The Chicken, Duck and Unknown Bird Chronicles

Life’s been a bit harsh for our birdie population lately. Baby chicks primarily have been stepped on, but one has unluckily fallen through a wire chair that caused it to strangle itself and another to hang from its leg. Yesterday another hen had six new chickies. This morning there were only two. Two nights ago John brought me a duckling that he’d pulled out of the mouth of our oldest cat, Shaq, who’d brought it into the house. The day before we had what looked like young herons at our front pond. Then one was killed. The next day the other one also met a terrible demise. 

So this afternoon I convinced John that if we waited overnight again with our new mother hen and her last two babies, then we’d find no babies tomorrow. Armed with nothing more than a bit of seed to entice them John got the family to relax enough for me to grab one chick and he got the other. They couldn’t go into our chook house though because the resident hen that's mothering two older chicks and one orphan would tear them apart. She is more than a bit offensive in her determined way to protect her progeny. She will bite your head off, or just go for your hands.

But I’d had another great idea and John agreed. So we put the babies in a large bucket and he picked up the mother by her feet, much to her surprise and mine really, and we trudged over to the large mobile cage type structure we’d refurbished for several different chicken families in the past and threw them in. John mentioned that he only saw one baby. I said, “That’s impossible. I put them both in there.” But in a minute the other chick appeared just on the outside of the portable house. There was a crack in the structure where it met the dirt and the little one scooted through there but came back the same way. Ah, I thought. At least we’ve managed to save something after all this loss. I’d already nursed the darling limping larger baby back to health and noticed that he’d disappeared back into his family after a couple of days of R and R near our cottage, where I hand fed him along with my larger rooster, who is also lame. Such is life and death on a farm. Living here, in the raw rural countryside, we really have to harden our hearts to the possibilities of danger for these animals we keep. It is something we just can’t change although we try our hardest to protect them. There are so many untimely accidents and freaky situations with such a frequent loss of life and it reminds me that adventures can be risky and 50 chickens is way too many. But I wanted a slightly wild life along with a slightly wild garden and I seem to have gotten both in spades.

 

Postscript written the next day is that one baby chick completely disappeared and the other was found dead in the little house attached to the portable area that they were locked into. I guess the little one that got out late yesterday managed to escape again and perhaps couldn’t get back in. The other little guy might have suffocated accidentally underneath the mother hen. I really can’t know for sure about either loss. But life is fleeting and death is inevitable for these creatures early on and there are many dangers lurking after hatching including the hawk that circles our paddocks several times a day.

After feeling such a sense of exhilaration that we got those two babies safely into the house with their mother, today our moods were seriously affected. Every time something like this happens we must go over everything we did and try to adjust our thinking for the next dire situation that crops up. It’s just a pity that there were so many dire situations this week and that many didn’t turn out for the best.