An Avian Adoption
Everett Yau
11/12/2019
Writer's Workshop G
An Avian Adoption
As soon as we got home from, I scooped some ice cream for myself, and ate it gratefully. The cold, creamy ice cream melted in my mouth. After a little while of hanging around in the kitchen and cooling down, my mom arrived home from work at our school with a large cardboard box. We scrambled to meet her.
To our surprise, there were living things in that box! A brood of four cute fluffy chicks were in there. They were so small and innocent, resting on the hay. Every once in a while, they chirped so brightly, with only the blitheness that could come from a newborn. The chicks were all relatively the same size, but were all a different color. One of the chicks was a light grey, and another was brown, bordering on red. The first of the remaining two was white with a few grey speckles in his coat, and the other had a coat yellow stereotypical to chicks. The box itself was simple. It only had the nesting material for the chicks, which was already covered in their excrement, and a little water spout the chicks could put their beaks to and drink from.
At first, I wasn't sure what I thought. While they were undeniably cute, I didn't know if I wanted to add four new pets into my life so spontaneously. I remember talking about adopting the chicks a few times over dinner, but never confirmed anything.
"Do you know the eighth-grader who is hatching chicks for their exit ticket?" my mom asked, shuffling her rice with her fork.
"Yeah! I've visited them a few times. They're so cute!" I exclaimed. "I even saw a few of them hatch."
"Well, you know they are looking for someone to adopt them. I thought we could take them because we're so close to the school, and we've talked about wanting chickens before," replied my mom.
My dad, ever cautious, didn't want to suddenly have to be responsible for 4 more lives. He stopped eating suddenly and stopped us from being too drastic: "I think we'll have to think about it more, before we do it."
She had risen the chicks at school, from right out of their little eggs. The chicks had been hand raised completely from birth, so I had seen them at school. I was there on the day they hatched and had held them only hours after their birth.
On that Friday afternoon, right before my mom had returned home from work, she had been approached with the choice of keeping the chicks. They needed a new home other than Synapse because their original caretaker had no place to keep them, and they weren't allowed to be kept at the school. My mom might have turned them down and adopt them at a more suitable time, but otherwise they would be adopted by someone else.
Immediately, we took the cardboard box out to our backyard to set the chicks free. We picked their fluffy little bodies up out of the box, and gently set them down on the turf patch. The chicks were very lively. The ran around like they were racing each other all around the grass, and even the dirt to the side of it. Apparently they didn't realize that the turf was fake, or they just didn't care, because the patch was soon dotted with the chicks’ waste.
Each chick had their own personality, and my brother and I instantly set to work on each of their defining attributes. Looking back on this, this made us feel much closer to our new pets. One of them was very fast, and whenever we attempted to catch her to put her back into her home, she would dart away from us, resulting in a grand chase. Another chick was very adventurous and friendly, he would later be the first to, by himself, fly out of the box when we took them outside. He immediately flew onto my brother as soon as we freed him from the box, and made a perch for himself. There was also another chick who enjoyed sunbathing, and would lie down in a way that his wing covered him partially, and he would bask in the sun. Our last chick was very alert and always slipped out of our grasp when we tried to catch him and restore him to his nesting area. Over time, my brother and I made up fantastical stories about our chickens, sometimes with them having special abilities and powers based on their personalities.
From arriving at my house to now, the chickens have lived in countless places. At first, they lived in a hallway downstairs in my house in their original home, the humble cardboard box they came in. After a little while, we setup a nice wooden coop for them on the turf patch where we played with them when we first got them. The coop had a little enclosure under a wooden birdhouse with a ladder that led up to it. In the coop itself there was a removable floor, on top of which two wooden beams crisscrossed, allowing the chickens to perch at night. There was a little box in the very back. . This was where the chickens were to lay their eggs. We had no place to let them roam when we weren't home, so we opted to move them to a new home in the garden. There, they had a gated enclosure, so they could roam around during the day. Three of the original chickens were roosters, and where I live, owning roosters as pets is illegal. Sadly, we had to give them away, but their legacy lived on. Later, we went to the store to get another hen, to give our remaining chicken company.
Getting chickens was a great experience. They were my first pets that survived for more than a few months, and they helped me get experience and leverage for owning another, more demanding pet, my dog.
