every day is a good day
It’s a rainy day. There is always food and dry places to rest in the chicken yard, but most of the chickens want to be outdoors where they can see the raindrops falling and see all the action. For a midday break, Tangerine has taken her chicks to a dry spot at the entrance of the wood shed. From their dry vantage point, they can preen their feathers while seeing what is happening.
Do the neurotic chickens count their feathers? It makes you wonder.
Fall is the time of brilliant reds. On a sunny day, it looks like the leaves are on fire. I’m not sure the chickens are impressed. Many of them have combs redder and more brilliant than any leaf can dream of being.
Skunky’s mother is too busy rearing her next brood to worry about the fall leaves. And Tangerine and her chicks scamper around my feet when I split wood. You have to swing your ax carefully when you have a mother hen and her chicks running around at your feet.
A warm, sunny fall day is made for building new bridges. There was a narrow bridge here until a tree came down and split it in two. The replacement bridge is twice as wide and much stronger, a perfect bridge to ford the ravine to enter the western woods on the other side. You can’t see them, but there are chickens in the ravine, scratching in the muddy waters in search of good things to eat. The forest on the other side is a favorite hunting ground of the chickens. Now, they’ll have an easy bridge to cross the ravine, and so will BB on his rabbit hunts.
Lunch time sends me out into the garden to fetch dill and kale. The nice thing about having your own garden is that if you need just one or two leaves of something, you can go get it.
Walking out to the garden and back, I can’t help but take photos of the mother hens and their chicks. Tangerine’s chicks can still huddle underneath her, but at the rate they are going, not for long. When one of them gets separated from her, you can hear its loud peep from 500 feet away. Niji-hime and her daughter are inseparable. And Madge is still caring for her chicks though they are well able to manage on their own.
Watch hens care for their chicks, and you can understand why love is the greatest of all. It’s the one thing chicks crave from their mothers more than anything.
Rain, rain, go away. Come again some other day. Maybe that is what the chicks are chirping as they huddle under their mother and use her as an umbrella. Mother hens make excellent umbrellas. Not only do they keep the chicks dry, they keep them warm, and look, no hands required. Mother hens are much better than plastic umbrellas.
Unlike baby chicks, cabbages don’t need umbrellas. The rain rolls off their slippery leaves the moment it lands on them.
It’s a pumpkin kind of day. Time to bring in some pumpkins. You know it’s not pumpkin pie if it comes out of a can. Before you can make a real pumpkin pie, you have to feel the pumpkin in your hands, count its ridges, close your eyes and let it tell you how much cinnamon, how many cloves, how much cream it wants. Dream with the pumpkin and get to know it. You can’t do that with the pumpkin in a can. By then it is long dead and past sharing its dreams with you. Most likely, it’s not even pumpkin. It’s probably butternut squash or some other pumpkin wanna be. Life is too short not to have the real thing.
On a pumpkin kind of day, Madge’s chicks are glad to spend the day with their mother. Such days are numbered. Yesterday evening she flew up to the top of the roost to spend the night. Her chicks panicked. “Where is our mother?” they chirped and chirped as they ran around looking for her. The chickens on the roost weren’t about to let them fly up and crawl past them. Her chicks ended up spending the night, sleeping in the nest on the ground where their mother used to curl up with them. It was their first night on their own.
It’s a traumatic ordeal all chicks go through: that first night without their mother. No doubt it is a common topic chickens vent about when they lay bare their hearts to their therapist. “Describe your first night alone, without your mother,” must be a mantra of chicken therapists. It all goes downhill from there.
Madge’s chicks are very content this afternoon. They spent all morning and afternoon with her. Under the hawthorn, they preen and nap. As adults, I wonder if they will dream of this happy afternoon they spent with their mother on this pumpkin kind of day.
