WHISKEY CREEK FARM

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Life, with the farm

Location: Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, Canada • • • Visit: May 2012

We picked up a rental car and left Victoria. Drove across the island and spent a long weekend enjoying the hiking trails and beaches in Ucluelet and Tofino. I was enchanted by the wild, temperate rainforest greenery.

On our drive back, halfway to Victoria, I turned off the highway and stopped at Whiskey Creek Farm. There, I unloaded my green monster backpack and my plastic bag with bagels and tea. I said goodbye to Frida and the girls and they drove off. I was alone again. At my new WWOOFing farm. With the chickens picking in the flowerbeds around me.

So. Whiskey Creek Farm. Lori, the owner of the farm, doesn’t need a lawn mower. She’s got Tango, the pony, who freely walks around on the property, together with the chickens and the turkey.

Sparky, Lori’s mother Vi’s dog, might be the fattest dog I’ve ever met. Vi is 86 years old and forgets when she’s fed him, so she feeds him again. And there isn’t any arguing with her. Of course she knows best. She’s the oldest!

You never know what you might find on the farm, in a bush or on the wall of one of the many sheds. Old bikes, shoes with plants growing out of them, a hen lying on a nest, or art. Surprising sculptures.

One thing is for certain: walking around on this property, you will at least not get bored. And there are chickens everywhere!

One of my first days at Whiskey Creek Farm, Lori had me working in the butcher shop. Because, Lori doesn’t only raise chickens and have a big garden, she also has a small farm butcher shop where she butchers chickens, but also ducks and turkeys, two days a week. Farmers come with big crates full of birds, and leave with boxes full of meat.

It was kind of a shock, starting the work there. Not necessarily a bad one, more that it took a while to get used to. The smell of cleaner and raw chicken meat, the chilliness of the place, the humidity. Everything being so clean.

I didn’t work with the actual killing. That was done in another room. What I did was to take the butchered, head-, foot- and featherless bird and pluck possible feather ends from the skin. Then, I handed the bird to the next person, who would empty out the innards and cut off the neck. Last, the birds would go to the meat inspector, who checked so that the chicken was big enough and seemed healthy. In-between the different stops in the process, the birds were kept in big tubs of cold water.

I’m not squeamish. Handling still warm, dead chicken didn’t bother me, even when I heard their last screams in the room next door. Even when considering that I might have been feeding this particular bird, chasing it into the barn, just the day before. It’s the way of life. I didn’t know that I would feel this way, but it felt kind of good knowing that I could handle death in this very concrete sense.

What eventually started making me feel uncomfortable was the smell and the strain on my hands. Lori’s chickens were big and fat, carrying them and turning them to find all the remaining feather ends put a strain on my arms and hands, especially after seven hours of work. When the last bird was finally plucked, I was exhausted.

I was later told that this wasn’t a normal day. Usually, they butchered about two hundred birds a day. This day, they had had to do four hundred, due to some double bookings. That’s why Lori had asked me to help in the shop. Normally, she wouldn’t have wwoofers there. But really, I liked the experience. I will never become a butcher, but having worked for one day in a butcher shop, I now have that experience. For one day, it was interesting.

There were a lot of people coming and going at Whiskey Creek Farm. My first couple of days, there were two young German guys wwoofing, but after they left it was only me and Lori and her mom. But there were the workers in the butcher shop, three different carpenters coming to fix stuff, customers and friends that would just drop by for a chat and a bite. I didn’t feel isolated in the least.

One of all these friends was Kathy. I was invited to her house with Lori for dinner and one Sunday afternoon she took me for a walk around Cameron Lake. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon, and the walk was a wonderful brake from all the weeding. And the lake, with the snowy mountain tops in the background, was just magical.

I really felt like part of the family at Whiskey Creek Farm, included in everything. I could have stayed here for months, taking it easy, getting dirt under my nails. But I had convinced myself. I needed to move on, return to university and get my master’s degree. There were things that needed to be done in the world. Talking with Lori and Kathy and all the other people I had met at the farm, I was more convinced of that than ever.

Oh, you wouldn’t believe how cute the chicks are when they are one day old. The laying hens’ chicks are hard to get close to, since their moms are there to protect them. But the meat bird chicks, delivered from the mainland freshly hatched, are all on their own and are just craving to hide underneath something. They are completely yellow and soft as cotton balls and their small tweets make your heart melt.

Or when they’re a little bit older, and have started becoming more independent. When I entered their shed, they were all vary at first, even scared, but eventually some would be brave enough to come closer, eating from my hands and even jumping up on my lap, expecting to find more food. They try to squeeze through everything, but if they end up on the other side of the fence all alone, they start screaming and running around in a panic until you catch them and let them go back into the chick shed again.

They are funny creatures, chicks. After having spent some time among them, I now know that they are just as baby playful and teenager rebellious as most other human and non-human kids.

When Lori gave me the responsibility to gather the day’s catch of new eggs, she said that the hens were sneaky and that every day was like a never-ending Easter egg hunt without a map. But I didn’t realize just how sneaky.

Some hens laid their eggs in the egg barn, where Lori had built cozy little nests for them. That was all well and simple. But most hens seemed to think that nesting there would be making it far too simple. They wanted a challenge.

I found nests in the tool shed, in between tools and nails. I found a nest in the firewood shed, behind piles of logs. I found a nest in the back of the meat bird barn, where the laying hens weren’t even really supposed to go. Behind the bakery, underneath a chair. Next to a big plastic exercise ball in the horse barn. Behind the feed bags and hay bales in the stall where horse food was kept. Even just under the roof of one of Lori’s quirky sheds, in a decorative basket sitting on the very narrow shelf which the roof was built on.

At first, I just picked the eggs. But then, Lori told me that if a hen finds her nest completely emptied, she will think it’s been robbed (which is true) and find another place to build a nest. To avoid this, one should either put a golf ball in the nest, which resembles an egg enough to deceive a hen, or just leave some of her own eggs in the nest.

Since the golf balls were scarce, I came up with a system. I would take old eggs from a nest that I’ve just found, mark them with the date, and redistribute them into the nests I knew were active laying places for the hens. No one wanted to do anything with those eggs anyway, since they might have been in the hidden nest for weeks and maybe even laid on and then left (resulting in it containing a half-developed, dead chick). Win-win. If a hen found a nest with many eggs in it, she would become excited, think it was a good laying place and start laying eggs there herself. And I would know how to separate between the new eggs and the old.

It became a highlight of my days at the farm, going on the egg round, trying to find new nests and the excitement when an old nest with new-old-marked eggs had managed to fool a hen into start using the nest again. Maybe I would make a decent chicken farmer.

Now in the spring is the time when the hens want to have babies. But they are strangely communal about the egg laying process. They’ll find a spot that they like, build a little nest there and start laying eggs. When the original hen isn’t there, some other hen might lie in the nest for a while, leaving an egg as a gift of sorts. Some hens, on the other hand, are so greedy that they will steal eggs from another nest, carrying them under her wing. When there is an appropriate number of eggs in the nest (the exact number varies between hens, some are greedier than others), she will start the actual laying process, keeping the eggs warm for three weeks.

The tricky thing about this is that in the beginning, the hen still leaves the nest for short periods of time to eat. Since another hen might come and lay a new egg in the nest during the laying hen’s absence, a couple of eggs in the nest might be behind the other eggs in maturity. When it’s time to hatch, the first chick might start crawling out of its shell while the last still needs a day or two to mature in its egg. This leads to the hen getting off the nest when the oldest chicks are ready to leave, while there still might be a couple of eggs that are only half hatched. They can’t hatch on their own, they need the heat from the hen, so if the mother leaves, the half-born chicks die.

But I was so excited about the hens lying on eggs, wanting to see the newly hatched chicks, so I checked on them often and managed to be on time to save seven chicks from freezing to death in their eggs. That was when the midwifing process started. Lori made it my responsibility to make sure the chicks were warm enough, possibly help them get out of their eggs and let them dry before I put them back underneath the hen-mother again. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, though.

The first chick I midwifed was the only chick in the batch that didn’t make it out on time. It had only just cracked through its shell, and was tweeting like only bird babies can. I could see the beak through the hole in the shell, but that was all.

At first, I kept the egg warm with towels soaked in hot water. Lori was out working in the butcher shop, but on one of her visits in the kitchen, she showed me where the cooker that she used for making broth was. In that, I thought the egg might be warm enough. But the hatching was slow. Eventually I started helping the chick crack its shell, peeling off small pieces.

When it finally got out, it looked like a tiny alien. Seriously, if someone had showed me this creature out of context, all wet and still crooked from the egg, I might have believed a claim that it was a dinosaur baby. Now the heating got trickier, the wet towels prevented the chick from drying. I found a hairdryer, but using it seemed to scare the chick. It looked tired and weak, and I didn’t have a clue how to give it the right, mother-hen-belly-temperature. At last, after more than two hours of midwifing, the chick died. I was holding it in my hand when it took its last breath.

I’m not that sensitive, but still I felt a little sad afterwards. The chick had gotten cooled down before we found it, so it was weak – but if I had found a way to keep it warm and comfy for a long enough period for it to dry, it still might have survived. I think. My first try as a chick midwife was a huge failure. To lighten my mood, I had to go visit the chick barn, where we kept all the newly hacked chicks and their mothers. It’s hard to be sad with those small, cute tweeting cotton-balls running around you.

The next time I was more prepared. This hen had laid her eggs in the worst place imaginable, on top of the wood shavings pile, in the corner up against the tarp where the wall didn’t go all the way up to the roof. And she was protective of her eggs, so she wouldn’t let Lori move her into a cardboard box to make sure none of the eggs fell down from the shavings pile. To make matters worse, she had more than twenty eggs, far too many to be able to keep them all warm enough. So, when her eggs started hatching and the first bunch were strong enough to start moving, more than half of her eggs were still unhatched.

Luckily, I walked by just then, on my search for the day’s catch of eggs. We quickly moved the hen and her chicks into the barn and found three half-hatched eggs that were still tweeting.

Now, I knew what to do. First, I helped all three chicks to get out of their eggs. Then I created a system where I wrapped all the mini dinosaur babies in towels soaked in hot water. I continually had to change the towels, before they cooled off, but all three chickens seemed to be doing fine. Then Lori got the idea to use the small heater in the living room to keep the chicks warm. So I built a nest of dry towels for the babies and placed it right underneath the hot air vent. There, the chicks could dry, and eventually all of them were lifting their heads and moving around. When they were all dry and fluffy, I took them to the chick barn and placed them underneath the vary mother-hen, hoping she would let them rest for long enough.

Just to make sure, Lori and I went back to get the unhatched eggs from the wood shavings pile. There, we found two more chicks, one all hatched, but lying at the bottom of the pile, bleeding from its stomach and barely breathing, and another one with barely a hole in its shell. These must have been really strong, to hatch completely without the mother-hen’s heat. So, I did the same procedure to them, with the hot towels and the heater, and when completely dry, put them back underneath the mom. They both seemed very much alive and strong.

The next morning, when I went to check on the chickens in the chick barn, I found two dead chicks in the nest where the newest hen had been lying that night. One was the chick with the wound on its belly. It had probably been caught by a raven from the top of the shavings pile just after hatching, but then dropped for some reason and fallen to the bottom of it. It might have had internal bleeding that was too severe for it to survive, even though it seemed extremely strong the night before. The other chick was yellow, maybe the one of the first three that had seemed more tired and groggy than the other ones.

Still, I managed to save three happy little chicks from freezing to death and making it through those first critical hours of life outside the egg. That must be considered an accomplishment for a second-time-chick-midwife.

Now I’m sitting in the bus, leaving Whiskey Creek. I feel sad. I didn’t want to go. I could have stayed with Lori for the rest of the summer, eating chicken and eggs and played with Tango and cuddled with the baby chicks and made apple pie and rhubarb sauce.

But, at the same time, I want to continue my journey. If the bus isn’t too late, I’ll make it to the ferry from Victoria to Port Angeles, where I’ll spend one day hiking in the Olympic National Park – and after that, I’m meeting up with Hanna in Seattle. She has just turned in her bachelor’s thesis and is flying across both an ocean and a continent to go on a two-and-a-half-week road trip down the US west coast with me. I’m really excited about that and feel completely torn between wanting to stay and excitement to go. But I guess that’s the risk you must take when you go traveling like this. The chance that you fall in love with a place. It cannot be avoided. Not the way I travel, with curiosity and an open heart. But unless I’m ready to uproot my entire life, I always have to move on.