REWILDING CHICKENS IN TORRSKOG

Photo by Chacko John, Pexels

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‘When we rescued four brown broiler hens last summer, it didn’t occur to me that these birds would have wild instincts‘

by GRACE MCNICHOLAS

When people ask about my journey to rural Sweden, I hesitate. To describe it as a ‘trip’ feels like a disservice, because what I felt was a return to the wild. Freshly graduated and back in my hometown, I was overwhelmed with indecision. Questions of work and future woke me in the night, and a strange pull to be in the forest grew stronger.

Desperate for answers as many of my friends left for corporate lives in London, I packed a rucksack and flew to Sweden to live on a small sustainable farm. I had never spent much time in wilderness, but on arrival in Torrskog I experienced something deep in my bones: a return of my material body to the earth, to ancient oak trees and the rapid splashing water, to something much older than myself, yet something that had always been quietly running through me.

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To explain my experience of rewilding, I’d like to talk about chickens. Industrial chickens, which we now recognise as simply chickens, have diverged far from their wild ancestors. These birds have been genetically modified repeatedly to achieve maximum egg production and weight gain, not motherhood. Hence they are usually about four times their natural size, struggle to fly, and are dubbed stupid. An industrial hen need not interact with her surroundings in any useful or meaningful way because her food is delivered to her feet and her coop is likely too dark and crowded to move around. Her instincts are dulled and intuition stunted, and she is discouraged from natural behaviours, such as foraging and brooding.

Modern varieties are selected for single purpose activities such as egg-laying, and discouraged from costly activities: foraging takes time and requires a spacious natural environment, and brooding stalls egg production. A brooding hen will channel her energy towards first keeping her eggs warm, and later protecting and guiding her baby chicks. Eggs take a back seat.

When we rescued four brown broiler hens last summer, it didn’t occur to me that these birds would have wild instincts to which they might return. They were skittish and shy, and spent the first fourteen days inside, too afraid of the immensity of the world they’d discovered. I believed the wildness of these birds had been lost and their instinctive behaviours genetically removed without trace.

It seemed impossible that their nature could be stirred by a change in environment. However, as time went on our chickens adapted. They became curious, learnt to forage and respond to changes in weather, even their feathers changed. Then one day, a year after we brought them home, one of our hens started to brood.

Something primitive had awoken inside her. It was the beginning of her return: an industrial chicken remembering how to be wild. Our new mother hen sat for twenty one days instinctively and hatched one small, beautiful chick. The improbability of this new life widened my perspective and I began to question things. What else is possible when we return to the land?

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The first thing I learnt from our feathered friends was this: interaction with environment creates presence. Interactions with surroundings result from changes requiring action. If your environment is controlled, like the hens’ coop, there is no need to interact with it. This is because it is constant, protecting and ‘safe.’ But, there is no real awareness.

When our chickens moved to the farm they became exposed to natural light, to changes in weather, including harsh weathers like rain and snow, and to predators. Their environment not only changed, but was changing constantly. The farm was alive and its happenings were inconsistent: the lack of an appropriate response could be fatal. So the formerly-industrial chickens began to roost, run, dig and communicate with one another.

When your environment is alive, you, too, need to start living. The second lesson was that being adaptable and curious in turn inspires independence. Our brooding chicken was a great example of this. The immediacy of her interactions with the outside world triggered her intuition. In her reintroduction to the wild, her autonomy was restored. And thirdly, embodying presence and independence led her to a life of purpose. The same purpose I’d spent years searching for. Watching her, I realised I’d been drifting, stunted and disconnected. I’d gripped to a structure of safety and convenience for years, and was unaware of the natural guidance that was harbouring inside of me, ready to be released by the wildness of my environment.

…the formerly-industrial chickens began to roost, run, dig and communicate with one another.

It took me much longer than her to relinquish control and to trust, properly, in Mother Earth. In the first weeks, I still spent hours trolling job sites and even did a few remote interviews for positions I knew I didn’t want. It took months for me to delete Instagram from my phone, and longer to escape the tight grip of LinkedIn.

Even upon returning to England, I quickly slipped back into self-doubt, living in my head rather than in the world. Only when I returned for a second time did I begin to embrace my intuition. Fears of unemployment shrank, and faith in nature’s timing grew larger. With practice, my mind began to slow and I relaxed into doing things by hand, learning patience and overcoming frustration with the monotony of some tasks. I learned to problem solve properly, rather than this being a skill I’d claimed in interviews. I also became attuned to my surroundings; firstly out of desire and then, when desire faded, which it does when the weather turns, out of necessity.

I learned how to adapt to challenge, disappointment and destruction; pulling in heavy nets laden with fish in gusty winds; or tending to vegetables for weeks only to have them destroyed by wild animals. My nails broke, my feet ached and hardened, and my boots became weathered from constant use. I switched from being mentally exhausted to physically exhausted, and still I stayed, refusing to run back to comfort. I became grateful for relentlessness of living wildly over the easiness of a society built on temporality and materialism.

I began to resonate with the things I had sensed: we are not meant to sit at desks, stare at screens, consume mindlessly, or live vicariously through social media. I had never felt true connection scrolling through Instagram photos and videos that supposedly ‘aligned’ with me. The feeling of alignment I yearned for came from the wildness of nature, from its hardness and unpredictability, and from co-dependence with an eco-system.

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I wondered whether our hens felt this too, if they found relief in sunlit dust baths after the easy safety of the coop, and whether the difficulties of foraging and motherhood replaced aimlessness with connection. With these lessons learned, I finally felt myself begin to let go. I could sit beneath an 800-year-old Linden tree and let the wide structure of its trunk support my fragile body, sensing its web of roots spreading beneath me. I found safety in sunlight filtering through its leaves high above me, dappling my skin. I began to melt into a complex structure of nature older than all of us. Had I merely restored my purpose – or had I touched something that transcended even the Linden trees?

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Grace McNicholas is an emerging writer and homesteader who currently lives on a ten acre
farm in rural Sweden. This is her first publication.