Dumb Birds

Yes that is a chicken, and yes it is roosting on the computer monitor. But how in the world did it get there? This story goes back about about two months, when mom had a moment of weakness and decided to bring home two chicks from Murdock's. With chicks, we always set them up in the house with a heat lamp so they can feather in before we bring them to the coop.

A few weeks later, when they were still small, but feathered in enough, we graduated them to the big chicken home. I don't remember what mom and I were doing, but for some reason we weren't home and Luke was going to watch them. The most pitiful sight awaited us when we walked in the door, there was my brother Luke, sitting on the couch, tearing up, with a bloody head featherless chick shivering on his lap. Apparently the rooster had attacked it and Luke rescued it to the house again. A few days later the rooster attacked one of out hens and she had a huge gushing crater of blood on her back. Unfortunately for us, that meant turning our den into a place for chickens to re-cooperate (pun intended).

Right now you might be going "oh, poor chickens!", or "how wonderful that your mom saved them". Well, haha, not! I'm not trying to be a horrid human being with no pity for the harmed beasts, but these birds have made the last few weeks a living nightmare at times. At first it was ok having them in the house. The birds slowly started to recover and I could deal with my room smelling dimly like a chicken coop when I woke up in the morning, but that's when mom started having a emotional attachment. Every day Mom would take the three reject birds out to the garden and then if it rained or when it got late, brought them back in. It got to the point where once mom even said "Hi Meg, I just got back from taking the babies on a walk. Before that we played in the garden together, now I'm bringing them in the house because it was getting chilly out".

Do you see what I mean! They had infiltrated my mothers heart and once she even called them her loves! The straw that broke this camels back was when she started using the same names for the chicks as she did for me! She would be talking and I'd be like "yes mom?", and I'd walk into her talking to the dumb birds. This was about the time that the word "chicken" changed to "dumb bird" for me. It stuck too.

There is so much more to this story that I'm not even going to delve into like: what was happening in the chicken coop, the rooster escaping and then coming back, trying to free range the chickens, buying a pecking block, finally getting rid of the rooster, dad and I going crazy, loosing chickens in the house, stepping in unpleasant stuff, the den always smelling horrid, Cleo chasing the dumb birds, never being able to watch anything with mom in the den without her codling the creatures, them flying around the room, making chick food in the food processor (the worst sound you will ever hear), having them try to attack me, and so much more.

So that brings us to the first picture. I walked into the den to use the computer and I was so startled by that sight my heart was pounding for minutes afterwords. I had no clue what it was at first, and no one really truly expects to see a chicken on the computer.

Last Saturday morning was a great day for various reasons, but one of them was because it was the day we brought the birds out. We finally put the hen with the other chickens, and the two chicks in the garage. But you know what? I don't care that they are still not in the coop, because they are out of the house! No longer does this side of the house smell, no longer do I find a bird under the piano, no longer do I have to share mom with three dumb birds. Life is great, and I can sit here, in the den blogging without hearing the birds scratch, peck and fly at the sides of their boxes. Like I just said life is great:)