As a Hen Gathers Her Chickens

banty cochin hen

This isn't a photo of one of my chickens, I left my photos at my daughter's house and I've yet to fetch them home.  But I have plenty of pictures and our little black banty hens looked just like the lady above.

One of the things about living in the country and observing nature is that I see so many parallels between the way things happen out here and the way things happen in our own lives. 

Today I was reading in Matthew 23, and as always verse 37 stood out to me.  Especially this portion "... how often I wanted to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing..."  So God wants to gather us under His wings and protect us.  Exactly what kind of picture does that bring to your mind?  Thanks to my country living status and experience with chickens of all kinds, I think I know a little bit of what Jesus is trying to show us here.

These little banty hens, like the one above, are fierce mothers.  It takes a broody breed of chicken to sit on a nest and hatch out chicks and then raise them up.  Not all chickens are broody, and you don't always want your chickens to get broody.  If you're raising a flock of chickens for egg laying you want your chickens to lay eggs, not raise babies.  We had lots of little banty hens and they pretty much had the run of the barn and would lay their nest of eggs wherever they pleased, as determined by their internal chicken wisdom as being the safest spot.

 Inside the barn were separate stalls made of old pallets set on edge at right angles and nailed into boxes for our goats to stay in at night.  The floor of the barn was 100+ years of straw over dirt (this is where we now have our veggie garden).  One spring one of these little hens decided the best place to have her nest was under one of these cross pallet walls of a stall.  She scratched and dug out a hollow and laid her eggs in there... a bunch of them.  Maybe 12-15 eggs.  And then she crawled under the pallet and plumped herself down on the nest.

When a hen goes broody and decides to set, she will only get off the nest maybe once or twice a day to quickly eat and drink and then returns.  With every cell of her being she is committed to sitting on that nest until the chickens hatch, which is typically about 3 weeks.  Sometimes a hen won't get off the nest and if you know of it you need to help her.  I once heard of a hen down in Texas sitting on eggs and she allowed herself to be overrun with fire ants because she wouldn't leave the nest.  ...  Just trying to paint the picture of devotion and dedication of the mother hen as referred to in scripture.

Back to my mother hen...  We had at that time, unfortunately, a very chicken-unfriendly dog named Rex, a bird dog/Australian shepherd mix.  What he did to my chickens was a crime, and why we allowed it and how we attempted to handle it may never be a story for this blog.  Anyway, Rex happened to discover this mother hen and her nest.  I came out early one morning to hear frantic barking coming from the barn.  I scrambled out there, to find the hen placidly sitting on her nest under the side portion of the pallet stall, while Rex had dug a trench all the way around her trying to get at her and her nest.  He howled and foamed at the mouth and panted and scratched and barked.  But the hen didn't move, appeared to not even see him.  She quietly kept her soft fluffy feathers in exactly the right place to cover all her eggs and keep them warm and protected. 

After these little eggs hatched, mother hen proudly trotted them out of the barn and began to show them how to eat by scratching and calling to them and they all tumbled after her... little fluffy balls with twigs for legs.  Some of the chicks were black and some red and some yellow, and some were larger, because she hatched out a few egg laying chicks for us, too, not just her own little black banty babies.

Mother and babies had been out and about for around a week when I witnessed an amazing event.  It was one of those moments when you know you were just meant to be at that place at that time, because there would never be a witness to such an event if you were to try to make something like this happen.

I was out wandering around in front of the house one afternoon and noticed the black banty hen with her babies outside near the corner of the barn.  Suddenly I saw the mother's little head cock toward the sky.  She lifted her wings and made the noise that only a mother hen can make, and all her fluffy babies shot toward her like little individual feathery rockets.  At that point, I saw nothing of any concern.  But as I stood there I caught a dark shadow out of the corner of my eye, and became aware of a hawk plummeting toward the earth.  Aiming right for mama and chicks.  

(This hawk wasn't only a threat to the babies, because hawks can kill and damage full grown chickens, especially of the smaller breeds as the banty.)

Instead of scrambling back to the barn with her babies, mother hen flew up and met the hawk in the sky.  There was a terrific squawking and a few feathers floated down, and the hawk changed direction and shot back up into the air and over the top of the barn.  Mama hen plunked to the ground and gathered her babies and continued scratching for food.  The whole scene maybe took about 10 seconds.  But I was there to see it.

I immediately thought of this scripture and tears filled my eyes.  Even now, I get goose bumps when I think of this example of God's offered love and protection that He allowed me to witness.  Sometimes when we read stories in the Bible or hear various verses over and over again, they lose their freshness.  Or in this case, the real life example from nature is lost on those who don't understand the significance of how protective a mother hen is with her chicks... what she will do to provide for them and defend them... how she will give her own life for them.  She was willing to die in their place to provide life for her chicks... just as Jesus knew He would do for us when he spoke these words in Matthew.

Maybe the next time I feel alone and unprotected, I can remember that I am not.   Maybe you can remember that, too.

Blessings,

Katrinka