Heather Mlsna of Harvey shows off Stella, her soon-to-be 12-year-old chicken. Stella is an Ameraucana chicken, a breed well adapted to northern climates, which might explain, in part, her remarkable longevity. (Journal photo by Christie Bleck)

HARVEY — A “golden birthday” is a rare event; it happens during the year you turn the same age as your birthday.

It can happen with chickens too.

Stella, an Ameraucana hen who lives with 10 other chickens and her “human parents,’ Heather and Mike Mlsna of Harvey, is set to celebrate her golden birthday on May 12 when she turns 12.

“I’m sure I’ll do something,” Heather Mlsna said. “I’ll probably take a picture and send it around to my friends.”

The Mlsnas have had four flocks of chickens, she said, with Stella being in the first group.

The Mlsna flocks have experienced three fox attacks, but Stella has survived them all, and at the ripe old age of 12, has outlived most chickens’ typical lifespans, which are between 5 and 10 years.

A chicken’s life is more than eating seed and laying eggs; it can be action-filled, too, although not always in the best of ways.

Intelligence and coloration might have played a part in the hen approaching her 12th birthday.

“She blends in,” Heather Mlsna said. “She’s that color that she sort of matches the sand and the inside of the coop and the outside of the coop, and she’s smart.”

That savvy can come in handy considering the abundance of nature where the Mlsnas live, which is along Lakewood Lane on property abutting Lake Superior.

When eagles circle around the area, Healther Mlsna said, Stella goes under the trees. When a dog barks, she gets in corners.

A little added protection, though can’t hurt. So, the Mlsnas keep their current flock in a well-fortified pen, with indoor and outdoor spaces for the chickens to roam.

“Every time we had a fox attack, we kept on putting up more wire,” Heather Mlsna said. “We just reinforced it again this spring because we’ve seen a fox around here.”

Mike Mlsna has one particular “Stella story” that baffles him: how a fox got over the fence at one point.

“The wire wasn’t twisted together,” he said. “It was just kind of overlapping, and that fox was able to get up and over that fence.”

It also managed to get out of there with a chicken.

“They’re insanely clever,” said Heather Mlsna, who accepts that foxes are part of the natural world and these incidents happen.

In a post on her website, https://lastlettersnoregrets.com/2019/08/22/no-regrets-for-stella-a-very-old-chicken/, Mlsna, a professional writer, posted these observations:

“As the mother of four children, our various baby chicks have been christened with all sorts of names: Cocoa Puff, Chubby, Pookie Olive, Lighty & Darky, for example. The name Stella comes from the Latin word for ‘star’ – which, of course, she is. If we were serious farmers, and culled our hens after two cycles of laying – which is common – we would likely discourage our children from this naming practice.

“Nevertheless, we’ve eaten these christened chickens at various times over the years. After our first fox attack, it seemed wasteful to not process the birds for food. The number of people who were shocked that we would eat our chickens was 100%. ‘How could you eat something that had a name? What did your children think?’ What I thought was, ‘This is a great opportunity for my family to see how much work it is to make food’ and that ‘my children need to understand that chicken doesn’t come from a store with cellophane and Styrofoam.'”

Still, her husband’s fox tale was a little traumatic.

After the first attack, Stella was one of four chickens left, one of which was Sweetie, Stella’s best buddy, she said.

“They learned how to fly out of the coop, and they’d get up on the wood pile,” Heather Mlsna said. “They’d get up on the garage roof. They’d get up in a tree. The kids would have to climb up at night and get them and put them back into the coop.”

The chickens, though, weren’t afraid of humans, and would hang out with the family, even sitting on the backs of chairs, she said.

“They were like pets,” Heather Mlsna said. “It was amazing. That’s our most fond story.”

There still is a lot of good camaraderie with the flock.

“I talk to them every time I go in there, and every morning I say, ‘Where’s Stella? There she is,'” Heather Mlsna said. “That’s exactly what I do. She probably has no idea who I am. They all love me because I feed them, so when I go in in the morning, they flock to me.”

The flock does have a practical purpose since the Mlsnas raise their chickens for eggs.

“”They’re all heritage chickens,” she said. “They’re not like hormone-filled chickens, and so there’s not a lot of meat on them anyway.”

Raising chickens in northern country, though, requires some special considerations.

“When you buy chickens for this area, you have to kind of pay attention to the breeds that are cold-friendly, and Ameraucanas are, so it’s a combination of good genetics, being just a smart little chicken and luck, probably,” Heather Mlsna said.

As smart as Stella is, Heather Mlsna said the hen gets along with the other chickens, although she acknowledges there is a pecking order and she worried about the new chick picking on her. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened with the “tolerant” flock.

“Chickens are really very social together,” she said. “They hate being apart from each other.”

Christie Mastric can be reached at cbleck@miningjournal.net.