When you hatch your own chicks, approximately 50 percent of them will be male. As the overseer of Sugar Grove Farm, dealing with the baby roosters is my problem. The hens get to live an organic, free-ranging lifestyle at the farm. A neighbor was initially interested in raising the cockerels as meat birds, but decided there were already enough projects in her life.

“I will feed them to Mr. Friendly,” I said.*

“We would raise them,” my flatmates said.

“You’ll do everything? Feeding? Care? Building a house? They could live in the garden. It’s already fenced.”**

“Yes.”

“Kill them at the end of the season?” One of my flatmates is a vegan and the other is a vegetarian, which makes this question a bit deeper than asking your average person if they are up for killing what they will put on their plate.

“We think the experience would be valuable.” I couldn’t argue with that. But looking at their honest, hopeful faces, I recognized the expression. It was the same expression on my face when I was young, and sprung the mouse traps in my parent’s house because I did not want the mice to get hurt. It is not the face of someone who is going to find killing something easy or even possible.

My flock of five ISA Brown roosters-which are actually white, because they are sex linked-was started. The hens, which are brown, are some of the most productive egg layers on the market. At the time, the roosters were a week old and living in a kiddie pool.

My flatmates were amazing in how seriously they took chicken care. As the birds got bigger, they were carried back and forth to the garden each day. A small chicken house was added to the garden. Eventually, a larger walk-in chicken house was constructed.

When my flatmates were getting ready to go back to college, I asked the question: were they still planning on slaughtering the roosters?

“It is hard to kill something you have spent so much effort keeping alive,” they said.

“I’ll take care of them until they get mean,” I offered. “As soon as they get mean, I will do it.”

Because everyone knows roosters get mean, right? That was August. It is now December, and the Cluck-Clucks still expect to be petted regularly, like to be carried into the chicken house at night, and try to sneak into my house.

*One of my flatmates insist after I said that, I followed it up with, “unless you guys want them.” I don’t remember saying that. But it is the sort of thing I would have thought, and I frequently say what I think without fully thinking through the consequences, and my flatmates have an extraordinary strong sense of honesty.

**My garden fence was built to keep the deer out. It does that well, and holds up squash vines well. We quickly learned that it fails to keep anything besides deer out, and fails to keep anything in.

Trigger is-as you can see-not a bird. The flock is a mixture of guineas, ISA Brown Roosters, and Black Star Roosters. They all agree on one thing: an opossum is not a bird, and does not belong in the aviary. Or so I thought earlier this fall, as they threw very vocal temper tantrums whenever Trigger wandered inside and they refused to go in for the night. Refusing to go in at dusk has resulted in the death of many a bird.

Trigger would let me carry him back out. He didn’t even fear me enough to bother playing dead. His tail was rubbery, his fur silky. As much as I love opossums, I thought, I can’t feed everyone. I feed the flock, I put tasty scraps out for everyone, and have a bird feeding station and a ground feeding station. I already am feeding everyone, in limited, affordable quantities. But Trigger eats a lot of food and upsets the flock.

Last night, I went out to button up the chickens. It was cold (it is 12 F now) and there is a foot of snow on the ground. The flock hasn’t ventured outside. Trigger was inside the aviary with the birds. I don’t know that anyone was happy about it, but those roosters are roosters. If they wanted to kick a young opossum out, they could. I sighed. Trigger moseyed out into the snow and headed for the woods, instead of waiting for me to take him into the shed for shelter. Nitro makes him nervous. I know this because he plays dead for Nitro. The tip of his tail was already suffering from frostbite.

This morning, I fed and watered the birds. Then…I took a bowl of cat food out to the shed for Trigger and the two other opossums who live there. One of the opossums is Kip, Trigger’s mother; the other is a skittish black opossum who hasn’t shared his name with me yet. Because it is higher in protein than bird seed, the cat food will support the opossums better through these cold nights.

I am done for the evening. Done with the sound of chainsaws, the sound of dying trees, the sound of dump trucks. Done with the smell of wood chips, the smell of two stroke engines, the smell of burning green wood.

Done with the sight of blue sky instead of green canopy, the sight of brush piled higher than me stretching for miles, the sight of shattered wood a solid mass across what was the forest floor.

Tomorrow is another day. But tonight, as the darkness brings a temporary peace, and the cicadas and owls replace the sounds of living inside a sawmill, tonight I am done.