The Chicken Saga Continues

For those thousands of concerned blog viewers that have been on chicken watch anxiously awaiting the arrival of our Buff Orpington chicks we have a definitive resolution to incubation stress, although the outcome may be difficult to accept. If you have young children reading along you may want to put them to bed or divert their attention. After much calculation, planning, engineering, design, construction and late night egg rolling we have determined that a critical thermostat malfunction on the level of NASA's bad space shuttle o-rings has caused the first batch of forty-eight eggs to over-heat and suffer a critical failure. While a good hatch rate is normally 95% and we would have been satisfied with an 80% hatch, our zero hatch was a difficult loss to overcome. Upon inspection of our digital thermometer's maximum and minimum readings we realized that our low was too low and our high was conducive to omelets, not live chickens. I never thought it could happen to us. It's always on someone else's farm. I wasn't sure if we would recover from such emotional devastation.

We mourned our loss for the customary forty-five minute time period and continued on to plan B. (It's actually probably plan W or X, but we can't even remember where the chicken chase started.) Back to our favorite farm tool, the Internet, we went. We were very happy to find a local monthly poultry auction not too far from home that was coming up Saturday morning. So the calendar was duly marked and we again were chicken hopefuls.

In the mean time we were graced with a wonderful visit from the Simmerer clan of Westlake, Ohio. The Simmerers are a stout bunch not unfamiliar to the ways of the road warrior and an eight-hour drive is like a walk in the park for them. They made the over the mountain southern trek and arrived at the farm at 4:30 a.m. on Friday morning. Rick, Ruth, RJ and Rachel. Their camper blended well with the 53-foot semi trailer in the front yard and the neighbors didn't even notice all the goings on. Late Friday it was agreed that the men would go to the chicken auction while the girls toured the greater Mount Ulla area and visited Kaitlin in Huntersville.

Saturday came early, but the men were committed to filling the chicken coop, so off they drove deep into farm country. (Even deeper I mean.) The auction was all that was expected and a crate full of Barred Rock hens was identified and marked for attention at the appropriate time during the bidding. After a two-hour wait as the auctioneer peddled trailers full of land fill quality merchandise and miscellaneous live stock and related items the chickens finally began to come to the podium.

We patiently waited as box after box of some seriously distasteful looking poultry went by, but our target purchase had not come up yet. With only ten or so items left Ed got impatient and got up to look for the soon-to-be-his Barred Rock hens only to realize that he had been back-doored by some underhanded auction scalawag and the chickens of his dreams had disappeared. Obviously some high level corporate dealings had gone on outside the accepted auction channels and the opportunity was lost forever. Within seconds the auction was over and Ed, Rick and RJ were left to review their purchases, still reeling from the dirty chicken dealings. The day was not a complete loss though because Ed has a serious auction disorder and came home with a couple of rakes for the chicken coop. Oh,.... and two female Nubian milk goats. Meet our newest additions to the farm family, Laverne and Shirley.

These two fine specimens are six months old and are relaxing in the old dog pen behind the house. Goats are very social and fairly intelligent. Our next plan includes attempting to teach the goats to cluck and lay eggs.