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Home to Roost: A Backyard Farmer Chases Chickens Through the Ages

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Posted on Sun, Jul. 13, 2008

Pure poetry from a man who loves his poultry

Home to Roost
A Backyard Farmer Chases Chickens Through the Ages
By Bob Sheasley
Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin's Press. 278 pp. $24.95

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Reviewed by Michael Pakenham

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About 8,000 years ago, in Southeast Asia, the chicken came, before the egg. That is, humans captured the wild red jungle fowl, cherishing its fierceness.
The last thing these ur-chickens were was chicken. Cockfighting, the blood sport, way predated exploiting the fowl for eating or brooding eggs or coddling the things.

Today, each year, every citizen of the United States consumes, on average, 60 pounds of chicken flesh. Annually, the nation markets 90 billion of their eggs, about 300 per capita. Today there are 24 billion chickens on Earth, four for every man, woman, and child.

Now comes Bob Sheasley with a comprehensive, concise treatise on the bird. It is encyclopedically packed with facts such as these, a scholarly work with 13 pages of footnotes and an elaborate additional bibliography.

The book is also a love story. And a treatise on the practice of agriculture. It is a history of the chicken, as bird and phenomenon. It is a handbook of fowl husbandry, a survey of the literature of chickens, of chicken origins, development, and maintenance. It is a compilation of the mythology of chickens, deep into pre-history. Most powerfully, it is a memoir, a very personal story.

It contains maybe just a tad more than some readers really ever wanted to know about chickens, but it is so utterly enchanting that I can barely imagine anyone - even those numb to both chickens and country life - who would not find it delightful. At his best, Sheasley writes poetry.

As he finished writing the book, he and his wife, Suzanne, had lived for six years on their five-acre farm, which they call Lilyfield, between Philadelphia and Lancaster County. Her grandfather's ashes are buried near a weeping cherry tree there. They have been raising chickens and selling their eggs since the spring of 2004.

Sheasley draws provocatively from history, ancient and contemporary. He gives great tribute and affection to Ulisse Aldrovandi, who completed a 2,000-page treatise, Ornithology, in the year 1600, when Aldrovandi, a dauntless scholar, was approaching 80. His elaborate household, gardens, and coops were in the Apennines, not far from Florence, near Bologna, where he established botanical gardens. Sheasley learned a lot from him.

So from time to time throughout his own book, Sheasley carries on conversations with Aldrovandi - informed and respectful chats. They apparently occur in the early 1600s. This is a contrivance, of course, a benevolent conceit of the narrative voice. That might put off a pedant, but Sheasley handles these conversations with wit and gentle irony that goes far beyond redeeming them, at least to my ear and eye.

There is a great deal here that is not fantasy. Going very technical, Sheasley is deeply skeptical of such commercial designations as "organic" - dismissing them as based at best on hopelessly flimsy laws or regulations, enforced trivially if at all. Even if the ill-drafted "free range" labeling regulations are followed, he insists, most probably "the only range such birds will ever encounter is the one in the kitchen." As to the commercial trade: A case of eggs can be stored as long as eight months in serious cold storage rooms, and most or many you get in supermarkets may be many weeks old.

So, you want eggs that are healthful, nutritious, and delicious? Go to a farmers market, or better yet a farm. Examine the circumstances, the sanitation, the commitment. Look the proprietors - and, better yet, the birds - squarely in the eye.

Chickens should run free, for your sake and for theirs. Predators abound and invade, of course, in truly open chicken yards: weasels, skunks, foxes, hawks and domestic critters. But "those that die by the talon have nonetheless fulfilled their destiny," writes Sheasley, "which is to be consumed. From a chicken's perspective, better to perish in a meadow than a processing plant. As the prey of human consumers, it dies shackled and hanging on the disassembly line. As the prey of raptors, the end comes in a swoop of wings, in a field, swiftly. This is death. It's part of life."

A copy editor at The Inquirer, Sheasley regularly puts all his eggs in one basket and peddles them to his colleagues. Alongside journalism and chickens, he celebrates the American family farm as one of the great institutions of history - sustained by hard work, fortitude, honesty and much more. He bemoans its all-too-rapid deterioration. He rages against the descent of what used to be poultry farming into industrialized chicken manufacturing.

In the course of the book, there are places where it is impossible not to weep. An example is the final chapter, but don't, don't jump forward to read it. Begin at the beginning. A remarkable writer, a classic romantic.

And, my, my, the man does love chickens.

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Two Weeks Under

In first pages, the alluring narrator tells us he treks into Philadelphia every day from his bucolic farm, carrying a basket of fresh eggs to the bustling, city-worn newsroom of the Phildelphia Inquirer, where he works as an editor.

He had me at hello. The contrast between the natural life of a farm and the manmade newsroom illuminates our timely struggle to live a natural life in a techno world. Bob Sheasley has balance. He is a loving, talented story telling voice, but not saccharin sweet. He doesn't keep it cute. Farming isn't cute. Natural isn't all cute. That's probably why the faint hearted (like me) ran to cities to begin with.

He's a realist, but an optimistic one, who loves the land, his relationship to it, and with an unyielding respect for chickens. But he doesn't anthropomorphize them either. The relationship between man and chicken is filled with love, alienation, conflict, tragedy, irritation, celebration, survival instinct, and hunger. He brings that world to life, reminds us it's okay to feel everything at once, because that's life. If we're happy, we can also be sad. Nothing stands alone.

When I put down this book, I felt connected--and REALLY in the mood for sunny side up eggs. I highly recommend this book.

--Rivka Tadjer, Woodstock,N.Y.

More than anything else, "Home to Roost" reminds me of something that could have been written by John McPhee. In books like "Oranges" or "Giving Good Weight", McPhee immerses himself into the citrus-growing or farm-market industry, learns all that he can about it, then writes about the lifestyle in a way that the reader comes to understand the processes and procedures -- and appreciate the people involved. This is what Bob Sheasley has done for chicken farming in "Home to Roost."

The book is meticulously researched and offers as much footnoted, scholarly material as a textbook. But unlike most texts, it's written in a highly entertaining style with beautiful personal touches woven throughout. We read about the pros and cons of both caged and free-range egg production, then see which one chickens might choose for themselves if left to their own devices. We witness the devastation of predator attacks on a flock of free-range hens and to the hearts of the family who had given these creatures names... Such topics as animal research, genetic manipulation, animal rights, big agribusiness, organic farming are all examined from multiple viewpoints, always keeping in mind their effect -- good, bad, or somewhere in between -- on chickens and the people who live by them.

By turns funny, touching, and provocative, this is a memorable book that will leave you feeling you've learned something important - and that you've had a wonderful time doing it!

More than just a book about chickens, this is a book about life. Life as it was, life as it is, and our longing for what we've lost along the way. Sheasley's book is tremendously informative and often times funny. Sometimes it is poignant to the point of tears. It is impossible not to feel moved by this wonderful book- not if you have a heart and a soul.

My mother bought me this book, what a delightful find! I'd never heard of it - of course it's brand new, even newer than I am to keeping chickens; my husband and I embarked on that adventure in June of this year. Bob Sheasley's informative, entertaining look at all things chicken is a fascinating read. Chicken fans will appreciate his explanation of the evolution of chicken raising, from ancient farmyards to the factory farms of today, and the seemingly return to the farmyard that's happening across the country. But there's much more to find in this book, so much I can't cover it all in this little review. If you've read and enjoyed Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and you keep chickens, you will really enjoy reading this wonderful book!

i loved the book! wishing for fresh eggs again-the great taste of
home grown fried chicken for Sunday dinner. oh, the longing!. a very well
written ''sardonic'' take on one of the vanishing ways of life. life on a small family farm takes me back. bob- bring on a great novel about that
life on your childhood farm.

I love chickens and when I enjoy a book it is usually because I can feel that the writer loves it's subject. I did not get that feeling with this book. A lot of nasty historical information about the awful things the human race has done to chickens. The writer states that after a predatory attack on his peeps (which were kept outside in a cage, not in a secure building) he threw the dead bodies and parts into the weeds behind the garden. This is the exact opposite of what to do in that case. The predator probably came back that night and enjoyed it's leftovers. In the case of death by predator one should remove the remains and prevent the predator from having a meal otherwise it will remember that it ate well at your coop and soon be back. Such a shame. I had been looking forward to a fun read like Enslaved by Ducks or
Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance: Reflections on Raising Chickens but encountered this disturbing book. I'll take the other reviewers (from the book flap) at their word, that the author loves chickens, but can't recommend this book if you do too.