Tiny Grass

So the afternoon when our ducklings arrived, we absolutely had to figure out what to do with those chickens! I started by furiously making phone calls and e-mails to anyone I knew that might know someone who could take a chicken off my hands. Frankly, that didn’t get very far. One person told me via my sister that she might take two or three, but that just wasn’t going to cut it when we had something like 15 or so chicks. But then I had an idea - freecycle! So I made an offer on our local freecycle group immediately.

I got several e-mails within just a few hours. A few of them sounded like they were idiots who had the sudden idea to get their kids an Easter chick with very little thought put into the care and housing for them. A few others posted that they were teachers wanted chicks for the classroom. Again, I ignored those posts because I really couldn’t be sure that the critters would be well-cared for. Another person chastised me for offering chicks on freecycle because she felt I would unwittingly give the animals to a cock-fighting ring. In fact, that person thought I should just bring them to a local shelter! What insanity! I eventually found a good person to bring the chicks to - a woman with a small homestead in a nearby town. To make sure that the chicks would be going to a good home, I decided we should bring the chicks there ourselves the next day. Also, my ulterior motive was that I was hoping to see more of this woman’s homestead and hear more about her goats. I also figured M & J would get a kick out of seeing them.

The next day we headed out to the homestead to drop off the chicks. The woman told us on the phone that she would even show M how to feed a baby goat with a bottle! As I gathered up the chicks and put them back in their shipping box, I counted that there were 19 of them. Wow! That’s a lot of chicks. When we got to the farm, we saw quite a few wonderful things - cute goats and kids (that’s what you call a baby goat, right?), one lone duck (looked somewhat like a large Khaki Campbell to my inexperienced eye), lots of chickens, and plenty of buckets collecting sugar maple sap. We all got to hang out with the baby goats and see one of them feed from a bottle (its mom was a new mother and was a little resistant to nursing), M got to collect eggs from the chickens’ nesting boxes, and we got to pet the head of the herd-protecting donkey. The trip was a success - Arp and I got to drool over the dream of a homestead, and the chicks found a new home. And yes, they very well may be eaten very soon, but that doesn’t bother me. There was a day when it might have, but I’ve grown up a lot from that teenager who discovered vegetarianism. They are well-cared for now, and that is the important thing.

Back at home, we were happy to see our ducklings grouped together and beginning to show their herding instinct. When they were stuck with all those chickens, we could barely distinguish their individual personalities. But once they were alone we could get to know them, and they got to know each other. It was nice seeing them sleeping all in a group and just generally acting like a group of ducks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 10:38 am and is filed under raising ducks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.