What companion animals can teach about acceptance and opening our hearts.
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NEWSLETTER | SEPTEMBER 19, 2025
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Backyard Lessons in Love
As those of you who have been reading this newsletter for a while may know, I keep backyard hens. Mostly rescues from factory farms or adopted from people who can’t keep them any longer for one reason or another. Since they tend to be elderly and I live in an urban-wildland interface, death (by predator or illness) is a frequent visitor to the backyard.
That was certainly the case in late 2023, when my flock dwindled to one — a black-feathered hen called Dahlia. Skinny and belligerent, Dahlia never got along with other hens (which is why she was handed to us). So when various maladies carried away her coop-mates, we decided she could have the place to herself until it was her time as well. Dahlia seemed to like that quite fine — until spring came along. Then she got broody. She sat in the nesting box for three or four days, barely eating, hoping her unfertilized eggs would hatch. (You need a rooster to make baby chicks, and we don’t keep one because of city noise ordinances.) She got over it eventually, but when spring 2025 rolled around, she was back at it, starving herself and pining for babies.
We are softies, I guess. So we sourced some fertilized eggs from Whole Foods (yup, they sell those) and from a friend who lives on a farm and placed them under her. Two weeks on, in mid-June, a yellow fluffball peeked out! My daughter named the chick Sunny. The rest of the eggs didn’t hatch, so a few days later, we bought three week-old chicks of assorted breeds from a farm store and stuck them under Dahlia at night. She spread her wings over the little ones and accepted them all. Watching the once-crabby hen cooing softly at her adopted babies as they scampered around the backyard was such a joy.
Then, one August evening, after a careless mistake, death came stalking again through the open coop door. Three chicks survived, but the raccoons got the littlest one. And Dahlia. All we found of her were piles of black feathers in the coop, by the fence, all around the yard. She had died defending her babies.
I’ve been grieving in waves since, but also marveling at a Mama Dahlia, whose love, once ignited, was so expansive, so fierce. She didn’t give a damn about where those chicks came from or what breed they were. Amid all the violence and hate-filled discourse that’s swirling around us at the moment, I’m holding onto the idea that we too have the capacity to love those who might not be quite like us.
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We have a new associate editor! Serena Renner, who joined the Journal this month, has more than 15 years of international journalism experience and comes to us from the erstwhile Hakai Magazine. We are excited to have her on board and look forward to exploring new avenues of growth for the Journal together.
Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor-in-Chief, Earth Island Journal
Photo by Maureen
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