Chickens come home to roost
The free birds of Saba
It’s grocery day—the day the ship comes in with fresh supplies—so I go to the store to see if I can score some fresh lettuce and maybe some plain yogurt. (I let my starter culture die over the holidays; otherwise I’d have made my own and not be in this situation. It’s always a bad idea to count on just being able to buy all the things you want.) Half the island is at the store, and they’re talking about what I hear everyone is talking about these days: the price of eggs.
“I just didn’t order any this time,” the proprietress of one of the stores tells me. She thinks they would not have sold, not at a price that she’d be able to profit from, in any case. Even buying in bulk, she’d be paying close to a US dollar an egg to get them shipped in. And that’s before the inevitable loss that accompanies shipping fragile chicken eggs across the ocean.
Our groceries come from St. Maarten, the larger island about 30 miles away. But before that they mainly come from Miami: fresh produce, dairy, and eggs travel a route that goes Miami to St. Maarten to Saba. That’s why groceries are so expensive here. A 16-ounce packet of Dunkin’ Donuts brand ground coffee goes for 21 USD these days. On the other hand, you can get 16 ounces of the coffee roasted on St. Maarten for five bucks. That’s why eggs, which are expensive now in America, are even more expensive here.
In America, there’s a bird flu epidemic going on—mainly among birds. Hundreds of millions of chickens are affected, leading to culls of entire flocks. Thus there are fewer chickens, and thus fewer eggs. It is an education in supply and demand for any consumer of American eggs.
It’s also an education in American animal husbandry practices. It’s easy to understand why bird flu spreads so rapidly among thousands of chickens warehoused in battery cages, that aren’t even vaccinated against bird flu as they are in other countries. Factory farming is condemned for its cruelty, but it’s been explained to me that consumers are willing to accept that moral cost because it makes things like eggs so cheap.
Except, of course, when it doesn’t.
American eggs aren’t the only eggs on our island, though. The instant the local farmers’ market posts a notice they’ve got eggs for sale I’ll run down there. The local eggs are not as plentiful, so they’ll sell out fast, but they’re cheaper. They’re also beautiful, with shells of chocolate brown, speckled pink, sky blue. They’re hard to crack. Unlike an American egg, the shell of a Saba chicken egg is solid. I have to smack hard against my countertop to make an omelet.
The hardness of the Saba hen’s egg and the fragility of the American hen’s egg is explained by the amount of calcium in each. This, in turn, is explained by the health of the chicken. Saba chickens run around outdoors, foraging for insects, seeds, and the occasional potato chip. They aren’t housed in crowded chicken tenements, undernourished and spreading respiratory infections. A lot of them aren’t really housed at all. They’re feral. They are free birds, whose strong bodies are reflected in their hard eggshells.
So how do you get the eggs from free chickens?
I asked this to one of my neighbors, upon finding him building a chicken coop in the rainforest. “They want a place to nest, you see. You build them a home, they’ll find it eventually and lay their eggs there.” And a few years later, he’s got his small flock of chickens and a regular egg supply.
Which is, at the moment, sold out.
Like all chickens, Saba’s chickens are descended from the jungle fowl. Wild jungle fowl look like barnyard chickens in a children’s book, but prettier. In my opinion, Saba chickens are even more beautiful.
A study in sexual selection, Saba’s chickens are gorgeous because they are living in a lush paradise where it’s always warm, there are few infectious diseases, and they never want for food. The only axis of evolutionary pressure is beauty, and it shows in trends in feather patterns. A few years ago, apparently lots of chickens decided crowns of feathers were sexy, and now a large percentage of the birds are born with fluffy hats. A few years before that, jet black plumage was all the rage. But feral chicken genomes contain multitudes. There’s a lot of room for phenotypic variation, always room for a new range of fabulous feathers to emerge.
In evolving their fancy new traits, Saba chickens don’t even have any predators to worry about. Until now.
According to imported Dutch conservation biologists, Saba’s feral chickens are an invasive species. These chickens whose forbears were brought here hundreds of years ago are a threat to the native fauna, in some unspecified way. The solution is to cull them off, and return the island to its original, natural state.
The jungle fowl originally evolved on the islands of Indonesia, which the Dutch would also go on to conquer and colonize. You can see the vestiges of the Dutch invasion of Indonesia in Dutch culture today, in the popularity of Indonesian dishes like nasi goreng and chicken sate in the Netherlands. Long before that, though, the ancestors of modern chickens were being exported by Asian traders across the continent, and then to Europe and Africa. Chickens first arrived in Italy at least 2800 years ago, and in the Netherlands shortly after that. By the time the Gospel of Matthew was written around 70 AD, hens and their protective behavior towards their chicks was well enough known in the Near East that it could be used as a metaphor of God’s love.
Living around feral chickens on Saba, it’s easy to see why chickens would have become such a popular food bird. Resourceful and self-sufficient, you don’t have to give chickens a lot of assistance to have them thrive. As my friend building coops in the rainforest noted, you can just give them a place to roost, and they’ll take care of the rest. You can then harvest their eggs for omelets and their poop for fertilizer for your plants, and even the occasional individual bird to turn into chicken sate, and they’ll keep hanging out with you. The only thing that chickens really need from humans is to protect them from predators, and on Saba they haven’t even needed that.
But this traditional means of animal husbandry, I am told, is not correct. Chickens are not native to Saba; they arrived with the first also non-native humans to settle the island a few hundred years ago. They’ve been minding their chicken business and evolving their spectacular plumage alongside people since then, as if they were just a part of nature. But I guess they’re not; after all, they were brought here by people. The only place it’s natural for a chicken to live free in the jungle is in Indonesia, where red jungle fowl are, ironically, listed as threatened. One of the threats to the natural red jungle fowl population is their tendency to keep making baby chicks with domestic chickens. It’s as if the red jungle fowl doesn’t understand their place in nature: they are a different species, that naturally should not mix with domestic chickens. So they need humans to enforce that, by sequestering away the chickens to farms and killing the hybrid babies.
On Saba or Indonesia, I guess the only proper chicken is a domestic chicken in a battery cage, suffering from bird flu and with eggs too fragile to exist on their own. I guess the only natural kind of nature is one that bends easily to human will.
Before I moved to Saba, I lived in the midwestern United States. I used to hunt pheasants with my extended family.
It was interesting, if hard work. We often joked that pheasant was much more expensive than lobster: once you added up the cost of the bird dogs, guns, shells, and of course your time, the couple of 4-pound pheasants you’d bring down on a good day was a negative return on investment.
The ringneck pheasant is a close relative of domestic chickens and the red jungle fowl. Like the red jungle fowl, it’s native to Asia. It was successfully introduced to the United States in 1881 after several previous attempts had failed. Pheasants are not as resilient as chickens, and so it took a while for breeding populations of pheasants to become established in America. The reason for their introduction was because pheasant is tasty, and because they’re challenging to hunt. The skittish nature that makes them hard to hunt is the same reason why pheasants are not as adaptable to thriving in close proximity to humans as chickens are.
The ringneck pheasant is not considered an invasive species in the United States. It is not targeted for eradication. Rather, efforts are made to increase the population of ringneck pheasants in America. Its image graced the quarter of the state of South Dakota, minted just under 100 years after the ringneck pheasant was first introduced there.
The folks I hunted pheasant with were mainly farmers. But they were not chicken farmers. By the time we were hunting in the 1990s, rural people might have still been able to hunt free birds as a pastime, but not to farm free birds as a regular source of sustenance. Chicken farming in America had become an industrial operation with a few large corporations owning facilities run by poorly-compensated franchisees. Not bucolic farms with robust barnyard chickens, but warehouses filled with cages. The kind of environment that leads to bird flu epidemics.
Traditional ways of farming chickens—letting them hunt and peck in freedom, providing them just with protection and some food—are not efficient. It’s an invasion of older values into our modern, controlled environment, and definitely warrants being targeted for eradication.
I’ve heard we need to get with the program, and put all our eggs in the basket of an increasingly contingent and lean global supply chain, instead of allowing for centuries-old local means of production. We need to trust that our economic betters far away know more about what is best for us than we do. What wisdom could there possibly be in idiosyncratic understanding of local custom, when we have the universal logic of globalist values to order everything into its proper place?
And I don’t know how to answer all that, but I know some things about chickens. And it’s true that chickens always come home to roost.
I wonder how many years have to pass to allow for a man made change be considered also part of evolution. I once had a biology week in Wales, in a conservationist school and our teacher told us about two schools- the ones that want to take nature and pickle it to have it be as it was X years ago, and the school that understands that nature’s interaction with man is inevitable, so we have to be mindful and respectful for both to thrive. I took that home and remembered it when a friend of mine who studied forestry told me: “remember Ana, a mountain that does not produce will make a desperate owner apply fire to it and sell the charred carcass for development. If we want the mountain to survive we have to consider also the people who live in it”. It is the biggest conundrum ever, right after “what comes first, the chicken or the egg?”
I wish those environmental busybodies would leave your island alone. Ecology is always changing anyway. First they went after your goats. And now this. It’s as though they don’t want you to live self-sufficiently.