As I posted on Facebook earlier today: "Felt a little guilty yesterday eating delicious Game Day chicken wings while looking out the window at the friends' flock of beloved hens. Didn't stop me from nomming, though." That mostly sums up the day. We were invited to watch the Super Bowl with a great group of friends, all of us most interested in the commercials and Madge's performance (since none of us really had a team in the game - when the Niners lost the playoff, I sort of lost interest). I thought Madonna did a great job, though she has definitely slowed down a bit in the 20 years it's been since I saw her live. Then again, we'd all be so lucky to have her moves and her presence at 53. As far as her guest singers, it would have been out of character for M.I.A. NOT to have caused a bit of controversy with her red undies and hand gesture, imo, and Ms. Minaj was as cartoon-like and goofy as expected.

Favorite commercial? The Becks. Hand's down.

On Saturday, I had the double-treat of writing and riding. It started with a screenplay-writing workshop with David Seals (member of our local writers' group and author of Pow Wow Highway, the movie version of which was produced by George Harrison!). Afterward, I met a new friend for a long trail ride in the snowy woods. It's always nice to meet a fellow Arabian enthusiast here in Quarter Horse country - especially one who has a senior gelding like I do. The horses got along great, and we riders agreed it was like Grandpa's Day Out. Maybe next time we'll treat them to a round of bingo afterward.

I have not forgotten about the exciting news I'm planning to announce soon, but it's not...quite...time...yet.

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the quick and the dead

Well, it was quite a weekend. Our hatch that was due on Friday didn't start making an appearance until Sunday. Here is some of what we saw when things started moving along:


This was on of the first "pips" in the shell that we saw:

After a chick pips, it "zips" the shell -sort of pecks away in a semi-circle until it's able to start pushing its way out:

It's so exciting to see that first real fissure in the egg shell start opening up:

Then you start to see some feathers. Silkies have black skin (and even black bones, apparently), so even the lighter-colored ones look black when they're still wet at hatching time:

There's one little claw:

Free at last!

...except for this darned sombrero, which was a bit hard to shake:

Ah, nap time. Nobody told us they were going to look and act like drunken space aliens who'd been severely slimed on their journey to Earth:

This is a bit more comfortable:

And before long, there's a buddy in the 'bator:

By late Sunday night, we had three new chicks and one more pipped egg. The chick that took the longest to zip the shell (about 30 hours) had its feet curled into little clenched fists, so it wasn't able to get around like the others. I ended up splinting its tiny, weak toes to try to straighten them out, after being told that this should be done ASAP. For a while it looked like it was rallying: I'd dipped the tip of its beak in water and tried to introduce it to some warm chick starter mash so it could get its energy up. By last night, though, my husband and I agreed that it didn't look good, and despite all efforts my son went into the bathroom first thing this morning and woke me up to tell me that he thought it had died. Sadly, he was right. It was hard, but it wasn't a shock; and I also knew we'd done as much as we could for the little one. So, we had a chick funeral first thing this morning before school. My son asked me if the burial spot was a chicken graveyard now, since that's also where we buried his prize-winning rooster after it was killed by dogs last fall. I told him I guessed it was.

So, that was a little somber, but it wasn't the hardest part. The hardest part was when I went to check on the remaining pipped/zipping egg in the incubator. Since yesterday it had been making progress, but it was very slow progress. Last night, my mother-in-law and I debated about maybe putting it under the broody hen to see if that would move things along, but we eventually decided that leaving it undisturbed would be the better option. I wish I'd paid more attention and intervened, though, because it didn't take long for me to realize that, though it had about a centimeter of the shell zipped, there were no cheeps and no signs of life as there had been last night. Sure enough, when I took the egg out and started picking away at the shell with my fingernail, I could see that the little chick had died, probably at some point during the night.

Part of the problem, I believe, was that it had pipped the wrong end of the shell (the smaller, pointy end), which meant it didn't have as much room to move around and peck itself out. The chick was also huge (and perfect looking), so I'm pretty sure it suffocated in there. That was the part that got to me - the fact that I could have easily chosen to get in there and help it out if I had maybe paid closer attention and realized the chick was in trouble. That was the part - that sense of culpability - that had me sitting out on the back step with the dead chick still partially cradled in its egg bawling my eyes out. If only.

But I have to remind myself that I didn't know. That even experienced egg hatchers lose chicks at all stages of the incubation and hatch process. It's a beautiful and brutal thing, this life and death business. Now, it's time to tend to the life part, to the sweet little survivors:


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day 22 (or: and then there were six)

Chicken eggs need 21 days to incubate before they are ready to hatch. During those three weeks all sorts of changes are constantly taking place, eventually turning that microscopic little dot on the yolk into a full-fledged chick. Tons of genetic and environmental factors can influence the final outcome, however. For instance, if an incubator's temperature spikes a few degrees for an hour or so, there's a good chance all the embryos will die. I haven't had to deal with temperature spikes during my first incubation experience, but I have had humidity issues. One of the biggest was the discovery at the end of week 2 that my PetSmart hygrometer was defective. I thought I was maintaining a lovely 62% humidity for days on end, only to find out (when I finally got suspicious) that the stupid thing read 62 percent whether I put it in the 'bator or outside (where the humidity was right around 15%).

Anyway, we're at day 22 now, which means the hatch is officially overdue. But I'm not worried or anything. Nah. Not me. I've just been shining a light through the incubator window every five minutes because I have nothing better to do. Yeah, that's it. I must have stared for hours yesterday as the eggs started to rock and roll a little, and when the kids and I actually heard cheeping from a couple of the eggs this morning you would have thought Willy Wonka himself had just announced that we'd all won golden tickets.

It would have been lovely if my broody hen had been ready to set when the eggs arrived, thus allowing me to bypass all this anxiety and overwroughtedness (is that a word?). But she wasn't. She is now, though:

The other hen isn't broody at all, and I think it's because she views herself as just way too above all that sitting-on-eggs nonsense. That blue ribbon from the fair last year went straight to her head, I tell ya:

My mother-in-law (aka the genuine farmgirl in the family) came over to candle the incubator eggs a second time, this time with a more powerful candler. Unfortunately, when held to the light, most of the eggs glowed like little yellow Christmas lights (which meant there were no chicks inside). In fact, when we broke those 18 eggs open (outside in the fresh air, of course), only one of them contained an embryo, and that one looked like it had died in the first week. The others showed no sign of an embryo presence, much less development, which leads me to believe they weren't fertile in the first place, or they were scrambled by the post office en route from Florida to Arizona, or a combination of both.

Anyway, so there we were - down to six eggs. It was sad to see the incubator so uncrowded all of a sudden, but that's the breaks (especially with shipped eggs, as I've learned). The good news was that we saw definite chickage in the remaining ones. That's when the last, longest part of the wait began. I was glad to get away to Phoenix for a couple days, and then a new job started up, which kept me further occupied. There was a 4-H meeting to get ready for, too (I lead the local horse group), and that turned out to be fun. My husband gave a shoeing demonstration, and we all stood out in the arctic wind, proving what tough equestriennes we are (yeah, right).

There was a new tomcat to figure out, too. This is Mogi (short for Mogollon, which is pronounced Mogiyon)...

...so named because the Mogollon Rim just south of Flagstaff has the dubious distinction of being one of the most lightning-struck places on the planet, and I think Mogi looks just like a grey thundercloud over the prairie.

He may be something fancy, too, like one of those Russian Blues. All I know is he's young and sweet, and he definitely seems to be sticking around. Also, those fuzzy little round things between his hind legs will be snipped off very soon.

But still, despite all these distractions, I have continued to worry, and I continued to obsessively research all the things that can go wrong not just during the incubation process, but during the actual hatching process, when you'd think you'd pretty much be in the clear. But Nooooooooooo. Chicks can drown in the air sacs before they pip the egg (make that first little hole). They can suffocate inside membranes that dry out too quickly after pipping (back to the humidity issue), and they can fail to fully absorb the yolk or hatch with their intestines hanging out. Nightmare-creating stuff, I say. I told my husband that I would have made a completely neurotic hen, so it's a good thing God made me a female human instead.

He chose the strategically intelligent response of total silence.

Then I started to worry about my kids. They've been so patient and excited during these past three weeks that the thought of a failed hatch hurt my heart on their accounts. So, I hemmed and hawed, and deliberated and thought...and then my neighbor mentioned that the feed n' grain in town was due to get another shipment of day-old Silkie chicks in the next day.

You just knew this was coming, didn't you?

There's four, one for each person in the family. Mine's the big yellow one, and I've named it Ivan the Terrible due to the fact that it unmercifully tried to peck the sh*t out of all the others their first day home. If it turns out to be a pullet and not a cockerel, I'll call her Ivanka.

I dare you to tell me the last time you saw something cuter.

I'll let you know how the hatch goes.

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adventures in egg candling

My mother-in-law, who is a true, authentic, dyed-in-the-wool farm girl, came over this afternoon to candle the Silkie eggs that have now been sitting (and hopefully growing) in the Little Giant incubator for eleven days (that means we're officially more than halfway to hatch day - hooray!). In case you're not familiar with egg candling, it basically entails shining a bright light through an egg to get some idea of what's going on inside. Ideally, you want to see a growing embryo in there, and some people on the egg boards I frequent (yeah, I know, I'm a total poultry geek) even report seeing a little beating chicken heart!

I tried candling a few of the eggs in the dark of the closet yesterday with a flashlight, but it was a very disconcerting experience. You know when you get a bad headache and decide to look up your symptoms online, only to discover that you surely have a brain tumor the size of a grapefruit and about 36 hours to live? Well, I've been doing way too much incubation "research" online lately, so I was sure that each egg I shined light through was either a) an explosive about ready to blow, or b) a total dud that had never been fertilized in the first place.

Fortunately, my MIL was able to dispel some of those fears. She came over with her homemade candler, and the kids and I followed her into the guest bathroom, turned off the light, and watched her expertly "read" our 21 potential peeps. So far it looks like we have only two or three true duds (eggs that were never fertilized while still developing inside the mama hens). It was hard to tell if the remaining eggs contained live embryos or not, but there was definitely something in there.

On another farmy note: I was watching RFD-TV the other day, and they were doing a show for corn-growers (did I mention I'm easily amused?). One of the farmers commented that corn has recently gotten very expensive - no kidding! Gallon jugs of corn oil from Wal-Mart (which we use for supplementing our 27-year-old gelding's feed) were going for $5 last year. Now, they're $8!

Don't even get me started on hay prices. Sheesh.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

vicarious gestation

I suppose vicarious incubation would be more accurate, since we're talking about eggs here. I actually ordered them months ago from a Silkie breeder in Florida, but then chickened out (so to speak) when I realized that - duh - I'd be trying to raise baby chicks at the coldest time of year. Fortunately, the lady was willing to put off the egg shipment until earlier this week.

You'd think I would have learned my lesson at this same time last year when we had five chicks living in the kids' bathtub, but I'm nothing if not stubborn. So, there's an incubator with 21 eggs inside set up in the master bedroom. I find myself obsessively checking the hygrometer to make sure the humidity level inside the incubator is where it's supposed to be (it never is, because - hello? I live in Arizona). How chickens were ever introduced into this climate I'll never know.

And it's not just humidity and temperature levels I'm obsessing about lately. Did you know the eggs need to be turned on a regular basis (i.e. several times per day?) In the absence of a good, broody hen who will get up off the clutch of eggs to do this instinctively (we have good hens here but not broody ones at the moment), you can buy automatic egg turners which will do this work for you. But was I going to take the easy route through this process? No, sirree. So, I've been turning the eggs several times per day by hand instead, starting first thing in the morning and ending last thing at night before bedtime. The husband found me groggily turning the little darlings right after I woke up this morning. "Aren't you supposed to do that with your beak?" he asked. Har.

Anyway, hopefully, I'll have much fluffy cuteness to share in a few weeks. Until then, I'm just hoping no disasters happen - like power surges and exploding eggs (which is possible, and what better way to become a total insomniac?).

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as if I wasn't losing enough sleep already

Headed outside for nightly rounds with the flashlight earlier this week, just because I like to check up on everyone before I go to bed. You know. Make sure no horses are cast against their corral panels, make sure no cats are in a stand-off with a coyote, make sure no chickens have already lost said stand-off.

Anyway, I heard a thump coming from the pump house. Instead of running inside and strongly suggesting to my husband that he investigate the source of the sound as I'd done the night before, I decided to cowgirl up and do it myself. I made some noise as I approached the door, and a fat ol' raccoon promptly scurried down from the window of the pump house, which we keep half-open so the cats can come and go as they please. Relieved that it was only a raccoon, I opened the door and shined the light in, just to make sure the cats were okay.

If I'd been thinking clearly I would've run inside for the camera so I could have gotten a picture of the TEN little beady eyes staring back at me like, "Lady, we're trying to eat here. Would ya mind turning off the flashlight?" Yup, that's right. Five raccoons were hunkered over the cat food, fattening themselves up for fall inside our pump house.

photo via myraccoons.com

Unfortunately, though, my brain was otherwise occupied with setting up the baby monitor near the chicken coop so I could hear the raccoon family when they moved the party over to the coop for a nice dessert of Silkie Hen Tartar. Yes, you heard me correctly. I use a baby monitor for night-time chicken surveillance.

Because I have become that person - only with poultry instead of felines.

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Falanis goes to the Fair!

If You Give a Hen a Spa Day

(with apologies to Laura Numeroff)

If you give a hen a spa day she's going to ask for bubble bath.

After the bubble bath she's going to want to be dried with an oversized Turkish towel

The towel will be insufficient, so she will require a hair dryer. And a comb. You will have to draw the line at styling products.

"Take me to the County Fair!" she will cry when the treatment is done, "So that my loveliness may be gazed upon by fowl far and wide!"

And you will have little choice but to comply.

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girls rule, boys drool

That's the word on the playground, apparently. Also, the other way around.

Yes, school is back, and all the hubbub therewith. I find myself with more free time than I've had in almost a decade (though "free" may be an overstatement. It would more accurately be described as time to put a dent in the mountain of tasks, large and small, looming before me. Can you hear the sad violins playing in the background?).

Yesterday I worked for hours on the new and improved Chateau Chicken, since some friends are giving us their pair of Leghorn layers (that's "Leggern" to those of you interested in improving your Chickenese). This could work out well for a couple of reasons: Leghorns are big layers (and I mean BIG - have you seen the size of those monsters?), but they're not so much into going broody (sitting on the eggs). Silkies, on the other hand, rarely get around to laying because they go broody so easily. They love sitting on any eggs they can find, even those of other hens. Silkie roosters are apparently the same way - they'll keep the eggs warm and help raise the chicks. How's that for the "sensitive male" so many women dream about?

Last weekend we did the horse show thing, and tomorrow's the County Fair show. Don't know if we'll be going though, since Zzari stepped on the boy's toe this week and it's still sore.
That's about it for this Friday - short and sweet. I'd like to add "like me," but I'm more the tall and cranky type.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

and then there were three

Harrowing night last night. I was awakened at about 1:30 a.m. by chicken distress signals - not a pretty sound, in case you haven't ever heard them right outside your window. Of course, by the time I got out there in my nightgown, flashlight in hand, it was too late. The beam shone first on my husband's old gelding who, ears pricked, was staring intently at the chicken coop. Walking out there I passed a great mound of feathers, and my heart sank. I moved the flashlight around a bit, and there they were, right on the other side of the fenceline separating us from the great prairie beyond: a pair of glowing red eyes staring me down until I made enough scary noise to frighten whatever it was away. Coyote or raccoon, I assumed. Whatever it was, it didn't help that my husband was down in Tombstone on business this week (yes, that Tombstone).

When I finally got up the nerve to look in the coop, I found two of the five chickens alive in there - Bootstrap Bill (the rooster), and one of the fluffy yellow Banties. The others were nowhere to be found, though I made a thorough, shaky search, hoping against hope that they were maybe hiding out. But chickens are light-activated, as my husband has always told me. When the sun goes down, they're basically in standby mode. Sitting ducks.

I felt heartsick and stomach-sick. After all, it had been my decision at feeding time yesterday to finally just let the chickens come and go as they pleased and to not lock them up as we always have. They've been doing so well in free-range mode during the day time, after all, as did the Aracona (sp?) hens we owned years ago. But those hens roosted high in tree branches, whereas these do not. It was a foolish decision, a foolish mistake, and a heartwrenching one, considering that two beautiful, sweet pullets had to pay with their lives.

I got back to bed sometime around 2:30, and maybe got two or so hours of restless sleep, during which I dreamed (nightmared) over and over again about telling the children about their Easter chicks when they woke up. It was truly one of those "dark nights of the soul," and I'm not talking about the fullness of the moon.

The kids were okay about it when I told them. They immediately wanted to check out the scene of the crime, so we headed outside to a strange sight: What I thought was the remaining pullet was cruising around, pecking at the ground. I wondered how she'd gotten out of the coop after I'd secured her in there hours earlier, and then I thought, "Could it be?" We raced to the coop and saw the other yellow fluffball in there, just as alive as you please. So, a little miracle came out of the whole thing, especially considering the fact that the Mystery Pullet was running around out there for several hours, completely unprotected. I still don't know where she was hiding to have missed the flashlight beam during my search.

The kids set right to work gathering up memorial service feathers from the feather trail left by the varmint - from the entrance to the coop right out to the prairie. I got online and learned that raccoons and skunks will usually leave a big mess consisting of headless chicken carcasses, etc., whereas coyotes will leave nothing but feathers. I tried track identification this afternoon in vain - whatever it was moved too nimbly, and the ground was too dry, I think, to make an i.d. possible. But when my son looked out the kitchen window at about 11:00 this morning and said, "Hey, Mom. Is that a coyote out there?" I was doubly conviced that we were watching the felon trot casually right past our fenceline in broad daylight. He was a big sucker for a coyote, too, so I immediately implemented an indefinite, No-kids-outside-alone rule. Then I spoke to my neighbor - WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS (lol) - and who mentioned the very real possibility of a local wolf population. So, I guess I can pretty much kiss any fantasy of a good night's sleep goodbye for the foreseeable future.

We'll see how tonight goes. The coop has been relocated, fortified, and hung with a set of lovely wind chimes I was given years ago after judging a horse show. I plan to keep one eye and one ear open, though if I know prairie varmints (and I think I do), they'll work in sneaky, swift silence. There's a lawyer or politician joke in there somewhere, I'm sure, but frankly I'm too fried to tease it out.Follow @nicole_mcinnes