Trauma Farm (27 page)
WE NEVER RAISED MANY
ducks, especially after a flock of Muscovys escaped from our neighbours, packing their young up to our ponds, and became a great feast for the eagles, which picked them off, one at a time. Even the ravens got into the act. They would fly at the young in waves, one bird returning over and over again as the ducklings got used to the cycle of diving and surfacing, diving and surfacing, until the second raven came in as the duckling surfaced . . . .
Duck eggs are a delight. I separate the white and mix it with minced, spiced pork and green onions and then put it in a dish surrounding the yolk and steam it. It’s a Chinese tradition I picked up somewhere. It also works with the even stronger-flavoured goose egg. These days a friend keeps Indian Runners and provides me with the occasional duck egg I need. This will change soon. The avian flu hysteria has suppressed public sales of ducks in North America, and only a few varieties are raised for food in distant factories. Duck eggs are difficult to find in stores, and a multitude of varieties are endangered.
AS THE GOOSE AND
duck declined in our diet over the past century, the ascendancy of the chicken and the turkey began.
The wild turkey is a canny bird, as any turkey hunter will attest. The best place to surprise the clever, skittish turkey is from a hunting chair in a tree, which the birds don’t notice because the adult turkey has no real airborne predator. Amateur hunters are notoriously inept at attaching their tree chairs and have a tendency to get drunk or nod off—so they tumble out of the trees at an impressive rate. Thirty-six percent of hunter injuries in Georgia in 1990 were caused by plummeting from trees.
The wild turkey—our table variety is a pathetic descendant— is an intelligent, beautiful creature that can fly fifty-five miles per hour and run at eighteen to twenty-five miles per hour. It has a lifespan of about fifteen years. The wild turkey is so smart that Benjamin Franklin volunteered it would make a better national symbol for the usa than the bald eagle, a carrion eater that is pretty but cowardly— qualities that some unsympathetic American political commentators consider apt. In America, it’s traditional for the president to pardon a turkey every year. That turkey gets to live out its days on a “sanctuary” farm. President George W. Bush pardoned more than twice as many turkeys as prisoners on death row. The first turkey pardoned was a pet of Abraham Lincoln’s son Tad, who became hysterical at the thought of eating it for Thanksgiving, and thus the tradition began.
Not much is known about the early days of the domesticated turkeys because the colonialists destroyed almost all the Native American records they encountered. Surviving fossil evidence shows the birds are at least 10 million years old and that they were raised confined by Natives in Mexico two millenniums ago. Both Columbus and Cortés took such a liking to these birds and advocated their use so enthusiastically that by 1530 domestic flocks were appearing around Spain. The Pilgrims were well acquainted with them before that legendary first Thanksgiving dinner of Native American crops and game.
At Trauma Farm we’ve raised standard bronze turkeys, a variety that resembles the wild turkey and remains capable of surviving without human intervention. Many of our friends raise other varieties. Bev and Mike Byron tend to grow the white broad-breasted—the commercial bird. However, Mike runs them free-range and feeds them grain, so they are delicious even if he loses birds because they aren’t bred to thrive in the natural world anymore. Like all free-range birds, these cook faster than the fatty, confined birds fed high-protein pellets because they’re active, making their meat denser and more heat conductive. Other friends are part of a desperate continent-wide community attempting to save the last, endangered remnants of the great breeds.
The inbred domestic turkey, debeaked and declawed, is raised in darkened, ammonia-stinking sheds housing up to fifty thousand birds. More than 300 million turkeys a year are produced this way. The white broad-breasted is preferred by the factories. Fed their own recycled excrement, rendered animal offal, and reject grain formulated into chemically fortified pellets, factory birds are often diseased by the time they reach your Thanksgiving or Christmas table. If the turkeys are not confined to individual cages, which they almost never are, and if a door is opened to an outside pen, which shed-raised birds would seldom dare to explore, they can legally be called “free-range” and sold at an increased price. Ninety percent of all factory birds are tainted with bacteria, including the nasty campylobacter. The last U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate I could find stated that 35 percent of the birds have salmonella. The number is greater today, which explains the pressure to irradiate meat with gamma rays. Salmonella and
E. coli
and other bacteria die when they’re nuked, so irradiation will allow the slaughterhouses to become even dirtier and spray more meat with excrement during slaughter.
That’s why I want to know my turkey before I eat him. I check out the farm, its range, the feed. When that’s no longer possible, I’ll probably join the growing millions who prefer their birds in a tree, not in the oven, and sit down to the dreaded tofu turkey. According to the National Turkey Federation, 97 percent of Americans ate turkey on Thanksgiving in 2007, consuming 45 million birds on a single day. This is another of those statistics I suspect; nevertheless, these numbers make me wonder who actually has the strongest flocking mentality.
PEOPLE ASSUME CHICKEN HAS
been central to our diet since time immemorial—that the bucolic fantasy of the small farm and a flock of chickens in the yard goes back to Babylon. This is not true. Though the chicken was domesticated early as a fighting bird rather than for meat or egg production, wild birds fed the lower classes around the world more than chickens did. Aside from domesticated geese, ducks, turkeys, and the occasional chicken, local diets of fowl included pheasants, pigeons, quail, peafowl, and whatever other bird could be trapped or killed. Peafowl were generally reserved for the aristocracy, but poaching is an ancient tradition. They have a reputation as a tough-fleshed bird if not hung properly. Yet it can be delicious—one of my best meals ever was a broiled, curried peahen.
The poet P.K. Page visits our farm occasionally and, like most guests, is enamoured of our peafowl. She once told a story of a king who grew so angry with a peacock he had it sewn up in a leather bag and left to die. She couldn’t comprehend that kind of cruelty, but she’s never been at the farm during breeding season—from April to July. The scream of a peacock can be bloodcurdling at close range (as scary as a cougar’s wail). It sounds like a woman’s high-pitched scream for help. At a distance, oddly, the pitch changes so that the cry becomes haunting and romantic. However, hearing the mighty Ajax scream at two in the morning while perched on a balcony rail outside our bedroom window is enough to lift us right off the mattress. Repeat that sound every hour and every night for a couple of months, and sewing him up in a leather bag starts to sound like a good idea if you’re an uncontrollable king.
Peafowl, originally from Indochina, have been domesticated for millenniums. Brought to Europe via Egypt, they became the favourite bird of kings and monasteries. I sell the cock’s moulted feathers to pay the flock’s annual grain bill. As a child I was enthralled with the peacocks at Stanley Park in Vancouver, and their cries haunted my dreams. I promised myself if I ever owned acreage I would have peafowl. (Because of the noise factor, they need a minimum ten acres—otherwise the neighbours will be holding public meetings about you.) So I told Sharon they were one of my musts when we moved to the farm. She’s never quite forgiven me.
We ended up with four peafowl running free on the farm. They became our friends, even as they demanded hand-fed grapes or raisins and raised havoc in the garden, dust bathing in freshly seeded beds or devouring the broccoli and cauliflower. We survive the screaming, though it leads to near-divorce every May. The male is merely standing guard, acting as both a lure and a warning system for predators, real or imaginary. Fifty feet off the ground on a narrow branch, and ready to fight, he’s a formidable foe, unlike the peahens, who are vulnerable on the nest. Being good mothers, they’re reluctant to leave their eggs, even under attack. Our survivors have grown wise and usually nest close to the house where the dogs can protect them.
Peafowl are inquisitive birds, and they often peer in our bedroom window in the morning, as if wondering why we aren’t up yet. It’s been dawn for twenty minutes! In the summer months they consider any open door an invitation. When our backs are turned they scoot in and rush along the low windowsills, snapping up the dead flies. This makes for impressive housecleaning, but the reward is usually a big plop of skanky peafowl shit on the spruce floor in the front room.
Sharon’s father, Andy, visited the farm during the last years of his life. Almost blind, in his eighties, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he’d drift in and out of delirium because of the combination of strong medicines he’d been prescribed. After a while we got used to his rambling and didn’t pay attention if he announced there was a ferry boat parked in the pasture or those cia agents were in the closet again.
Preparing dinner late one afternoon, Sharon and I were in the kitchen, with her father nattering away in the front room. We couldn’t see him behind the adobe divider, but his occasional bizarre announcements made us laugh, softly, despite ourselves. He was a dear, sweet man. After a while he began talking about how all the birds loved him. He declared himself the king of birds. I decided to peek around the corner. He was in his armchair blindly basking in the warmth coming from the sunroom. On each side of his chair sat the peafowl like regal attendants, Ajax to his left, his long tail fanned out behind him on the spruce floor, and Juno on Andy’s right. Both birds held their heads erect, staring proudly at me.
ON THE OTHER HAND
, meat chickens are grotesque creatures these days, and a very different fowl than their ancestors. The only good thing to say about the avian flu hysteria is that much of the commercial stock was destroyed during the panic, at least in Canada, and so breeders had to go back a few generations to start rebuilding their flocks with real chickens.