Hope is the Thing With Feathers

After my stint last week as Debbie Downer, I must say the weather for the last six days has made me thoroughly eat my words. I woke up tuesday to find a clear, warm sky above, and day by day since, the temperatures have crept up into the high sixties and, scarcely believable though it is, the low seventies. Yesterday was without doubt the finest day of this young year so far, and though rain and cloud-cover stand on the horizon, this week has been enough of a shot in the arm to see me through.

Oddly, one of the clearest signs of spring, symbolic of the coming seasons of plenty, have been an abundance of birds, of all sorts. Birds, for me, have always been something of an afterthought: the charisma and kinship of mammals have always drawn more of my attention. Yet increasingly, birds have turned from being the mere background noise of the animal world into the miraculous things they are. When was the lost time you stopped and thought about what it actually means to fly? Yeah, me neither.

If I'm speaking of birds, first perhaps I should talk about the chickens, who are doing quite well.

They are now just three weeks old, but already are growing at a rate that is hard to believe, doubling in size at least. I've given them the entire stall as their brooder room, and they've made good use of the space, trying out their fledgling wings in hopping, awkward flight. The birds have begun to molt, and like teenagers, they look rangy and thin, with long necks and oversize feet. Also like teenagers, they eat quantities of food that would put the pigs to shame. They chirp and preen and make short little bursts of running that always seem to take them right into one of their brooder-mates, bouncing off each other like little feathered projectiles. They pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and go right back to eating.

Outside the barn, the chickens' wild relatives have also turned up in greater numbers. The bluebirds seemed to be the first, darting about the pasture weeks ago. Starlings, obnoxious though they may be, were next, and then the chickadees, who have been here all along, made their presence known with constant calling in the trees by the house. A redwing blackbird came soaring over-head today, mourning doves fly to the newly filled bird-feeder in pairs, and robins have begun to skip about the yard in droves.

Other birds, less obvious, make their presence known as well, for good or bad. A cock pheasant, solitary holdover of the hunting season, managed to dodge a winter's worth of coyotes and hawks, and he came strutting down by the bridge and along the creek yesterday in all his iridescent finery as if the farm belonged to him. A duck was not so lucky. I found its remains in the high field yesterday morning while walking the dog, and though it was newly killed, there was little left to judge just what the bird had been. White feathers with large, hollow quills, a deep breastbone; one of the domestic ducks from a local farm must have been carried off in the night. Even more mysterious, I found an owl pellet today, an even slighter clue. What species the owl was, I've no idea. I've never heard one here and certainly never seen one, but there was the evidence none the less, filled with the tiny bones of the mice and voles who new the owl in a more intimate, more terrible way.

Other birds have spring in their veins as well. At least one woodcock has begun to nest in the scrub thicket in the center of the main field, getting up with a twitter and circling around every time the dog and I approach. Killdeer wheel and call back and forth together all day. At first there were three of them, but now only two seem to be around, a male and female, ready to nest when the grass gets taller.

Most amazingly, I happened to catch the red tails mating the other day. I was walking from my car to the barn and nearly missed it; one hawk alighted in a hickory tree beside the stream, nothing special here where the hawks make their home. But as I watched, the second hawk, the male, ghosted down to land with the first hawk, and in a rustle of feathers that was brief and without ceremony, they coupled, and then flew off to separate trees. Hmmm. Maybe they're on the something...

Everywhere, the farm is coming alive again. Green is slowly seeping back into the fields, almost unnoticeably, and the snow is gone from even the deepest gullies. The bees are coming and going from their hive once more, and along the roadsides daffodils are sprouting from the earth. And the birds, over-head and all around, are taking this opportunity to flaunt their disregard for the dull pull of the earth. The hunters, the lovers, the prey, and the survivors; they all take wing together under the same spring sun.

The Season of Our Discontent

This morning, around eleven, a fox ran through the yard. I was walking to my car through the drizzling rain, and the fox darted up from below the barn. It hugged the barn wall, and shot over the road, while I stood watching. Across the road, the fox stopped, turning in the neighbors yard to look back at me. We locked eyes for a moment, but the wind was biting and the rain was cold. We both were quickly on our way.

The last few days have been those of quiet misery here on the farm. It isn't misery of any extravagant sort, just the spoiling misery of early spring discontentment. After a week of unseasonable warmth, the weather shifted last friday, and the oppression of gray and rainy days settled in.

These last weeks, leading up to the returning green, are proving to be the hardest, like the last few yards of a race (or so I would imagine). The barn yard has been tromped into a muddy ruin by the animals, after having at least been dry and walkable last week. Worse still is the pig run; the pigs, bigger now by far than when they first moved into the space, have been in their pen too long. They've torn the ground apart with their rooting, till the whole run looks like a World War I battlefield. They need to be moved to new pasture as soon as possible, but until the ground totally thaws and we stop getting nightly freezes, they're left to trash their current home.

Yet worst of all are the constant hints of spring. The clocks jumped ahead this weekend, but the extra hour of thin gray sunlight is barely distinguishable from all the other hours of thin gray sunlight. Bluebirds are back already, and a pair of plovers have moved into the pasture behind the barn, calling to each other with tinny hawkish cries. Even the chicks, after their rough first week, have grown swiftly and begun to fledge out. Soon, they too will need to move into new quarters.

Mostly, it was the nearly solid week of temperatures in the high fifties that has made this new weather so unpleasant. In that week, I walked the dog daily out in the fields, planning and measuring and thinking about what comes next. I got out and began to shift stones for the walls and even cut back the brush, and there was even sun to do it under. Now, the dog and I are stuck inside, driving each other crazy. We both look up every once in a while, out the window where the rain still falls. And we wait, and wait, and wait...

Learning Curve

Nine PM, saturday night, I received a call from the Waterbury Post Office: there was a box of chicks there with my name on it. The birds weren't supposed to arrive until tuesday morning, but that point was moot. They were here, whether I was ready or not. I was not.

That first night, with the heat lamps and pen in the barn yet unassembled, the chicks came into the house with me. I settled on two plastic clothes hampers for temporary quarters, under a reading lamp appropriated for what heat it could give. I cranked the thermometer up to around 75, unbearable for me, but not even warm enough for the infant birds. It was past ten by the time I was ready to open the chirping box and see the fluffy cargo.

Inside, crowded together, were 101 day old chicks of various colors, representing perhaps half a dozen brown-egg laying breeds. There were Rhode Island Reds, Black Australorps, and breeds I won't be able to identify till they're older. All were equally cute.

It's almost impossible to avoid hyperbole when describing the cuteness of a baby chick. They are built as if with the specific intent to tug on the heart strings, so small, so innocent, so...cute. Few other words fit so perfectly. They trundle around, peeping, taking tentative steps, preening their downy fuzz. As I gently transfered the chicks from the cardboard box to the hampers, it was as if I was dipping my hands into huddled life itself, coming up with soft handfuls of sweetness and light. It was tough to not melt right away.

I'll interject to say the birds, despite being shipped across country from Iowa in a cardboard box, in late February, arrived in good health. I'll give due credit to the McMurray Hatchery for fine chicks (though I'd no basis for comparison) and an expertise that brought the birds swiftly and safely to me. I'll use them again.

After a night of constant chirping that no doubt drove Blitz crazy, I woke early to set up a more permenant home for the chicks in a barn stall that I'd begun to turn into a brooder room. I'd read extensively about just how to keep the newborns, about the temperature needed, about food, water, space, and about just how fragile the little chickens were, vulnerable to drafts and dampness of any sort. I'd read that keeping them close was fine for the first few days, better than having them spread out over a larger area, and so I hung the heat lamps over a large rubber trough, which I'd bottomed with layers of hay and pine shavings. I filled a tray with feed, and placed the waterer in the center, and after a few hours of leaving the heat lamps on, I used a thermometer to make sure the temperature was right for the birds. I moved the birds first back into their traveling box, then down into the barn, and slowly placed them into their new home, taking time to dip their beaks into the food and water, so they knew where it was. They were a little crowded when they all were unloaded, but they seemed warm, and were finding their food fine. They seemed perfectly ok, and I checked in on them constantly through the day and into the evening.

This should be a fluff piece about getting chicks for the farm, about how cute they are, about how having birds is great. But this post isn't about that. It's about how the next morning, I came out to the barn and found 18 of the chicks dead, crowded into their waterer, and once wet, unable to make it through the night. 18 was a lot, and as I slowly gathered them from out of the water trough, one by one, the count seemed to never end. Wet, limp, they seemed even more frail, even more slight than they did when they were fluffy and alive. Two other chicks seemed destined to die, weak, damp, listless. I left them in with their sisters, and hoped for the best.

The chicks died because I didn't know what I was doing. The space I'd provided the chicks was not enough for them, and now, in hindsight, that's very clear. In the grand scheme of things, 18 dead chicks out of 101 might not be so uncommon, and in comparison to the thousands of chicks and chickens that die or are killed every day, my tragedy was trivial. But it stung. I had been entrusted with this chirping mass of innocence and naivete, and within 48 hours I'd let the birds down. It was a taste of something that I'll have to get used to as a farmer. It's a feeling I'll no doubt have when I kill a pig or send a steer to slaughter. But this was different; this was a mistake.

When you're dealing with living things, when you take that resposibility upon yourself to raise them, when you only have secondhand experience at best, the learning curve can be very sharp. Those 18 dead chicks are a taste of failure, a taste of what I'll have to face up to again, if I really expect to do what I'm doing. It hurt, more than you'd think given the tiny stature of the victims, but there was little to do. I tried to focus on fixing things, pushing forward.

I built a new space for the chicks, a frame made of tall plywood, with ample room for movement. I bought a third heat lamp, paranoid about keeping the chicks warm in what's turning out to be a bitter early March. By early afternoon Monday, the chicks were in yet another new home, and this one finally seemed a proper fit. One night passed, with no deaths, and the two chicks who seemed on death's door began to perk up, though even now one seems to be less fit than its fellows. Relief began to fill me, and I began to feel good. The next morning, though, one chick was dead. One chick, I told myself was not bad, comparatively. It really wasn't. I don't know why that chick died, it could have been anything, since the body was dry, and the crop was full of feed. Though I was responsible in the bigger picture, it wasn't my fault. In the days since, I haven't lost a bird, but I know I could at any moment. It's something I'll need to get used to, this occasional loss, this sense of having let down something blameless.

There's a learning curve there, a sharp one, and one I'm just now skidding into. I keep my hands on the wheel, and my fingers crossed.