The Cherrylane Chicken Chronicles

I didn’t know anything about chickens when we moved to the country five decades ago.

Well, actually, during our early years at Cherrylane, we did have a rooster living in our front yard for a while.

We kept inheriting the adult versions of all the cute fluffy critters from our son Kelly’s preschool in Clarkston. When the babies grew up and summer came along, they all ended up at our house, because “you live in the country.”

This rooster was an imposing white Leghorn, Salty by name, who was almost as tall as my son and armed with sharp spurs on his legs.

But that’s another story.

My latest experience with chickens came in the wake of a disastrous wildfire that roared through the Clearwater and Potlatch River valleys in July.

Sparked by lightning and driven by high winds, the so-called Gwen Fire scorched more than 30,000 acres, forced hundreds of residents to evacuate their homes and closed U.S. Highway 12 for days. Our home was spared, but at least 25 homes were lost, including a neighboring trailer home tucked up the draw near the north end of the Cherrylane Bridge.

The inferno left a bomb scene of twisted metal, charred hulks of appliances, piles of rubble and the skeletons of two burned-out cars. The young couple who lived there were living in a motel. They lost everything.

But somehow her chickens survived.

The nearest neighbor spotted them wandering around in the blackened wasteland. It was August now, and the bench was baking hot. So we started taking water and kitchen scraps up to the chickens — 10 hens of all shapes and sizes and a handsome rooster with a golden cape.

My grandkids were visiting at the time and we would walk up to check on the chickens. They started right away naming them, of course, beginning with the rooster, who they named Sparky.

“What should we do, Granny?” they asked me, recognizing the chickens’ precarious situation and uncertain future. I don’t know anything about chickens, I confessed. But I know women in the neighborhood who keep chickens and they will know what to do.

Their advice: You catch them, at night, when they are roosting. Then you can grab them right off their perches.

Well, this was clearly not something Granny would be doing. But thankfully, my intrepid chicken-keeping neighbor across the river, Kristy Kerby Anderson, volunteered. I just had to discover where they roosted. So I went at dusk to watch, and here came the flock, following Sparky to a grove of singed hackberry trees beside the road up the draw. A search with a flashlight into the trees revealed black forms hunched on many of the branches.

Now my job switched to holding up a cardboard box for Kristy to stuff the struggling, squawking, flapping chickens when she snatched them from their perches. We did this for several nights, keeping the captured chickens in a holding pen, until there was only one left. We named her Houdini, because Kristy tried three times on three different nights to catch her, only to come up with a few tail feathers. Each time she escaped, running up the road into the darkness.

One night we brought my three grandkids, each equipped with a headlamp and armed with a steelhead net. They lined up on the road as Kristy climbed up to Houdini’s perch, made a grab for her, and lost her again.

The image that sticks in my mind is the look on my grandkids’ faces, eyes wide, dumbfounded, steelhead nets still at the ready, as they watched Houdini dash right past them and into the night.

Perhaps we should have practiced a bit.

———

Before the Great Cherrylane Chicken Roundup, during visits to feed and bring water to the chickens, I started to notice their different personalities and identified the breeds online.

The first to come out from the rubble on my visits were the Silkies, always so happy to see me. The breed, originally from China, has feathers that are more like soft fur. And they are notoriously friendly. I can see why they are singled out for being the easiest to turn into pets.

And then there were the tall, stately Polish hens, each with a spray of feathers on their heads, like big fancy hats. They approached more gingerly, like proper old ladies.

Sparky is a Brahma rooster, a breed feathered in a beautiful patchwork of colors, and characterized as “calm and easy-going.” I admired how Sparky ushered his girls amidst the wreckage, always placing himself between them and perceived dangers, like me.

All these assorted chickens were adopted into the flocks of three friends and neighbors, even Sparky. Roosters are hard to place, because you already have one, or you don’t want any. So there was a glitch when one of the adopted hens turned out to be a rooster.

My friend Dawn Wittman had taken two Silkies and two Polish hens, and now one of the Silkies was trying to crow, she reported, like the cracked voice of a teenage boy. But Dawn kept him anyway, saying the cock-a-doodle the Silkie came up with was soft, and “actually quite pleasant.” That’s friendship for you.

Meanwhile, the season had changed, and with the cold, rainy weather, Kristy and I started to worry about Houdini. Polish hens like Houdini are not a cold-weather breed. She’s slender, with a spray of black feathers on her head and breast feathers checkered black and brown. She looks rather like a pheasant at first glance, minus the long tail and wearing a fancy black hat.

She no longer roosted in the hackberries, which didn’t offer enough rain cover, I’m guessing. So I drove up and sat in my car one evening, hoping to discover where Houdini was roosting now. I was early, so I was doing a crossword puzzle and sipping some wine when a movement beside the car caught my eye.

And there, coming out of the brush beside the road, was Houdini, leading a covey of quail! She’d gone wild!

———

The hillsides in the Clearwater Valley have greened up again after the fire. Spring will tell us which trees survived. For now, the view across the river from our windows seems mostly unchanged.

Our neighbors just upriver who lost their home in the wildfire have started to rebuild. They even strung Christmas lights in some of the charred trees around the site of their new home. It’s been a symbol of hope and resilience enjoyed by the whole neighborhood.

I’ve continued taking chicken feed and scraps up to Houdini every few days. I see her occasionally, running away from me. She looks skinny, but good.

Kristy and I did make one last-ditch effort to capture her in a live trap borrowed from Fish and Game and baited with chicken goodies. She wasn’t fooled. So we’re trying to accept Houdini as a wild bird, although we admit to each other we still worry about her.

She’s taken to hiding underneath the burned-out cars. That offers some protection from predators and the rain I guess. But it won’t protect her from the freezing temperatures that will surely come in January.

Pettit is a retired city editor on the Lewiston Tribune and lives along Cherrylane Road. Those who have similar stories about the aftermath of the July fires are welcome to share them with the Daily News by writing to editor@dnews.com.