every chick deservers a mother
Watching chickens preen makes me want to have a neck that can stretch like theirs. The only spot they can’t reach are the tops of their heads. To scratch an itch on their heads, they need to use their feet. When they are resting, their necks don’t look very long, but when they need to, they can stretch their necks to reach any itch.
Only a mother can provide the warmth and security a little chick craves. I was aware that hens have a variety of calls to instruct their chicks. There is the sound they make when they have found food. Another for danger. And yet another call which means, “get your butt over here now!”
Today we learned they have another sound which means, “hide, stay quiet, and don’t move until I come.” While she was with her chicks on the open grass, a raven came flying in. Lucky sent the chicks scurrying under a bush, while she went running in another direction to distract the raven. A raven will easily eat a small chick. She waited until the Raven was gone before she went back to fetch her chicks.
A favorite spot for chicks is right in front of their mother, half covered by her feathers. Sitting snugly, they can peer out and watch the whole world go by.
Being a mother hen is a twenty-four hour job. It’s mid afternoon and it’s time for a break. Some of her chicks are taking a warm nap under her, while others still scamper about. Her chicks may nap during the day, but Lucky doesn’t. Which might explain while mother hens tend to go to bed early. By dusk, they are bedded down with their chicks underneath them.
Every trip into the vegetable beds is a voyage of discovery. You don’t have to look far to find beauty. Mother nature can’t touch a single square foot of land without leaving behind breathtaking splendor.
I had a laugh today listening to Ira Flatow on Science Friday today. He was interviewing Michael J. Sheehan about facial recognition. As I listened, it dawned on me that Ira Flatow must spend almost no time with animals. He commented how animal faces all look the same while human faces are very different. His comment made me laugh. Has this man not even looked at two dog faces side by side? He certainly hasn’t looked closely at a flock of chickens.
It’s gradually becoming the cool, wet time of the year. For Lucky and her chicks, it means having a big breakfast before spending the day outdoors in the cool, drizzly weather.
In the village, the last flowers of summer are as beautiful as ever. The butterflies are enjoying the last sips of nectar. The beauty of the Pacific Northwest is that the seasons change gently and slowly, giving plenty of time to enjoy the transformations. Each day is just slightly different than the day before it.
The first fall leaves are dropping. Ahead of me are weeks and months of gathering leaves to compost and use in vegetable beds in the spring, summer, and next fall. They are much more satisfying to use than artificial fertilizer sold in plastic containers. Raking the leaves provides plenty of exercise. The earthy smell as they break down is enjoyable. The crumbly texture of composted leaves soothes my fingers. And as the leaves break down, they attract an infinite variety of bugs the chickens love to eat. The bugs eat the decaying leaves. The chickens eat the bugs. I eat the eggs of the chickens. In a way, when I crack open an egg and eat it, I am eating the autumn leaves. If I close my eyes, can I taste the autumn leaves in the eggs?
On the way home from delivering eggs, there’s time to enjoy my favorite cows.
After just two days, Lucky has taken her chicks outdoors to enjoy life. In the clip below, you can see how little chicks bury under their mother when they want some warmth.
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During the day she takes them further and further into the grass to explore and find good things to eat.
Near the post office is this long row of fifty or so trimmed poplar trees. Whoever trims them must spend a lot of time trimming them as they are always trimmed. Only, it turns out that it’s not a person who keeps these trees looking so neat. It’s a pair of cows. They go along the fence by the trees, nibbling at the trees and eating all the branches and leaves they can reach. In the process they keep the bottom branches of the leaves all trimmed to the same height.
The next time you are in the country and see a row of trees with their lower branches all trimmed neatly. Look for cows. They’re most likely the ones trimming the trees.
Lucky’s eggs hatched. After watching hens hatch eggs for five years, you’d think it would be no big deal. But each hatching is wonderful. And Lucky is a very special hen. As a tiny chick, she had an unfortunate accident and scraped the back of her head and neck. We had to separate her from her siblings as they kept pecking at her wound. Oh she peeped and peeped and peeped to be with them. They didn’t have a mother. Someone had ordered some chicks from a hatchery and received the wrong breeds. The local post office called and asked if we’d take them.
We rigged up a space with chicken wire just for Lucky so she could be right next to her siblings while she healed. She grew up to be an outgoing hen, with a very distinctive look. She’s usually the first hen to see what we’re doing when we go to work in the gardens.
We weren’t sure if her eggs would hatch. She decided to brood her eggs in a nest a few other hens also liked to use to lay eggs. Sometimes we’d find her in the next nest while another hen lay an egg in her nest. We marked the eggs we put under her for her to hatch, so we were able to remove any eggs other hens added to her clutch.
From time to time, we found her sitting on new eggs in the nest next to hers and had to move her back onto her eggs. One morning I found that she’d even spent a whole night on the other nest and her eggs were cold. I had my doubts any of her eggs would hatch. But they did, and now she has a happy brood to raise.
Not exactly tyrannosaurs, but fearsome creatures nevertheless if you’re a field mouse, the chickens have found a bone one of the dogs buried. With a bone, a flock of fifty chickens can attack it like a school of piranhas. Well, maybe that is a bit of a stretch. But, leave a bone out and the chickens will strip it bare in no time.
I watched a program on TV Japan called “Tameshite Gatten” which each week, looks at something people use all the time, and takes an hour to thoroughly explain it. This evening they were covering fresh soybeans, which are usually boiled in salt water, and are called “edamame”, which literally mean “beans on the stem”.
Many stores sell edamame, but they are usually sold precooked and frozen in the US. What was interesting about tonight’s show is that many in Japan will only buy fresh edamame that are picked that day. The reason for this is that within hours of being picked, edamame loose their sweetness. When picked fresh, the amount of sugar in them is a bit over 3%. But with three days of being picked, that level falls to nearly 2%.
It would be hard to find consumers in the US insisting on buying only beans that were picked that day, and refusing to buy beans that were picked three days ago. Why aren’t consumers in the US more demanding of the groceries they purchase? I often wonder about that. I’ve yet to see someone in a supermarket ask the grocer if the produce was picked that day or how many days ago it was picked. The same is true for eggs and meat. There seems to be no demand for fresh produce.
Plants are living things, and even after being picked, they still breathe. To breathe, they use up the sugars that are in them. However, since they are no longer attached to their root systems and to the ground, they aren’t able to replenish the nutrients they use to breathe, and their quality degrades.
Quick cooling and shipping produce in cool, oxygen and carbon dioxide restricted containers will slow this breathing, but with each passing day the quality of the produce degrades. It’s best if you can pick your produce at the time you make your meals. The question is how do we do this? What needs to change with how people get their produce to enable them to have produce picked just hours before eating it?