring child that had no interest in sex or drugs and always called when I was going to be late, and that Riley was a trusted family friend, My parents trusted me to go out at like 9PM and come home at 2AM on a Tuesday.
…To do things like scale locked fire escapes and climb around on rooftops that we DEFINITELY did not have permission to be on to do things like install speakers and bluetooth broadcasting devices at strategic points around Old Town so that if you download the right app onto your phone (I’ve got it backed up somewhere, I’ll post it when I find it) , you can walk around town and be exposed to the ghostly, extremely shady side of FoCo history for his 2007 Halloween project.
We did get caught by the cops but I was 17, short and white as goddamn mayonnaise so when the cops asked me what I was doing “It’s for a community art project!” actually worked.
My favorite Mad Science Project was in 2009, Gallus rostromegalus.
I was home from college for summer, and Riley had been messing around with Rotational Physics and had managed to make Giant (24’ x 18’) extremely realistic Chicken eggs, weighted and everything so that if you picked one up, it would feel like there was a heavy yolk wobbling around inside. They’re amusing all on their own, but after leaving them in the slash pile from spring cleaning, Riley realized they had POTENTIAL.
So we went around getting permission from a few businesses and the art museum, and I spent a few nights making plausible enormous chicken feathers in Riley’s lab out of grass, acrylic glaze and some other odds and ends laying around, and filling up the back of my mom’s van with as much of the backyard slash pile as fit in there, then drove out in the middle of the night to set up giant nests for the eggs, strewn with feathers and surrounded by Traffic cones and orange construction mesh and signs from the entirely fictitious “Department Of Fish And Wildfowl, Specious Relocation Division”
(an incomplete nest on the steps of Fort Collins Museum of Art)
(signage, responsibly warning people to stay away in case of giant chickens)
Riley even made QR codes that linked back to an obviously false Wiki- if you scrolled to the bottom, the page was covered in feathers and after five minutes it would start to make chicken noises.
People. Went. INSANE.
Crowds turned up to take selfies with the nests and Riley tracked down literally dozens of tagged photos captioned “IS THIS REAL????”.
Someone wrote a very worried and not terribly facetious-sounding letter to the editor concerned that Giant Chickens were roaming around FoCo, something that big could hurt someone! There was an entirely-serious-sounding counter-letter that we Humans have clearly invaded this majestic creature’s natural habitat, where are they SUPPOSED to make their nests, huh?
Multiple people called the police to report having seen the elusive Gallus rostromegalus up in the hills or skulking around downtown. Reports claimed it was anywhere form five to twelve feet tall, with dramatic plumage and an eerie, yodeling sort of call.
A few nights after installing each nest, we went back, collected the eggs, and left broken ‘eggshells’ and extra down feather around each of the nests. One of the nests was put up at the local Garden Center and I remember one of the assistant managers coming outside just after we finished the ‘hatching’ and shrieking “OH GOD I THOUGHT THOSE WERE FAKE THEY’LL GET TO THE TOMATOES SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE!” That woman would later become my manager when I worked there for a summer, though she never made the connection between me and The Chickens.
Riley passed away in 2015 after a good and well-lived life, and was kind enough to leave me The Eggs in his will.
It was a truly splendid bit of ruckus, and I miss him terribly, and I very much treasure the memories. And the Eggs, which I am absolutely going to inflict on some unsuspecting neighbors at some point, in his honor.
(If you’ve enjoyed this story, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or Paypal so I can support myself telling stories, thank you!)
This is written for @gallusrostromegalus who is sick and apparently really enjoys chickens, so. Fair warning that you are going to read about my family and chickens. I don’t normally write stories on tumblr, so here’s hoping you enjoy the narrative despite the shoddy storytelling.
To begin, I should start with my mother the Undercover Hippie. I spent a good portion of my childhood thinking my mother was normal because she didn’t dress in tie-dye, but as an adult, I’ve realised there are several things that marked my mother as one of those Boulder Hippies. The types that aren’t really Hippie in the seventies sense, but more in the ‘making questionable health and lifestyle choices because it is the newest Organic Idea going around.’ Notable occasions on this list are the time that she filled the brownies with wheat germ and made them crunchy, the time she brought my east-coast-city-child cousins on a camping trip, and the time she got chickens.
Chickens, in and of themselves, are reasonable things to own. Usually. However, my mother wanted them for eggs and began by taking the childhood fort (which most of us had grown out of) and turning it into a chicken coop. By chicken coop, I mean she stuck some boxes in it and put a fence around it, and patched up the hole in the side from A’s Enthusiastic Ninja Punch, and the hole in the other side from C’s Peephole Experiment, and the last hole from my own childhood Cannonball, and both windows, and then got chickens.
My mother is the sort of learner who just starts a project and then learns as she goes. While she knew they needed food and basic heating, she was otherwise a bit naiive.
For example, it turns out L, my sister, is terrified of chickens. My mother apparently didn’t know this (Mom, I don’t like the idea of chickens) until the chickens (Mom, really, do you think we have to have chickens, because they have beaks, and I got pecked once) actually got to the house (OH MY GOD GET IT AWAY. GET. IT. AWAY. GET IT AWAY GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF!!!!).
Additionally, Mom forgot that chickens can fly short distances and the fort has a loft and thus made the interesting mistake of not wiring off the top areas of the roof. On Day One she had to knock on the neighbour’s door and ask if she could retrieve her chickens from their yard.
Eventually, after many phone calls, Mom got a handle on chicken care – by which I mean she passed the project onto my chicken-enthusiastic younger brother, who adored them. Not only did Mom have chickens, she had Happy Chickens who were more than pleased to make Many Eggs, and the family chowed down happily.
W, my chicken-enthusiastic younger brother, explained chickens to me this way:
Chickens have a hierarchy, so you have to have a rooster. They’ll start pecking each other and it’s a mess, but roosters kinda keep them calm, though roosters can get aggressive if the hierarchy gets disturbed, so you have to keep the roosters calm. This isn’t really hard, except that if you have to have a rooster, you’ve got a chance of eggs getting fertilised, and we want to eat them, so you have to go out and get the eggs every day, unless you want more chickens, and there’s a limit of how many chickens you can have inside city limits.
All of which seems perfectly reasonable, and was perfectly reasonable, until Mom decided to go on a fortnight’s holiday with my younger brothers, including W.
This left L in charge of the chickens.
Now, my mother is not a reasonable person, so if you’re just now wondering why Mom left the chicken-terrified child in charge of the chickens, it’s because mom is either an idiot or an arse. I’ve still not decided to this day which one she is, so we’ll leave it at that. But regardless of Mom’s motivations, my younger sister is now in charge of the chickens. She can’t get within a few yards before wanting to burst into tears, but also has a Big Heart and doesn’t want the chickens to die.
The chickens need to be fed and watered.
According to W, several things had happened when he got home and took charge of ‘his’ chickens again.
On day one, L had attempted to feed the chickens, and upon entering the coop had been met by the Rooster, who, not recognising her, had immediately gone into Protective Mode. L had fled the coop, dropping the food but leaving the door open. This led to L calling the neighbours in a panic asking for a Group Hunt for the Chickens because she was too terrified to round them up out of the yard. A friendly neighbour put the end of the hose into the water trough so L could just turn it on instead of going in.
L had fed the chickens every day by taking a bucket about the right size full of feed and tossing it into the coop. Not just the feed – the whole bucket. W had to pick up 12 different containers because after L ran out of buckets she just started using old yoghurt containers and whatever else she could find. The chickens apparently didn’t mind being bombed with buckets full of food, just ran out of the way and then attacked the containers until they got their due.
L didn’t fetch the eggs, not even once, which meant that now W was a full eight chicks over the city limit, and had to give six more to some friends in the foothills who weren’t in city limits and could have as many chicks as they wanted. He ended up keeping the eight chicks and bargaining with the neighbours that they could have free eggs, provided that if the city Chicken Inspectors came by, the neighbours would tell the Chicken Inspectors that W was just caring for their chickens while they built a new coop or something.
By the time W, L, A, and my mother left to live in Swaziland (another story altogether), my brother had ten chickens over the limit, all extremely pleased and contented with life, until L went Anywhere Near The Coop, at which point they would all start shrieking like the dickens and running out of the way of any impending Food Bombs, except for the Rooster, who would puff up and start attacking the fence in preparation.
Anyway, the point of this story is Don’t Leave L In Charge Of The Chickens, with side morals of Don’t Buy Pets You’re Not Prepared For and Don’t Fuck With Roosters, and also I hope you feel better.
This is DELIGHTFUL and a fairly solid example of why I don’t intend to own my own (Beyond already owning a dog with an impressive prey drive and No Damn Sense). Was you mom ever part of the Fiber Visions Guild, becuase she sounds an awful lot like one of my mother’s friends who moved to somewhere in Africa a few years ago, but I can’t remember right now.
I want you to know that your storytelling is not shoddy at all!
In fact I was glued from beginning to end and I would have gone looking for your equivalent of a Family Lore tag if the premise did not suggest there was none to be found.
if u raise them from small (or sometimes just anyway) you are Forever Mum and they will jump up on ur back and go to sleep
and preen you, rearrange your clothes and hair sometimes
dont like dealing with spiders in house? go outside. pick up chicken. hold chicken in vicinity of spider. spider vacuumed up in about 0.3 seconds.
make amusing Warning Noise when a Bad Bird goes overhead. sometimes this is something sensible like a raptor. sometimes it is a startling blackbird, or maybe nothing (maybe chickens can see extradimensional birds? unsure)
when chicken mama has babby chicken and they get in her feathers and poke their heads out
rooster is Very Protective but also thinks that maybe anything that peeps is Potential Flock Babies. has been known to bring food for goslings and ducklings
actually roosters in general are very cute. find food and go beep beep beep so ladies can find it. if you give him a nice treat he wont eat it and will go find a lady to give it to.
Steel Phoenix Studios 