My girls call my husband a sissy farmer.  The man has a Bachelor’s Degree in Range and Wildlife Management.  He has a Master’s Degree in Agricultural Education.  And he has a PhD in Practical Arts and Vocational Technical Education focusing on Agricultural Education and Agricultural Mechanics.  He is NOT a sissy farmer!

But, what they fail to recognize is that because of their emotional attachments to all stock we may have on our ranchita, they have coined him with a name that is totally because of THEM!   They name anything and everything that we have – our chickens, our turkeys, even bugs and snakes they may find and catch and try to keep (nope, bugs and snakes belong outside until you live on your own).  I’ve even seen them name a spider that was building a web on our patio – watching her everyday to see how much work she’d done or what flying insects she’d collected for food.  I cringed but kept my thoughts to myself.  I don’t want my insecurities to affect my kids – they deserve to get their own insecurities!

We are on round three of hatching eggs.  Last year, the girls incubated a batch of eggs and we had 17 chicks that lived.  A month later, some critter got into their pen and slaughtered every single one of them – didn’t eat them, though.  Just left dead chicks littering our land.  Carnage.

Then they incubated another batch of eggs later in the year.  From that batch, we have seven hens and one roostser that are free-range chickens – though we put them in the coop at night.

A month ago, one of those hens got broody and decided she was going to sit on her eggs.  We’ve had turkeys and guineas do this before, but never one of our chickens.  My husband said to leave her and see what happens.  We marked all of her original eggs so we’d know which ones she began roosting on, but all of the rest of the hens kept depositing eggs in the same bin in the coop – I know there were over 20 eggs at one point (and the number has grown since then).  There were so many eggs her little body couldn’t cover them!

Last Saturday, we noticed one egg was cracked and hatching.  Unfortunately, during the night, the mama hen killed two babies who hatched.  We think she was trying to help them out of their eggs and accidentally killed them with her beak – at least that’s what we told the kids! 

So, my husband set up “Operation Chickie” once again in one of the bathrooms.  This consists of a large Rubbermaid box with a heat lamp, sawdust shavings in the bottom of the box and a water and feed bowl.  We decided once the kids saw an egg that looked like it was beginning to hatch, they were to bring in into the house and place it in the new chickie box so it could hatch without assistance from mama hen.  All seems to be fine although we had one chick die because it could not hatch itself, we now have 11 lively chicks making a LOT of noise in the bathroom and driving the dogs nuts.  🙂 (the photo shows nine chicks but we had two more hatch since I took the photo):

Looks like we’re in the Sissy Chicken Farmer business again!