Day 25 of 365
I will have to be very brief tonight. In about half an hour, I have to go try to sneak the baby chicks under our mama hen, Kate. I am nervous about this. It almost always works, but, out of the about 20 times I have done this, one time, the hen rejected the baby. It was devastating. But I know how to do everything right, and I am going to try really hard to do it stealthily. Ron helps me, so we are a pretty good team at replacing eggs with babies under sleepy broody hens. It should go well.
Still, you always worry a bit, right?
But I just had to write quickly to say how magnificent 9:00 PM in June in the woods in the state of Maine truly is. I grew up in the south, and one of the things I love most about the “up north” is how light it is in the evenings, just before the Solstice. The light lingers so late. It’s beautiful.
I was just playing the duck game with the ducks, and after I had them all tucked in, I turned my eyes toward the tree line and just had to stop and take it in. The light fading in the pine trees in the woods behind our home was breathtaking to me. I have lived in different parts of this country and found beauty in those places too, but there’s something special about Maine to me. It has my heart.
This picture is not one I took, but I searched Creative Commons photographs quite a bit to find a beautiful picture that kind of captured what I saw. This is pretty much it. So magnificent, right? I just wanted to share it with you.
The photo credit for this beautiful photograph goes to m wrona at Unsplash. You have to take a peek at their other photographs if you have a moment. These photographs are so fantastic that they inspire me to write.
And wish me luck with Kate. I’m going to be holding my breath, hoping for the mama hen purr.
Farmer-ish 
So why do you remove eggs from a broody hen and replace them with live chicks that you buy?
Sorry to be behind but I’m not understanding this.🤷
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This is a great question. For us, we have two reasons. First, our rooster is so old that he’s just not doing the job very well overall. Second, we wanted to bring in a different line for the genetics. It’s good to mix things up a bit when you are breeding chickens for the gene-pool diversity. Some people will do this when they have a broody hen but no rooster at all to fertilize the eggs. In our case, our fantastic boy is just getting up there in years. But I love him to the moon and back, so he stays, of course.
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