Post by Lara
27th March 2014
So we may have mentioned once or twice on the blog, and on
Facebook, and on the phone, and perhaps even in person, that we raise chickens
here in Sierra Leone. We kind of love
our chickens. It started small—one day in October or so of
2012, we told our neighbor Millicent that we were interested in keeping a hen
or two. The next day, Milly called me
over, pointed to an adolescent hen of hers, and said, “This one is yours.” We decided to name her Dot (mostly after the
character from Animaniacs—at the time, we were in a cartoonish mood), and built
a house to keep her. Dot started laying
eggs soon, and not long after that we bought a second hen named Penny (A BBT
reference, if you’re keeping track), also just starting to lay. Within a month or two we had something like
15 chickens. It took a while to get into
the swing of things, but by now we feel like seasoned chicken ranchers and
we’ve settled into a comfortable routine.
It turns out, I have a lot to say about raising chickens…so in the
interest of keeping it short and sweet, this post will deal with just one
bit—the egg.
Originally, we had wanted to keep chickens for eggs, which
cost about a quarter each here and occasionally are rotten when we buy them in
town. (Little-known-fact: eggs keep
fresh, unrefrigerated, for up to a month!)
Keeping our own hens seemed like a great plan—while they’re laying,
they’re worth about a quarter a day. Well for a few reasons, that didn’t work
out. We learned quickly that most Sierra Leoneans don’t eat the eggs their
chickens lay here—I’m not really sure why, except that an egg goes for a quarter
and a full sized chicken can sell for up to $5, so perhaps the margin is too
wide to justify cracking open those eggs that might grow into a handful of meat
in a few months. Because of this
hesitancy to eat home-laid eggs, most of the chickens here seem to have been
pretty well-bred for broodiness, or motherly qualities. When hens start laying they look for a quiet
spot and stack them up until there are about 8 eggs in the nest, then sit on
them until they hatch. If the eggs
disappear from where they’re laying them, hens tend to go find another place to
lay—and they can get creative, let me tell you.
So the issue of figuring out how to harvest eggs while not
scaring our hens away from the convenient chicken house led us not to harvest
so many—and then we got acquainted with the giant-bundle-of-cute that is a
clutch full of freshly-hatched baby chicks.
Dot’s first hatching gave us 6 little feather balls. They peeped softly
as Dot kept them warm, and tripped over their own feet as they tried to copy
their mama and pick up bits of rice from the dirt. In accordance with local tradition, we dyed
them all blue a few weeks later (see our post titled Mauve Chickens), which
supposedly keeps the hawks from eating them.
It wasn’t long before Penny also had a clutch, and we were surrounded by
baby chickens all day long. For us,
keeping mama hens has worked out well because every few months we have a new
batch of chickens getting big enough to eat or start laying for themselves, which
means we have a constant supply of chickens getting old enough to leave the
nest. What to do with all these
chickens? Easy! There’s not much that a Sierra Leonean friend
appreciates more than a feathery bundle of live chicken as a gift. We tend to give away all our grown male
chickens and often keep the females, or give them to someone we know will let
them lay some eggs and raise some babies before making chicken soup.
So there you have it.
When it comes to whether to eat the egg or the chicken, most Sierra
Leoneans feel that the chicken’s a better deal.
Because of the difficulties associated with trying to break from that
way of life, we decided to just join the crowd and err on the side of more baby
chicks rather than omelets. We still buy
our eggs in town, which also helps our friends who sell them. Keeping chickens, in our estimation, is worth
it even without the fresh eggs to fry every morning.
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