Picky, picky....

So there I was late this morning, wearing rubber boots and standing at the edge of the front pasture. I had a scissors in my right hand, a bucket in my left hand, and I was about to cut some of the tall green grass which, if left alone, would grow still taller and eventually turn into dried brown hay. You've heard of "amber waves of grain?" That's what our pastures look like now: green grass stalks growing towards the sky with amber-brown tops that dance in the breeze. Breath-taking, to say the least.

But there I was this morning, cutting enough of those amber waves to fill up the bucket. I was doing that because my red hen, Dolly, had been clucking and cooing and oohing her way around the chicken coop, flying up into the nesting boxes, inspecting each one of them, and deciding that the hay and grass in the boxes had been in there a bit too long for her liking. So into the shrubs she went, on the side of the garage again, to lay her egg. All the while she was hiding back there, I could hear her oohing and cooing, and if she could have said tsk, tsk, she would have added that in as well.

I filled up the bucket with the cut grass-- I had asked my husband to buy a small bale of hay at the feed store, but then we changed our mind. How can we justify paying for hay when we've got 23 acres filled with it. (Or 20 acres, at least, if you subtract the mowed lawns around the house and the cottage.) By the time Miss Dolly had left her egg behind the shrubs, I had cleaned out the old hay from the nesting boxes and added the fresh-cut green grass. In a few days time, it will have dried into light brown hay, and I hope my pickiest of chickens will approve.

I cannot get over how each of my three hens have lived up to their names. Dolly being the picky one, whose nest has to be just so before she gets into it. And Jaye, who preens her feathers in the morning and in the late afternoon and would probably love to have a mirror in the coop. Jaye is getting big enough now to start laying eggs, and she has poked her little head into one of the nesting boxes already, as if to see if the accommodations suit her. Or maybe she's looking in there and thinking You want me to lay an egg? And ruin these perfectly coiffed feathers? And poor Edie..... who had to be first on line at that fountain, and one mis-step there sent her into the well and she couldn't fly out. Just like my Aunt Edie, that chicken always had to be first on line. Lesson learned here-- being first isn't always a good thing.

We are thinking of ways to chicken-proof that fountain. I would hate to find another bird floating on top of that water. My idea is to fill the well with cinder blocks or large rocks, and have them come to just below the surface of the water. This way, if one of the chickens do fall in again, she'll land on the rocks and just two inches-worth of her legs will be in the water. Or we could put some sort of netting all around the water well of the fountain, to prevent the chickens from falling into the water at all. My husband doesn't want the fountain to look "schlocky" he said. Well, drowned chickens floating in the fountain is about as schlocky as it can get, so we've got to do something.


Early this morning, there was a beautiful deer in the far pasture.... a buck, with a decent-sized rack of horns. One of our neighbors let me know... he happened to be driving down the road and saw the buck and thought we'd like to see him. I wish I had been able to get a closer look-- the binoculars would have helped but I didn't think to get them before going out to see. The neighbor said there was a doe and two babies out there earlier this morning, and he said they've been there many times before.

Well, we're certainly up early enough to see them, but I just don't think to look at that side of the property in the morning-- that's when I'm feeding the cats and cleaning litter boxes, and changing the paper in the chicken coop. (The hens are enjoying Christmas wrapping paper now-- thinner than the wallpaper, but it works just as well as long as I don't use it on breezy days. I'm saving the wallpaper for the days when the breeze kicks up.)

I will have to remember to look for the deer when I'm out there in the mornings now. There is certainly enough tall grass for them to munch on.... and when the buck was finished with his breakfast this morning, he just jumped right over the fence, crossed the road, jumped over the fence on the other side and walked into the woods. I also had a lesson on deer-jargon this morning........ the doe is the female (which I knew), the buck is the male (which I didn't know), only the bucks have horns (I knew that), and the babies are fawns and not all are named Bambi (I sort of figured that).

One thing is certain-- I'm glad that none of our neighbors were driving down the hill this morning while I was out in the pasture filling up the bucket with scissors-cut grass for the nesting boxes. Had one of them stopped to ask what I was doing, I was going to tell them that I was cutting down the hay fields, one bucketful at a time.