Three Rights Make a Left

by

We have been battling predators on our little farm ever since we moved here. Our chickens would just disappear one by one and sometimes two or three. We once saw our rooster running across the pasture with a coyote right behind him in broad daylight. More often we find our little flock a little smaller in the morning after a predator broke into the coop the night before. Several months ago, we ordered thirty white leghorn chicks through the mail. Several of those died when they turned their water over on a cold night, and we had to blow dry the survivors off one by one. Once they got bigger, we started losing them to predators. Now there are only three of the original thirty still alive. A couple of weeks ago, we bought twenty more California Gray chicks, and we are raising them now.

After deer season was over in January, I moved one of my trail cameras to the chicken coop. While I’ve never caught a varmint in the act of killing a chicken, I have caught pictures of them breaking in and found the remains of a dead chicken that had been dragged off. One such time, I got a good picture of a little masked assassin as he was breaking his way into the coop. The next picture that triggered the camera outside the coop was a poof of feathers that came through the chicken wire and settled on the ground. The next morning Lori found the remains of one of our favorite chickens, a gray hen that laid green eggs. Before Lori put the little that was left of the chicken in a bag to be put out with the trash, she found a fully formed egg that had still been in her body.

Lori lovingly took that green egg, along with two more and six brown eggs, and put them in our little incubator. Yesterday, that little green egg that she had saved from the dead hen she had found hatched and one of the brown ones is hatching now. I have to say that we never get tired of watching the birth of a baby bird pecking its way out of its shell. Nobody taught those little babies how to free themselves from the hard shell that has protected them from an embryo until the time they are ready to peck out of their shell. The instinct that tells them how is instilled by God.

Now that gray chicken that we loved will live hopefully live on through the tiny day-old chick that Lori rescued from its mother.