Turkey’s Birthday Bash, my eighth collaboration with author Wendi Silvano, will be set free on September 10th, 2024. This post is about how I created the illustrations.
The first thing I do after receiving an offer to illustrate a book is work out a schedule. My sweet spot has always been about 3 months to complete the drawings and six months to complete the paintings.
Next I spread all my tubes of paint out on my taboret and paint a color chart with the main palette I intend to use. Each book I illustrate has a slightly different color-scheme depending on the season and setting.
I order all the paper I’ll need.
Then, after paginating the manuscript, I create a Photoshop file for each two-page-spread and drop in the text.
And then my favorite part of the process begins: the sketching! I typically fill up two or three sketchbooks.
One of the first sketches is a map based on the flow of the action.
All throughout the drawing process I gather photo-reference material to help add authenticity to the imaginary word. Recently, when building new animal dwellings I find myself thinking about how it might look in a Turkey Trouble illustration…
…take this chicken coop, for example.
Every component of each illustration is a separate drawing. I begin with the most essential ingredient: the characters.
I scan each sketch, cut it out, and paste it into the Photoshop file. Each sketch is a separate layer. I often make improvements to the sketches after I scan them.
I also store the scanned and edited drawings in separate files for future reference. This is The Max File for Turkey’s Birthday Bash.
I then sketch all the components of the setting.
Every little detail must be carefully thought through or kids will bust you. This is one of the tables at the party.
Here’s the oak tree behind the house. The branch supporting the tire swing broke on a previous page, so I had to modify this drawing a little bit.
A section of an out-building.
After I’m finished building all the pages in this manner, I put all the pages in one PDF dummy and submit it to my publisher.
After a week or two I get the dummy back with little yellow Post-it-style notes from the editor and art director scattered throughout. I’ll then spend a week or two revising, then re-submit the dummy.
Once my revised dummy is approved, I lightly trace each drawing onto a piece of Arches 140 lb. hot press watercolor paper.
I soak the paper, then stretch it on a piece of Gatorboard.
Then I pull out my paint and brushes and go into hibernation for five or six months.
Seasons come and go. People die and are born. Then one day I emerge from my seclusion with a neatly wrapped stack of final illustrations.
Here’s how that ‘parade scene’ looked when I was done.
Then the designer gets to work transforming the stack of paintings into a book!
The next time I see my art will be when I receive the artist’s proofs. This is where I check color and stuff. After artist’s proofs, the next thing I’ll see is the advance reader copy — a paperback version of the book used for promotional purposes.
Then, one day when I’m least expecting it, a box of my new book appears on my doorstep!
One day while walking through an airport in Copenhagen, a young boy tugged on his father’s sleeve, excitedly pointed toward me, and exclaimed,
“That’s the man who visited my school today!”
My wife Krista joked that she felt like she was with a rock star.
How this all got started is a long story that began back in 2008 after the publication of my first book, Woolbur. Before that, I didn’t have an inkling that school-visits were a thing. But when Woolbur began receiving critical acclaim and winning awards, my editor Phoebe Yeh at HarperCollins encouraged me to do school-visits, volunteering to accompany me on my first one. And so began my journey to becoming an elementary school rock star.
School-visits, it would turn out, were a perfect compliment to my budding picture book career. I always loved working with kids, it was a great way to stay connected to readers, a venue to reach new readers, and an opportunity to sell books. Above and beyond all that, school-visits are incredibly rewarding on a personal level. Creating picture books for a living becomes so much more gratifying when you venture into the wild and see for yourself how much joy your books bring to children. It’s an incredible feeling when you read the letters you receive after a visit, and years later when you meet grown children who tell you about the positive impact your visit made in their life. And did I mention it makes you feel like a rock star?
But it took a while for the school-visit rock star thing to gain traction. In my first four years of being amongst the ‘published’ I only did a handful of visits a year.
I’m sure part of the reason I didn’t do many visits in the early days is because I was not great at presenting to large audiences of elementary school children. Speaking in front of a large group of people did not come naturally to me. It wasn’t for lack of effort. I put a lot of work into my programs. Maybe too much. I tried to cram my entire life-story into each presentation. I spoke above the student’s grade levels. I was overly technical in my description of the process. I talked too fast. I didn’t engage the students enough. When they got chatty, I would talk over them. I was looking inward instead of outward. I had yet to learn how to read the audience and make it about them instead of me. In other words, I was too full of myself.
Once I learned how to focus on the individual children in the audience, and not on what was going on inside my head, my presentations improved. But it took a lot of time, and a lot of good advice from people with more experience than I had working with children. One helpful bit of advice I remember receiving was from school-visit agent Jean Block who was with me at a visit to my old hometown. When she noticed I was nervous she asked, “Why are you nervous?” and reminded me that, “Three quarters of your audience eats their own boogers.”
My geographic location also had a positive impact on my ability to develop my skills as a school-visitor. Living in a region where visiting-authors are a tradition allowed me the opportunity to sit-in on many author’s visits when they were passing through the area. I would recommend to anyone thinking about doing school-visits do the same.
There was also a wonderful bookstore in my town called Book Tender’s Secret Garden. In time I got to know the owner, Ellen Mager. Ellen was selling a ton of Woolbur at Booktender’s Secret Garden and I did my first book events at her store. She thought I had a good way with the kids and began hooking me up with some of her school clients. She had seen hundreds of author visits and was a wealth of information. She gave me lots of good ideas on how I could make my presentations more interactive and engaging.
Up until then, I’d just taken what came my way, but as the importance of school-visits became more and more evident to me, I began marketing for them. I created a spiffy school-visit brochure that I handed out at book festivals and librarian’s conferences. I got my name on lists of visiting authors on the internet, like Kim Norman’s AuthorsbyState.com.
My marketing efforts gradually brought in more school-visit work. Then, because I was getting better at the craft, I began getting referrals from the librarians whose schools I visited. When I did an excellent job at their school, they would tell other librarians, “You’ve got to bring Lee Harper to your school.” Every visit was an audition for the next visit. Do a great job and the word gets out.
Then in 2013 I did thirty visits. After 2013 I stayed busy, averaging around twenty-five visits a year until the pandemic shut it all down.
My school visit routine has evolved organically over the years. I’d try a little something new with every visit, and if it worked, I’d keep it. If not, into the scrap bin it would go. I’ve now amassed enough keepers that I can pull one out of my hat whenever I feel the need to change things up. This helps keep things fresh, and prevents me from growing bored of my own presentations.
A typical visit includes three one-hour presentations in a day. Each one-hour presentations is divided into two main segments. The first segment consists of a PowerPoint talk in which I introduce myself, tell the story of how I became a picture book author/illustrator, explain where my ideas come from, and show how I make my books. This usually takes about ten minutes for the littles, up to a half hour for the bigs.
After the Powerpoint segment there is a five-minute intermission to allow the children to remove the ants from their pants. This process involves something physical like doing the ‘Woolbur stretch’ or singing the ‘Turkey song’.
The second segment of each presentation consists of guided drawings where the students learn how to use basic shapes to draw some of my characters. During this segment I am standing with a king size Sharpie at an easel with a large pad of paper and the children each have a pencil and three sheets of paper.
Drawing Woolbur is always a big hit with pre-K through 3. We usually make him a little extra scribbly and I let the little artists know that it’s OK if their drawing doesn’t look exactly like mine.
“Your Woolbur wouldn’t be Woolbur if he looked the same as all the other Woolburs,” I explain.
Older students enjoy drawing Oswego Pete, a character from a Walter Dean Myers book I illustrated.
The grand finale of all the guided drawing segments is always drawing Turkey, although I don’t tell the kids what we are drawing. Instead, it is a mystery to be slowly revealed. Over the years, this routine has evolved into a game show of sorts that involves me giving the students softball clues and asking them to raise their hand if they think they know the answer. Example:
Me: “This is a type of candy with red and white stripes popular around Christmas.”
Selected student: “A candy cane?”
Me: After asking a child in the front row to hand me the (imaginary) envelope.
“Drum roll please…. and the answer is…” I pretend to open and read an envelope.
“CANDY CANE! Give a big round of applause to the student with the correct answer candy cane!”
I draw a candy cane shape on the large pad of paper and ask the students to draw the same shape on their paper. This routine continues with lots of silliness until we have drawn a turkey. The funniest part is when we draw the turkey toes, and all the kids get grossed-out. I am not sure why this is, but I roll with it.
After we have drawn Turkey, I ask the children to raise their hand if they can think of something we might add to Turkey so Turkey doesn’t look like a turkey. The kids love showing me their drawings when we’re done disguising Turkey.
During a school-visit I will sign as many books as there are to sign. If there are a lot, I’ll begin before the first presentation begins, sign some at lunch, then if necessary, I will finish up after the school day is done. I draw a little doodle in each book if time permits. I have always liked to get everything done in one day, but sometimes if there’s more than a hundred books to sign, and it’s a school I can drive to, I will sign the books in advance.
I have never sold my own books, preferring to support booksellers. Using a bookseller who knows how to handle book sales for a school visit makes life so much easier for a school presenter and allows the focus to be 100% on the children and not on selling books. Booksellers, by the way, are excellent referral sources.
As my picture book career unfolded, school visits became my primary source of income for many years. It wasn’t until the recent explosion in popularity of the Turkey Trouble Series that book royalties became my primary source of income.
I’m now an old pro with over 250 school visits under my belt and still counting. I’d estimate that I’ve personally interacted with over 100,000 children. I’ve visited schools in faraway places like Oaxaca, Copenhagen, and Wyoming…
…and in nearby places like New Jersey, Maryland, and my home state of Pennsylvania, where it seems like I’ve been in just about every small town east of the Susquehanna.
I still love visiting schools, and surprisingly, many aspects of presenting to children have gotten easier for me. I guess after doing so many visits I have developed a level of confidence that I can handle anything thrown my way, and I worry less about acting like a turkey.
After three months of drawing and a round of revisions, I was ready to paint Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day by Wendi Silvano!
I ordered 20 sheets of Arches 140lb hot-press bright-white watercolor paper and cut it to the sizes I would need for 7 two-page-spreads and 26 single pages.
After talking things over with art-director Michael Jantze, I made some decisions about the color scheme. It would be a perfect, blue-sky day throughout the entirety of the book, I decided. I’ve never done this before, but for this book I mixed a books-worth of ‘perfect blue sky’ in advance. (Winsor Blue, Green Shade)
I wanted Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day to be extra light and sunny with lots of perfectly white highlights throughout. Masking fluid would help me achieve that effect.
I stocked-up on paint and pulled out my color swatches. Having color swatches helps immensely with watercolor. I always want the first color I apply to be what I want— exactly. It’s one of the things I love about watercolor. You make a decision, then live with it. No endless fussing.
I use a blotting paper to moderate the load of watercolor in my brush and to test the color before putting it down.
My most frequently used brands of watercolor paint are Holbein, Winsor & Newton, and Daniel Smith.
I usually order a few new paint brushes each time I begin a new book. I sort of have a system for organizing them.
My most frequently used brush is the Da Vinci Cosmotop Spin Quill size 0. (I made a decision when I first began my painting career that I was never going to waste a minute of my life using a paint brush smaller than size 0.) I also really like the Winsor & Newton Series 7 Kolinsky Sables and the Silver Black Velvet brushes.
Next I filled up my color-wheel ceramic palette with the watercolors I intended to use. With the exception of one convenience green, all the colors on my palette are single-pigment paints. With watercolor in particular, the fewer pigments you mix together, the fresher your colors will look.
I did a few frisket tests.
I gathered my photo-reference material.
I decorated my studio with seashells and taped paintings of seagulls to the ceiling.
I printed out the drawing for the copyright/dedication/title page at 10% larger than actual size, and lightly traced it onto the watercolor paper.
After tracing, I soaked the paper with water…
…and taped the soaked watercolor paper to a piece of Gator Board.
Then I dove into the painting. I listened to ocean sounds while I painted.
I think this painting took me 2 1/2 days to paint, around my average.
After the painting was done, I cut it off the Gator Board and scanned it so I could see how it would look with the text.
When all the paintings in the book were complete, I wrapped them in clear sleeves and drove them to Two Lions for a proper scanning.
The designer at Two Lions, Tanya Ross-Hughes, then did her thing.
Screenshot
Basically, what she does is take a pile of paintings and turn them into a beautiful book. I love all the details she adds to the jacket, spine, and flaps.
After the paintings are in the hands of my publisher, there’s nothing left for me to do but to go out into the world and meet my readers at book-signings, school visits, conferences, and such. My favorite event to occur around the release date of Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day was Frostburg State University’s ‘Pirates Ahoy’, an amazing event that brings the entire town together to inspire children’s literacy.
When I illustrate a picture book, I always have my audience in mind. All the interaction with my audience I get to experience after my books are released into the world is one of the major reasons I love expressing my artistry in the medium of picture books.
Creating a picture book is a complicated puzzle.When I’m in the drawing stage, I spend much more time thinking about how to solve the puzzle than actually drawing. I visualize solutions to the puzzle while I’m taking a walk, when I’m feeding the animals, when I’m on hold with Verizon, at night while I’m sleeping…
I like to imagine I am a humming bird, flying around the scene, seeing it from every angle. Typically, I begin putting pencil to sketchbook at around sunrise before I forget the fleeting images my subconscious mind churned-out the night before.
The windows with the lights on…that’s my studio. When this picture was taken I was just in there drawing. Now I’m walking the sheep out to pasture. I brought along the manuscript, a pencil, an apple, and a pen-knife. The apple and pen-knife are so I can give the sheep, chickens, and crows a little treat on my way through. Beyond the pasture there’s a gate that leads to a walking trail at Pine Run Reservoir. It’s my go-to place for a walk when I need to refresh after drawing for a few hours in the morning. As I walk the trail, I stop periodically to make a note or doodle on the manuscript.
Wendi Silvano’s written story for Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day begins on page seven:
The Summer Children’s Festival was in full swing. Farmer Jake made a special trip with his farm animals. Turkey and his pals loved kids, and they were happy to be there…mostly.
My visual story begins on pages two and three with the endpapers. (Page one if you count the cover)
On my first day of walking with the manuscript for Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day I drew this doodle of Farmer Jake holding a shepherd’s crook. My idea was that Farmer Jake would lead Turkey and all the other animals onto a wagon, and at the same time lead the reader into the story.
After I run out of room to doodle directly on the manuscript, I turn to drawing in sketchbooks. I fill up three or four sketchbooks with every picture book I illustrate. My pencils of choice are Derwent water soluble sketching pencils in light, medium, and dark wash. Don’t want a detail pencil at this point.
Here are some of the other drawings that went into creating the front endpaper scene.
When I was ready to incorporate these sketches into the dummy, I scanned them, opened the scanned images in Photoshop, lassoed them out, and pasted them into a new blank page sized at 11″ X 22″. This is my one concession to digitalization. Inserting my drawings into Photoshop helps me with the page design and makes revisions easier. Each element of the drawing is a separate layer and can be moved around and re-sized however I like. I could avoid the extra step of scanning my pencil drawings by drawing directly on a digital drawing tablet, but I love drawing with a pencil on paper way too much to do it any other way. Here is what it looked like when I was putting all these drawings together in Photoshop.
(I like how some of the manuscript still shows through on Farmer Jake.)
Here is what the watercolor looked like while it was being painted.
After having shown the reader Farmer Jake leading the gang onto the wagon on the front endpapers, I thought a good way to keep the forward momentum going would be to next see Farmer Jake’s fully loaded jalopy hurdling over the bridge towards the ocean, Turkey waving from the passenger seat, and the gang in tow. I wanted the reader to feel the excitement of almost being there… to smell the salt air…to hear the seagulls…
I found a photo-reference for Farmer Jake’s jalopy on the internet.
This scene also had to function as the copyright/dedication/title spread. Here is what I submitted to my art director and editor at Two Lions in the first draft of the dummy.
After reviewing the dummy, the team suggested that it should be more obvious that the animals are in a wagon. This is why it’s good to have editors and art directors look at your work. To me, it was obvious that the animals are in a wagon because my head was immersed in their world. To someone looking at it fresh, it’s wasn’t as clear.
This is the revised version of the copyright/dedication/title spread. Much better thanks to ‘Team Turkey’.
This is how the final turned out.
The settings are another example of the many things I work out in my sketchbooks. Here is a boardwalk study.
This is the picture that inspired KLUCK BROS.
Turkey’s Sandastic Beach Day also required me to draw many people. It wouldn’t be the beach without lots of people. So I drew lots of people… and lots of other beachy things.
One of my favorite scenes in Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day is the one where Turkey is riding a wave. Coincidentally, I’d spent a few weeks the previous summer in Maine painting waves and studying how other artists paint them.
This is the photo reference and sketch of Turkey riding the wave.
This is the sketch of the wave.
Here are the sketches assembled in Photoshop.
(I like when Wendi Silvano writes but then. That’s my cue to draw something crazy on the next page.)
Here’s how this page looked in watercolor while I was painting it. (In the final I added a little yellow to the sun.)
As you can see, drawing a picture book is a lot of hard work, and also a lot of fun. Sometimes I laugh out loud at my own silly drawings while I’m working. That’s when I know it’s a good drawing. But you know what the coolest part of my job is?
The coolest part of my job is when I walk into a school like The Upper Township Primary School and see that my work has inspired a whole new generation of budding artists.
Thank you Upper Township Primary School. And thanks to everyone else who is reading my blog. In part three of Illustrating Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day I’ll show you how I did all the paintings.
I wanted to dive right into my sketchbook the minute I received the manuscript and deal summary for Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day. But first I had to put on my agent-hat and iron-out all the details with my editor, Kelsey Skea at Two Lions. The deal summary is basically a simplified contract that summarizes the advance on royalties I’ll receive, percentages, and the schedule for the delivery of sketches and finals. Once all the ‘i’s are dotted on the final contract, Kelsey and I switch back from business-mode to creative-mode. It feels a little bit schizophrenic jumping from businesspeople talking about numbers and due dates, to creative people discussing the latest shenanigans of Turkey and his barnyard pals, but we’re accustomed to it. We’ve now worked together on six of the eight Turkey Trouble books…and everybody in this business wears a lot of hats.
I love illustrating the Turkey Trouble books. I don’t know how the author Wendi Silvano does it, but she always comes up with great new adventures for Turkey that keep it interesting and fun. In Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day, Turkey and pals visit the ocean for the very first time. The story includes lots of action, silliness, and word-play. And the fact that the story was set by the ocean made it extra fun to illustrate. I have many fond memories of vacations ‘down the shore’… and I LOVE to paint the ocean!
Like a caveman, I still create all my pictures by smearing pigments around on a surface.
So, before I begin drawing, I take inventory of my art supplies and make a list of everything I’ll need to paint a forty-page picture book. During this preparation time I spread all my tubes of paint out on my taboret and make a color chart with the main palette I intend to use. For each book my palette is a little different depending on the season, setting, and colors I want to emphasize. For the ocean scenes I mostly used a mix of PB27 and PO62. I find it helpful to think of the pigment names and not the marketing names of the colors I use.
I also usually purchase a few new brushes when I begin a new book. With all the painting I do, my brushes tend to lose their sharp tip. And you can never have too many brushes.
Unlike a caveman, I order most of my supplies from Blick.com.
My Blick.com order for Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day might havelooked something like this:
5 Derwent Water Soluble Sketching Pencil – 8B (Dark Wash)
4 Derwent Water Soluble Sketching Pencil – 4B (Medium Wash)
3 Derwent Water Soluble Sketching Pencil – HB (Light Wash)
3 Blick Wirebound Sketchbook – 12″ X 9″, 80 sheets
1 Faber-Castell Dust-Free Vinyl Eraser
20 Arches Watercolor Paper – 22″ X 30″ sheet, 140lb Bright White 140 lb. Hot Press
1 Winsor Newton Professional Watercolor – Winsor Blue (Green Shade) 14ml tube
1 M. Graham Artist’s Watercolor – Azo Orange, 15ml tube
1 Daniel Smith Extra Fine Watercolor – Prussian Blue, 15ml tube
1 Holbein Artist’s Watercolor – Cadmium Red Deep, 15ml tube
1 Turner Water Colour Masking Fluid, 40ml jar
2 Da Vinci Cosmotop Spin Brush – Quill, Short Handle, Size 0
1 Winsor Newton Series 7 Kolinsky Sable Brush – Pointed Round, Size 6
During this preparation time I also make myself a precise work schedule to help me keep on track during the long process, which from start to finish usually takes about nine months. This amount of time includes three months for drawing, six months for painting, any vacation I might have planned, photo reference collecting, school visits, book signings, and a little padding for unanticipated delays and miscellany. I greatly appreciate that I have a publisher that accommodates and values the care I put into all my illustrations, and from all my experiences visiting schools, I can tell you with certainty that the kids appreciate it, too. They see EVERYTHING!
Finally, before I begin drawing, I mark up the manuscript with notes about pagination, font size, font style, trim-size, and big-picture ideas I want to remember. For example, on the manuscript for Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day I wrote:
This is fun, real fun! KEEP IT LIGHT! (It’s the beach.)
And with that thought in mind, I conducted one last frisket test and dove in!
(In part two I’ll talk about the drawing process.)
Her beautiful golden feathers stood out dramatically against the muted greys of the November landscape — even in death. Another dead chicken lay at the base of the fence, presumably dropped there by her killer while making a hasty escape. There was no sign of the other four chickens Krista and I left to spend the night in the horse shelter in the pasture the night before.
We had not even moved into our small farm yet, and already we were learning tough lessons. Sure, when Krista and I first decided to take this big lifestyle leap we took some farming classes at Delaware Valley University, but now our real education was beginning.
Our first six chickens came with the farm. They were living in one of the horse stalls in the barn with a simple perch made from a branch, a couple of cardboard nesting boxes, and an ultraviolet light hanging from the ceiling to stimulate egg-laying. When Krista and I noticed the chickens didn’t look super healthy we began letting them out of the barn in the evenings after work so they could get a little fresh air and sunlight.
Neither of us had ever picked up a chicken before and we didn’t have a clue how to get them back into the stall when night fell. We were just winging it. They ran every which way when we tried to grab them. Fishing nets didn’t work well. Their feather got all tangled in it. On several occasions we’d find a chicken on the wrong side of the fence in our new neighbor’s back yard and I would have to climb over it. We must have made a hilarious first impression. We had yet to discover the luring power of a handful of dried worms.
On the night before that first stark lesson in the realities of farm life, we let it get too dark before attempting the round-up.
“They’ll probably be OK left outside for one night,” we told ourselves.
In December we officially moved into our new farm, and soon afterward decided to give chickens another go. We mail-ordered six new chicks of various breeds — which I never would have guessed was a thing you could do. My favorite was Artois, a Sicilian Buttercup. We kept them at just the right temperature in a re-purposed recycling box while their down filled in. Stella stood over the chick’s temporary nursery and stared at them for hours, drooling.
At first we were concerned she might want to eat them, but we soon came to believe she thought she was their mother.
While the chicks were incubating, I got to work on a coop.
My design began with our German shepherd Stella’s old doghouse as the top-floor roosting area. To this I added a nesting box on each side.
A ramp led from the penthouse on the top floor to a lounge area on the second floor to provide a dry place on days when we might not be around to let them out to free-range in the morning. We definitely wanted our chickens to be free range.
Another ramp led to a 4′ X 8′ chicken run with mesh wire fencing extending 12″ below the surface to prevent fox from digging under.
The site for the coop was in the pasture behind the barn, where from my studio window I could keep an eye on the flock during the day when the chickens free ranged.
Stella would provide back-up security— a job she took very seriously. Nary a day went by when I wasn’t alerted to one sort of threat or another. When Stella barked, I put down my paint brush and ran down the steps with a slingshot in one hand and a few steelies in the other. I very rarely arrived on the scene in time to see the perpetrators. I usually encountered only a bunch of frightened chickens and a few crows hanging around. I’d sling a few steelies in the direction of the crows and return to my painting.
Then one Spring weekend—at around sunset during a family get-together— while we were all in the house playing board games — Stella heard some crows cawing and began whining at the door. I’d forgotten all about putting the chickens to bed, the kind of opportunity the sly fox waits for.
As soon as I opened the front door of our house, Stella sprinted full speed toward the pasture, barking like crazy. I ran behind her. Stella gave chase to a red fox while I assessed the damage. It was an eerily familiar scene: scattered feathers and dead chickens.
“Damned fox!” I shouted.
The fox leapt onto the top of a fence post just beyond the invisible fence line she knew Stella couldn’t cross, sat there for a few seconds as if to mock us, then disappeared into the nature preserve beyond our property.
I searched the pasture for survivors but found none. I didn’t find any survivors in the horse shelter either. As I stood there silently mourning the loss of yet more chickens, I heard a faint trilling in the rafters above my head. It was Einstein and Artois, the only two chickens to survive the second great chicken massacre.
The next Spring we ordered more chickens.
“Maybe we get a donkey?” I asked Krista. “I’ve heard donkeys protect sheep, so maybe they would also protect chickens.”
And that’s how we ended up at Pleasant Farms looking at donkeys. We were considering adopting two because apparently, they get really sad if they don’t have a buddy, which when you think about it was probably Eyore’s problem. Ultimately, we decided not to add donkeys to the mix. Too much added work and expense. We were reaching for a solution.
I had a friend with a flock of sheep that she kept protected with a Great Pyrenees. This sounded to me like it might be a great solution to our chicken attrition problem. If a Great Pyrenees can protect sheep, I thought, it would probably protect chickens, too.
Enter Maggie, a three-month-old Great Pyrenees and the newest member of our elite chicken security force. Maggie, we decided, would live in the barn. Being nocturnal, she would act as a round-the-clock bodyguard for our chickens.
And let me tell you…she did guard those chickens fiercely. If you tried to take one of her chickens away from her there’s no telling the harm that might befall you. She loved her chickens and if anybody was going to eat one of her chickens it was going to be her.
We lost half of this third batch of chickens to friendly fire.
To make matters worse, Maggie and Stella fought tooth and nail. Stella didn’t think it was right that Maggie ate her beloved chicks. Maggie didn’t think it was right that Stella got to live in the human-house. It was a very unpleasant situation. Sadly, after a couple of years of trying to make things work with Maggie, Stella, and the chickens, we found Maggie a new home. She’s now chief of security at a horse farm in South Carolina.
Again, we ordered more chickens to bolster our flock, ever optimistic that this time we’d get it right.
The accidental rooster that came with this group was the low point. The Colonel, as we called him, was a regal creature…and admittedly, he did keep predators away…but he also did things to the hens that I don’t care to talk about.
I wasn’t terribly sad when Maggie got a hold of The Colonel.
While all this chicken trial-and-error business was going on, our farm was metamorphosing in unexpected ways. We began planting a variety of grasses, wild-flowers, and trees. Krista’s garden expanded. We began raising pigs and added a couple of sheep to the flock.
Every new life we added led to other new life. The wildflowers begot bees, the pig feed begot a pumpkin patch, the chickens begot crows, and on and on…
Things were coming together nicely at our little farm…except for the chicken situation. The cycle of acquiring chickens and loosing chickens continued for three years.
But then it stopped unexpectedly. Three more years passed without loosing a single chicken to a predator and we didn’t know why. We had a few theories, but none of them quite added up.
Then one unseasonably warm day in March while out in the pasture hammering shingles onto the roof of a new chicken coop I was building, a commotion in the trees overhead caught my eye… a rustling of branches below a single black crow at the tip-top of our tallest maple tree.
“Uh oh! Uh oh!”, it cawed.
The chickens in the pasture instantly went into defense mode. A few just froze where they were standing. The more vulnerable scrambled for cover. Then I witnessed a full-grown hawk swoop down and attempt to intercept one of the chickens while she was run/flying toward the safety of the horse shelter. The hawk was simultaneously attacked by two crows, one on either side. The crows continued to pester the hawk until it gave up and flew away.
“Could it be that the crows are the reason we haven’t been losing chickens?” I wondered.
I began reading about the subject and learned that crows are very territorial and will defend their territory from any predator — including fox and hawks.
I began observing the crows more closely. The more I observed, the more it became clear that the crows were in fact protecting our chickens. It’s also interesting to note that it’s always three crows: one lookout to sound the alarm and two to go on the attack. I also learned they recognize faces, develop opinions about people, and hold grudges.
This surprising turn of events was one of the most gratifying lessons we’ve learned in our great farming adventure.
Now Krista and I leave offerings of shiny objects and special treats for the crows so they know they’re welcome.
I talk to the crows, mostly apologizing for slinging steelies at them. I sense it might take them a little while to completely forgive me. We’re working things out as we go.
