“Honey, you ought to write about that,” DJ has said several times.
In company with many of our friends, we have faced intense on-going challenges this year.
Currently I am sitting on an Amtrak train, returning from my mother’s bedside in
Lynchburg. She suffered two acute strokes a few weeks ago.
At home, our 22-year-old daughter has been fighting post-Covid Long-Haulers since January. We have been in survival mode ever since. We are so thankful for our apprenticeship families and volunteers who have kept the farm going and the animals alive while we visit cardiologists, neurologists, vision specialists, and rheumatologists, to name a few.
Meanwhile, farm life ebbs and flows. Recently we were blessed to help set up a homestead family with a starter herd of our miniature dairy goats and some of our New Zealand-cross baby bunnies. (Plan: Milk and weed-eating from the goats. Original bunnies: children’s pets. Coming progeny: food for the table.) With the rising prices and uncertainties of food supplies, more and more people are becoming interested in raising their own.
Leroy and Sully, our livestock protection dogs, turned a year old the month our daughter came back sick. While they have settled down a lot, they are still puppies at heart. Unfortunately, we have not had a lot of time to spend with them. We have not yet convinced them that we love our chickens and goats and cats and they should too. Instead we wait until after dark to release the puppies from their pen, and set our alarms to put them back before first light when thefree range poultry begin to move around. Then we let out the bucks (boy goats) and any chickens we had secured for the night.
Last Week: The Great Snake Drama
Okay. Yes, I admit, I do not like snakes. Yet for years we have diligently checked descriptions and relocated rather than done away with problematic but non-venomous visitors. Currently, however, snakes have neared the bottom, the depths of distaste, on my I-don’t-like-you list.
A few years ago, our neighbor gifted us with Mama Hen, a smallish size black hen with a yen to sit on nests full of eggs and raise large clusters of chicks. The first summer she raised three rounds, some numbering up to 17 chicks each, if I remember correctly. Her daughters take after her and in turn like to sit on nests full of eggs and raise clusters of chicks, often with less success than their mama, but they give it a good try. Thus, we often have various sets of chicks wandering the farm under the more or less strict supervision of their more-or-less watchful mama.
For some weeks, we had been following the progress of what started as a set of six chicks, three black and three blonde. The first week, one of the little black chicks disappeared. We feared our cat had taken to chick theft, but then I found him drowned in a forgotten dog bowl. Poor little thing.
His siblings, however, thrived. Every morning and throughout the day as they scavenged the property, I would scan and see---yes, three blonde and now three black. Recently, our older daughter’s family has become interested in backyard “homesteading”. Our son-in-law transformed an unused shed into a chicken coop, and the pet chickens we had “given” their children years ago now became theirs in reality. Blondie and Checkers went home with them, along with Mama Hen (now renamed Black Beauty) and Pepper, a Silkie-Polish-something cross hatched on our farm but raised by a volunteer family. The children loved them, and we promised to send another batch.
Meanwhile, Creamy, a beautiful but definitely “blonde” hen, set about raising her own brood. She started off with a large crew, but was remarkably stupid about keeping her babies together and safe. I would find little lost ones peeping in the barn while their mom was obliviously pecking for insects with their siblings over near the rabbit hutches. At night, she decided the dog house near our house made a great shelter, so I would close it off with a baby gate each evening to keep them safe from our big puppies on night shift guard duty.
Then came the morning little Sara came screaming into the house as I was getting dressed. “The big puppy has a chick in his mouth!!” By the time I could get out here, a parade of chicks had entered the dog pen with disastrous results, and the puppies had discovered some new chew toys. I had been told when we got our puppies that one of the cardinal training rules in working with LPD’s is DO NOT fuss at them. It just scares them and hurts their feelings but doesn’t teach them.
Unfortunately, it is really hard to follow that rule when trying to rescue the adorable little puffballs they are destroying.
We re-vamped the once chick-proof “doghouse” pen and transferred the remainder of the chicks there with plenty of (shallow) water and chick feed. Next thing I knew, somehow their empty-headed mama had enticed them back out and was herding them toward the big dogs’ pen. Again.
That was it. Creamy lost custody. I gathered the chicks and sent them with the same family that had raised Pepper.
On Saturday, we planned to meet our older daughter partway (they now live three hours away) with the a set of five half-grown chicks to add to their collection.
Thursday evening, as had become my custom, I checked their whereabouts carefully before releasing Leroy and Sully for the night. Although now wandering independently during the day, at night the half-grown chicks still gathered near their mother, now setting a new nest of eggs under an old woodstove in the barn addition.
Just before I went to bed, I checked on the puppies only to see Sully trotting past me with chick legs dangling out one side of his mouth.
“Sully,” I pled, and he fled into the dog pen. Remembering the training advice, I followed him in and began to say, “Here, Sully, good boy, we love you! Come here boy” in a happy voice. He came, sat near me, grinned, and the chick fell out of his mouth and ran away while I grabbed his collar and continued to praise him.
Which left me outside in the dark, barely holding onto a big Anatolian/Great Pyrenees, out of reach of his leading chain, not daring to let him loose either in his pen (where the chick had disappeared) or in the yard (where it might have run) and who knew where the rest of the chicks were? I also needed to get hold of Leroy in case he found the chick survivors.
To be continued…