Little Mama T-Rex

One early Spring day a little hen decided to sit. She sat and sat and sat.



The little farm lady thought to herself, "Already? Didn't we just finish butchering the ones from last year? Do we have to do this again?"

But chicks are so much fun.

So. Much. Fun.



"Fine. You can have four eggs. Just a few."



By the next morning, something had changed. The little farm lady could see it in those beady little eyes. No question about it.

The sweet little hen had turned into a vicious protective little Mama Tyrannosaurus Rex. A whole lot of nasty packed into one little bird. Shrieking and growling and feathers up on end.

And the beak...



Dang! That beak is sharp!



That crafty little reptile had stolen another egg! She was sitting on five!

The third morning the little farm lady finally remembered to bring a pencil to the coop. A pencil. To mark the incubating eggs so any additional unauthorized eggs could be identified and removed from the nest in the coming days. You know, because if we can't have four, five is a decent number of chicks too.

Mama T-Rex and the little farm lady had come to an agreement. Five eggs. Not too few, not too many. Just five. We'd mark the eggs today and that would be the end of the drama.

Except someone didn't keep her end of the bargain.

Chickens are thieves.

Houston, we have a problem.

The difference

Chicks, like all babies, grow up fast. These photos were taken four days ago, and already they look different.

They have tiny feathers growing out of the fuzz on their wings.


I could sit in the coop for hours (except that I can't because I must keep my own children alive) and watch the interaction between the hen and chicks. This is so different from brooding orphan chicks in a cardboard box with a heat lamp.

It fascinates me to no end.

They make the happiest little trilling sound when they are falling asleep underneath their mom. I never heard this noise from our other chicks.

Despite being totally new at this, Momma Hen has turned out to be a really great mom. The transition from sitting to mothering was just seamless.

I was worried that she wasn't eating enough, so I brought her a bowl full of pieces of moist bread. (I did this often while she was sitting on the eggs.) She tasted it, then she called the babies out from beneath her and gave them every last piece. They ate it too.


Our orphan chicks would run like crazy when they got a snack. It was a game of keep-away with absolutely no rules. But these chicks, when they get a snack, are so calm and just step aside to eat.

It's almost like they know mom will give them more.


Chickens scratch.

It's what they do.

All the time.

Momma Hen thinks she needs to teach her babies to scratch. This has been our one problem. She scratches their bedding into mountains that cover their feeder and waterer.

I take bedding out. She manages to do it again. I take more bedding out.

Those birds have almost no bedding left.

But they're all happy and healthy, and it gives me another excuse to check on them, so I think we're doing okay.

Holding my breath

It's Mother's Day.

If you read about my determined hen you know that I have been counting days. Specifically, I've been counting the twenty-one days until today, Mother's Day. Not because it's Mother's Day. That happened to be an appropriate coincidence, and nothing else.

Today is the day our Nest Queen has been sitting on her eggs for twenty-one days, the day I marked on my calendar "Chicks due!".

I didn't expect to find babies this morning when I visited her, and I was right.

She has oatmeal all over her beak in this photo (which was taken with my unbelievably amazing, obnoxiously large new lens which I am, by the way, absolutely head-over-heels in love with) because I brought her a treat. My husband, by the way, thought I was a freak for using a telephoto lens in the coop.

Whatever.


She was sitting there. Grumpy. Doing her usual thing. I tried to prepare myself for the fact that they just might not hatch. So many things could go wrong.

We got home late from church, and had to get the kids fed and the baby down for a nap. I raced out to the coop the first chance I got.

Something seemed different, but I wasn't sure exactly what.

I squatted down quietly beside her nest. She wasn't happy with my presence, but she didn't move. Her body was in the same position on the nest that it always is. No fuzzy little heads peeked out from beneath her.

Then I heard it.

I could so easily have missed it.

If it wasn't for the three-day-old baby chicks that my chickens used to be a year ago when they arrived in the mail, I would have missed it for sure. That sound is imprinted on my mind forevermore. My heart beat faster before I even realized what I had heard.

I very carefully reached beneath her and gently pulled out the most beautiful shiny brown egg.

It was hot.

It quivered and vibrated ever so slightly in my hand.

It was alive.

I held it to my ear. After a moment, I heard the tiniest "peep peep peep" you could imagine.

Quickly I tucked it back into it's warm space under it's Momma.

As I sat there, every so often I would hear one of the babies, "peep peep peep" from within it's shell. Every time I heard it, Momma Hen heard it too. She would put all her feathers up on end, and glare at me. She knows, although I wonder if she really knows. What mother truly does know what she's getting herself into?

There are still at least a hundred things that could go wrong. But right now, I am completely amazed. An egg, people, it's an egg. You know, those things that you crack into a hot pan and cook. But these ones are ripe with life. It's a mystery to me really why, or how... but right now, at this exact moment those baby chicks are probably only hours away from hatching.

This is my gift on Mother's Day. I am once again overwhelmed with awe of my creator, filled up with excitement of this mystery, in anticipation of the joy of seeing those fuzzy little beady-eyed babies.

I know for a fact that Momma Hen didn't lay a single one of those eggs she incubated, and chances are good that they won't all survive. But they are all hers, and she is their mom.

Happy Mother's Day.

Happy Mother's Day to adoptive moms, to stepmoms, to moms who have given birth to babies, and to moms who hurt today because they have lost children. We are all moms, and what a mystery it truly is. My love to you all.

Twenty-one days

Once upon a time (like a week ago), a little orange hen known as The Nest Queen (actually she has another name that I dare not type here) decided to sit. She sat, and sat, and sat. While her friends scratched around the yard and enjoyed a beautiful Spring day, she parked her fluffy butt on the nest and sat.

When I shoved the other chickens off their poopy porch and locked them in the coop that night, I realized that she was still sitting, and that it was the first time that she had been for the entire day.

She was determined.

It was time.

With much anticipation in the mystery that was about to be, I let her keep nine eggs that were laid in the following two days. She knew what she needed to do.

But the week was disastrous to say the least.

We have a big community nest. Two of them actually, but the girls only use one.

As fresh eggs were laid beside her, she collected and carefully rolled them underneath her featherless warm belly. But you can only fit so many eggs under a hen, and in doing so she kicked the eggs that she had been incubating out behind her.

That was only the beginning of her troubles.

You know when someone has something, everyone wants it? Nest space is hot like that. There are times those girls are lined up waiting for that nest like women have been known to wait to use the restroom.

Once I walked into the coop to find three birds piled on top of each other, and another one waiting for space to jump up there with the others. And on the bottom? Yes, my broody Nest Queen and her pile of precious eggs. Eggs were kicked around in the scuffle and a few of them cracked. Still she sat.

When an egg broke in the mayhem, and subsequently dried beneath her, it glued two more eggs to the feathers on the edge of her bare breasts. Those eggs smashed in the following day when yet another hen bullied her trying to get into her space to lay.

We were down to six eggs after only a few days.

I made her a perfect private cardboard box, with a little door, nice and dark, and full of soft pine bedding. We moved her and her eggs after dark. I was so hopeful.

She was not amused.

She pooped on her eggs in the new cardboard box nest and escaped back onto the old empty nest. She managed to knock four hens off their night-time roost in her mad dash back up there. Determined, yes.

The cardboard box nest wasn't right. The old nest felt right, even without eggs. Somehow I had figured she would be happy to be wherever her eggs were. I was wrong.

I gave her eggs back to her, she rolled them under her breast and glared at me.

I thought and thought and thought.

The next day was as bad as ever. She had only three eggs remaining by evening.

So we replicated the community nest. My sweet husband built a lip for the box, just right to match the one she wanted to sit in. We put it on the floor in the corner of the coop. Then he framed out a private space, stapled chicken wire all the way around it, and stapled a slanted cardboard lid to the top. I placed food and water in, put fresh straw in the new nest, and we waited for dark.

We snuck in, my husband held The Nest Queen while I moved her warm eggs. Then as I put her in the new space, we quietly watched and held our breath.

She pooped.

She tested one chicken wire wall, then the other.

She was agitated, and looked up toward her old nest.

She hopped onto the top of the replicated nest box and prepared to jump just under the high part of the slanted roof. It was clear she was about to escape her new private space. She had not seen her eggs.

I gently lowered her back down to the nest, and tried to aim her beady black eyeballs toward those shiny eggs.

She clucked.

Cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck...

And she nestled into the new nest, beside her eggs, and one by one, she tucked those eggs under her beak and rolled them back into her warm place.

Cluck, cluck, cluck...

She sat, content.

Now her warm place is a safe place.

Today, convinced she is happy enough with her new nest, I climbed into her chicken wire enclosure with an egg carton in my hand. The carton contained precious cargo. I'm pretty flexible and have long legs. It was not easy. I was also just a bit concerned about getting out after I squatted down, because of how a cardboard flap kind of locks the lid down.

I took her three eggs and replaced them with nine fresh ones.

She didn't seem to mind.

So now we start over counting a twenty-one day incubation.

When my husband held her before we put her into the new safe nest, I took the opportunity to look her over. She had some poop stuck in the feathers on her behind. She has plucked her breasts completely bare, for better heat transfer to the eggs. The bottom edges of her wings, and the feathers remaining around her bare underbelly are thickly matted up with crusty dried egg, and even half an eggshell was still stuck there to her feathers.

I whispered, "She's a mess."

My husband smiled at me, "She's a mom."

Twenty-one days from now, the day I have marked on my calendar, the day I will be running to the coop every fifteen minutes to check on her if I can manage it, is Mother's Day.

It honestly is.

How perfect!

Knoepfle Soup - Part II

Missed Part I? Get caught up by clicking here.

If you recall, we're working on our soup broth. At the moment our Sunny rooster has just started cooking in a bunch of water with some celery and onion.

But we need something more.

In order to make the broth really great, it needs a bay leaf or two, a bit of salt and pepper, and some really yummy smelling, dried, home grown parsley.

A strange but wonderful thing to add is just a splash of apple cider vinegar. The vinegar extracts calcium and minerals out of Sunny's bones as he cooks. It makes for an extra healthy broth.

I want Sunny to cook for a full hour, until he is good and done. Roosters are notorious for having tough meat, although you wouldn't know it with this home grown guy.

Next up is lots of potatoes. The recipe calls for two medium potatoes, but doubling it I probably I use seven or eight of them. Funny math, I know.

A fully cooked Sunny and the bay leaf come out, and the potatoes go in.

One thing I truly hope for in this life, is that I learn from my mistakes.

I aimed more carefully this time.


I also added some season salt and a bunch of chopped up green onions.

While the potatoes cook, get ready for knoepfle!

Guess what? The chickens have another contribution for our soup.

Head out to the coop and grab two beautiful, fresh, brown eggs. No doubt you'll find them underneath The Nest Queen. Retrieve them very carefully.


She won't touch me, but I believe she might possibly peck you!


She's been getting more and more cranky lately, and sitting on that nest longer and longer. It bet it won't be more than a few days and she'll be The Nest Mama. Once she becomes a little more determined I won't take her eggs away anymore. And that is so very exciting!


Anyway, watch your fingers. Her beak is sharp.


While you're out there, be sure to tell her what a good mama she is going to be. A little positive reinforcement never hurt, right?

Was that enough adventure? Let's finish up later with Part III.