Chicks!

I haven’t written about the henhouse lately, and I’m sure many of you are hungry for a fowl update. (“Many” may be a stretch, but my niece did mention that I hadn’t blogged any chicken news for a while.)

David decided we needed some guineas. They are unique looking birds that are reported to be good protection because they make noise when possible intruders are around. Besides that, he likes dark meat, and guineas are supposedly all dark meat.

So he bought ten guinea eggs for a whopping $1.50 and put them under one of our setting hens. Sure enough, a month later, we had little guinea chicks. At first the mother hen would have nothing to do with them, so we gathered them up and put the tiny fluff balls in our well-used “orphan box” under a lamp. I was not happy about this development, because we are headed back to the US for a furlough soon and I really didn’t have time to take care of them and didn’t want to leave them behind for someone else to have to deal with.

David consulted with our next-door neighbor who advised us to put the hen into the box with the chicks for three days and let them bond. Hmmm. Great idea, but we weren’t observant enough to know which of the five red hens in our coop was the mother. And the hen certainly wasn’t rushing over to claim these little aliens. The chicks spent the night in the box.

Monday morning the gardener rescued us. He knew exactly which hen had been sitting on the eggs, and he dropped her into the box with them. For the first few minutes she stayed on her side and the babies watched her from the far corner. Remembering our bad experience with Cruella, I was ready to pounce at the first sign of any murderous intent from the hen, but she seemed content to just sit and cluck. Then David reached in to put a container of water in the box, and Mother Hen flew into action. She swooped those babies under her wings and sat on them, her beady eyes just daring David to try to touch those chicks!

From then on, Mother Hen was a natural. She took over her maternal duties without complaint, and at the end of three days of bonding proudly joined her fowl friends in the coop, guineas in tow. The rest of the chickens don’t seem to care that these babies are a little different in color and run a little faster than their young ones. I love happy endings!