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We have a family of quail with newly hatched chicks that are about 1 inch long each. They seem to have set up house in a cluster of agave plants that should provide shelter from coyotes. This morning there were 6 or 7 chicks. They must have hatched this week they are so tiny. There was a foot long lizard stalking around but I don’t know if he has the gumption to brave the parents. One parent is seen just to the right of the agave.
My uncle and I determined that it was a fox taking my grandmother’s chicken, so we rigged for night ops and waited him out one night after making sure the chickens were all in the coop by the orchard. It made eight year old me feel like a grownup.
They sound like they are going to be so cute and appealing in a few days. But it’s obviously a dangerous world out there for them.
That would be exciting for a kid, for sure. Did you get him?
Awww, rest easy, COL B! Thanks, again, @sawatdeeka!
Thank you for reading, Nanda!
Yup.
Obviously it was the rooster’s toxic masculinity that did him in. If he were woke he wouldn’t have had that “cock-of-the-walk” attitude that made him a prime target.
The farm’s layout faced the fox with a tactical quandary. The coop by the smokehouse was shaded from the security light by the smokehouse itself, but the dog was chained to the smokehouse, which might have been why he went to the orchard coop. But the light was better by the orchard.
Wow, politics seeping into everything. Ha, ha, ha.
We think he might have been defending his brood in those last minutes, a scenario which might explain the signs of protracted struggle. On the other hand, chickens do dump feathers as they are dragged off. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had been fighting for his girls, though. His protectiveness certainly proved useful to us.
Fun essay.
Here at Toad Hall, we used to let our chickens roam free. We’ve lost them to hawks, foxes, and weasels, but we think we have found a way to guard against that now.
We take spells as chicken herders to guard and protect the girls. We use two golf clubs to extend our reach and direct the hens, and herd them from one shady patch in the yard to another.
This keeps them out of the places I don’t want them (they poop, they dig up beds, they kill your favorite most finicky plants that have been tenderly and patiently nursed along for years and are just starting to do well) as well as protects them from predators and becoming roadkill (our roadside ditch has always got tasty snacks for happy hens).
It also gives the children something to do, and allows us to concentrate our chicken power in areas where ticks might be lurking, which is one of their primary purposes in living at Toad Hall.
They don’t get as much foraging as they would if they were free-ranging, but it keeps them alive and does not make our yard a pick-your-own-chicken attraction for foxes and hawks.
We buy our day-old chicks from Agway, and they are all sex-selected, but one time a little cockerel snuck through the process. He turned out to be a gorgeous auracana, bright white, but crowing at 4 am was not something we wanted in our chickens, so we found him a home with a friend who wanted an auracana rooster.
We used to keep the door to our chicken coop, which is surrounded by a fairly solid chicken yard, with netting above and all around, open at night, but a weasel got in one night and slit open three hens, ate their innards, and left the corpses neatly on the floor. Greedy little bugger.
Since then, we keep the door closed every night and we have not lost any more chickens, except for the aggravated and aggravating hen who just worried and fussed at every hen around her incessantly until she just up and dropped dead one day. What a relief.
My daughter when she was in the fifth grade brought home to our little farm her science project a peep. They watched it hatch from an egg. Of course it grew up to be a rooster and my best friend. It’s a long story by my Doberman killed it. I loved that chicken. I get a tear in my eye thinking about it 35 years later.
My daughter found out that free range isn’t always a happy range. They buy eggs at the store now.
I like all this talk about chickens. They’re among the more interesting and amiable of God’s creatures (except when they get angry).
We seem to have some authentic and very literate farm girls on this site. I grew up in the city, but I love farm girls. I married one. I also love the jokes that farm girls—and their “suitors,” the traveling salesmen—appear in. Or I did when I was a kid. No one tells me a farm girl joke anymore. Sad.
Kent
Do you know that old song, “Sweet Violets?”
Oh, my. Austenphilia should be a lifelong pursuit, never a stage to be passed through.
Yes, the name of the rooster was certainly a really great part of the essay.
Or white privilege.
When I was about ten, my father gave me ten chicks and two ducklings for Easter. That was not that unusual at the time. Since he hd grown up on a farm, he built a chicken house from an old dog house. He drilled holes in the sides and built roosts for the chickens. By late spring we had pullets laying pullet eggs and young roosters starting to crow.
About that time, my parents decided to send me to Wisconsin to spend time with relatives. When I got home, the chickens and ducks were gone, to the Farm my parents said. Our family had a farm in downstate Illinois.
We had fried chicken several times in the next few weeks.
When we first started keeping chickens, we had a priest who had grown up with an old Italian dad in NYC. His dad used to get chicks and raise them for meat, never long enough for eggs, and our priest used to joke with my tadpoles that he was going to come over to our house and steal and eat our chickens.
My children loved this and thought it was delightfully fun to share this with the priest. He really was delightful.
I found Grandma’s chicken ledger from back during the Depression: how much she took in for eggs and grown birds really made a difference to family finances.