Things Are Looking Up

It’s 63º. Almost all of the snow has melted. The air feels balmy to us and Dennis is sitting on the deck with a lapful of paperwork and a bottle of beer.

In the cold frame spinach and lettuce are going to town, but the arugula is putting up seed stalks. There’s a good reason it’s also called “rocket.”

Leaves on the 18-month-old sweet potato I discovered sprouting in the basement last week are growing and turning from maroon to green. Meanwhile the garnet yam is showing a few sprouts but the Japanese yam has only one tiny root.

Best of all is the Lucy news. Yesterday morning Dennis came in from the chicken house to announce that Lucy had died overnight, but when he went back to dispose of her body, she jumped up and ran out into the yard. 

I have been watching Lucy closely from the kitchen window. She has spent all her days since the attack 13 days ago standing in one or the other of the far corners of the chicken yard. She even trudged through deep snow to reach a refuge. She didn’t seem to be eating and we were sure she would starve to death. Then, when Dennis took a bowl of vegetable scraps to the hens, Lucy came running but didn’t get any of the scraps because she was afraid to approach the other hens, who were gobbling up the scraps. 

Chickens are very mean-spirited birds toward one another. That’s what the term “pecking order” is all about. They seem to have no tolerance for disability and will drive off a wounded or sick member of their flock. Once, back when we still kept a rooster, a hen sat on a clutch of eggs. When the eggs hatched one of the chicks was slightly deformed. The mother hen shoved it out of the nest! I put it back and she shoved it out again. She had no intention of raising a deformed chick. So, none of the hens has cared a hoot whether Lucy lived or died and they didn’t want to associate with her.

Realizing that the other hens were keeping Lucy away from food, I crumbled a leftover biscuit in one of her safety corners (chickens love any kind of bread) and some “scratch” in her other safety corner. She ate and she revived. By evening of the day we thought she had died, she was, as Dennis said, “almost a new person.” Today Lucy has been out and about, eating, but avoiding her flockmates. She, of course, is the one on the far left.

Yep, now that we’ve made it through the winter, things are looking up.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer