Plus 14

For my birthday in May, I paid an astrologer to give me a reading for the year. She asked if I could have children. I said I could not, that I was too old for that. She looked puzzled, so I asked with some worry if she meant grandchildren. Thankfully, she said no but kept her puzzled look. “Well,” she said, “I just see a lot of fertility around you for this summer.”

I just figured she was wrong. I love astrology but remain skeptical because it is my nature. I want to believe, but I have to question a lot. That just kind of summarizes who I am in so many ways.

Two days later, Maggie, our sweet turkey, hatched three eggs. It was on Mother’s Day. Maggie looked confused and kind of scared and was truly looking to me for help. The turkeys deeply understand we are the helpers. It’s very cool. In the moment I realized Maggie needed my help, my mind went to the astrologer. Truly, I had this deep feeling in my bones that raising baby turkeys was going to be more work than I thought it would, even though we had a mama.

Even the worried feeling I had could not do it justice. I had no idea what I was in for.

Friends, it was the summer of fertility, and I am exhausted.

It all started with Maggie. She looked really worried right away, but when she lost a baby in the woodpile the first night (we looked and looked but couldn’t find it), I knew that baby turkeys were not nearly as self sufficient as baby chicks and that Maggie, as a first-time mom, was going to need a grandma to help her. So I did my job. I was grandma to her babies. They knew they could come to me for help when they couldn’t find their mama, and it was pretty cool–but pretty tiring.

Our next hatch of baby turkeys hatched to chicken mamas, and they were more aggressive as mothers than Maggie but still couldn’t quite keep those baby turkeys in line. Until I finally found the hole in the fence (it was so tiny), I was running outside every hour or so and catching baby turkeys and putting them back into the fenced area with their mama. It took me well over a week to find the hole. That was a lot of running after tiny turkeys. When I finally found the hole, I literally jumped up and down and cheered. For a tiny bit, I got some of my life back.

But then our turkey, Athena, hatched some eggs. And then, like a person who is glutton for punishment, I ordered four baby runner ducks in the mail. We lost so many of our ducks this summer due to old age that I couldn’t imagine my life without ducks. One of those ducks is a beautiful little terror, which I will tell you about more later, but you get the idea that I have been very busy raising babies. Some of them difficult.

A couple of days after the last batch of turkey eggs hatched, I noticed one of the babies was falling over a lot. It could see it wasn’t going to make it. So I scooped it up and intervened. I learned it had “flop over syndrome.” The only research I could find on this condition was related to the poultry industry. I read that it is quite common in baby turkeys and that it is neurological, but I couldn’t find any good information about whether or not it was treatable.

I kept searching and found that someone had mentioned it in a farming forum, and she wrote about what worked for her. She said, if you can just hand raise them for a little over a week, making sure they are constantly cared for, they just outgrow it and can live a long and normal life. I was getting pretty tired at this point, but what are you going to do? You are going to hand raise a baby turkey.

For eight days, I raised a tyrant of a little male turkey. He went everywhere with me, and everyone thought he was the cutest thing they had ever seen. And he was.

I would carry him around in my bra during the day and slept with him in a shoe box with a hot water bottle in it beside my nightstand at night. I hoped it was a girl because I fell so in love, but my little turkey was a boy, which I learned for sure on the last day he was with me. He started strutting. There is nothing cuter than a tiny tom turkey doing his strut. Truly, though I loved him, I was so thankful when he went back to his mama. He thrived, and just last week, he was chosen by a woman who loves turkeys and wanted her own flock as the one boy to go with the four girls she bought from us.

But even that wasn’t all.

After spending my whole summer herding and helping baby turkeys, about July, I realized we really needed a few baby chickens to add to our flock. We have some very old hens. About half are older than five, and a handful of them turned eight this summer. Some of them are still laying, but the eggs are inconsistent in shape, size, and viscosity. Ron makes breakfasts, so he spent much of his summer complaining about eggs from old hens.

One of our Cuckoo Maran chickens, Belle, went broody under the back shed. When I found her, she had laid and was sitting on nine eggs. So I drug her out and put her into a large dog crate and clean straw and fresh food and water. But she didn’t like that. She wanted to take her chances in the dirt and with the rats under the back shed. She didn’t stay broody, so after a few days, I gave up, set her free, and put her eggs in the incubator. Six beautiful little babies hatched.

Our notorious Kate was broody at the time, so I decided to try to sneak the babies under her the night after they were born. She was having none of it and abused them, so I rescued them from Kate, gave her some eggs from the flock to sit on, and raised Belle’s babies myself–first in the house and then they went to a crate outside. While I was raising these babies, Kate was cooking up some babies, and I thought this should give us pretty good numbers. I wanted to add about six to eight hens to the flock. We have no room in the coop for more than that.

In the meantime, our other Cuckoo Maran hen, Genevieve, went broody under the back shed, just like her sister. At this point, we did not need any more babies, so I did everything I could to stop her. I knew she had to be under the shed, so I cleaned out all around the shed and spent a solid week crawling around, both at night with a flash light and during the day, trying to find that hen. I never found her.

When I stopped seeing her show up in the mornings for breakfast, I knew she was either dead or going to show up with like ten babies. I crawled under the shed with a flashlight one more time, but when a rat ran right in front of my face, I was done. We had lost one of my favorite hens, Tuesday, when she went broody under the shed and something got her, but I decided that wherever Genevieve was hiding was too clever for me. She would have to take her chances.

About a month ago, Ron was out working in the garden when he said he heard classic mama hen talk and then cheeping. He went around to the back of the shed, and Geneieve appeared and then babies just kept coming and coming. That hen had fourteen babies in total! Two of them were in bad shape, probably from being born in the dirt under the shed with rats, and even though we certainly didn’t need these two extra babies, I scooped them up and brought them in to give them a chance.

The first day, I held them all day long, together, in my hands. One did not fluff out, so I found a soft toothbrush and brushed its feathers. It was a mess of sticky mud, but the brushing helped. The other one was fluffed out but had an eye injury. Ron thought it might have lost its eye, but I was hopeful there was an eye beneath all that swelling.

When I had to work or eat, I made someone else sit and hold them. I thought these babies might have a chance together, and on the second day, they were able to walk a bit more on their own and spend time under the brood plate together. It was while these two were still in the house getting ready to go back to mama, which they did, by the way and are thriving, that a life-changing accident happened.

Exactly one month ago today, I woke up exhausted–exhausted from a summer of hard work and babies. I remember getting a text message right as I woke up a little after 6:00 AM that my credit card had been hacked. On that note, I went downstairs to pick up the rat traps I had set out the night before. It is terrifying for me to hunt rats at night with traps while we have baby chickens and chipmunks running around during the day. I try to always get up so early when I have set traps and put the traps away before the chickens are let out and the chipmunks start making their rounds at the chicken feed bowls I set out for breakfast.

But, on this morning, I was tired and foggy. Kate was being Kate, which is also always very difficult. She was jumping up against her crate and screaming to be let out. I had three traps. One was flipped but had no rat. I went to find the other two and put my boot in them to release them. I didn’t check the first trap because it was flipped. If they are flipped, they are always released.

I opened Kate’s crate and went to pick up the traps. And then, behind my back, I heard a snap and a scream. The flipped trap had not released. For some seconds, my brain couldn’t even process what had happened, but there she was, a little black baby chick, just a few weeks old, with a broken leg in a rat trap. She was hysterical. Kate was hysterical.

As I freed the baby chick from the trap, Kate attacked my hands and my face. The baby flew into the flowers, and as I was trying to find her, Kate remained fully hysterical. Her other babies were also hysterical. The little white chick got stuck in the fence, and the chaos was overwhelming. Hysterical myself at this point, I ran to the house and asked Ron for help. He came and looked heartbroken for me as I explained my situation.

He held Kate back while I found the baby chick and scooped her up. Poor Kate was so sad when I took off to the house with her baby. In the house, I could see the baby’s leg was just dangling. It was broken fairly high on the leg, which I know is worse than a lower break. I have zero training in veterinary care. I am just self trained and internet trained. I held the baby and read and read about what to do.

I could feel the bones moving around. I was terrified of all of this. I sprayed the wound with antibiotic spray and then got the vet wrap, set the bones as best I could, and then made her a cast. I read that she had a good chance of dying from the infection and such a bad break but that youth was on her side. I used tiny drops of oregano oil in her water for infection and CBD oil drops for her pain.

For two days, I could barely function from my heartbreak that my mistake had caused this. The first night though I had a dream that I was seeing her healed and that she held up her leg for me to see and was so proud. She lived the first night and then the second night. I told Ron about my dream, and he said he thought she was going to make it.

Friends, I am sitting here writing this blog post with a little black chicken sitting on the pillow next to me. Her leg has mostly healed, and I will have to write about the whole process at some point for educational purposes. For now, I’ll end this long story of my summer of babies by telling you this: This baby living in our house now and running my life is Cora’s baby. Cora is Poe’s grandbaby.

This little black chicken sitting next to me is from Poe.

And, outside right now, Ron is bringing Genevieve and her fourteen babies some of his homemade biscuits. Genevieve has figured out that Ron will drop what he is doing and bring her whatever she wants. Ron feels badly for her because it looks like the majority of her babies are boys, and they are rowdy. So, at any given moment, when you step outside the front door, you will have a mama hen begging you for a biscuit while her wild babies have mini battles in the background. Of course, as soon as Genevieve tidbits to alert them to the biscuits, the brawling stops, and fourteen tiny chickens fly in.

I have no idea what we are going to do with those fourteen babies.