We know that farm life is a snapshot of “real life” right. Real life has it’s moments: difficult, wonderful, sad, funny, everything in between. We see all of this, and more, almost every day. Chickens are the silliest little dinos in the world! We get attached, they entertain us, sometimes they get sick, many times we cannot save them. We’ve had a few difficulties lately with a couple of chickens as well as with our little quail, Little Man Tate.

We’ve had a couple sick chickens. The horrible heat that we’ve have just does some of them in. We have a white leghorn in quarantine for a about a month and a half, she had heat stroke one day and I just picked her up to see if we could keep her going. She was doing ok, but this last week we’ve had incredibly high heat. We’ve had to give her frozen water bottles, sometimes two and three times a day, to make sure she didn’t stroke out. She’s hanging on, but it doesn’t really look good.

We also had an Easter-Egger in quarantine for a while, some stomach issues. We lost her this Monday. We’ve only really been able to bring two back to health after they’ve come down with the weird intestinal issues. These losses are never easy.

One of our saddest losses happened very early this morning. Sweetpea heard the coyotes singing and woke Sue to let her out. Sue went out with her, just to keep an eye on those coyotes. As she walked by Little Man Tate’s brooder, she saw what she thought was a large stick inside. We didn’t give him a stick to climb on. So, she looked more closely… it was a gopher snake. She quickly removed it with the trusty snake stick but, sadly, it was too late for Little Man Tate; he had already been a small meal for Mr. Snake. He had gotten in by using a fresh gopher hole that appeared in the middle of the enclosure. Tate had to have been asleep, because there would have been no other way for the snake to catch him.

This is a Gambel’s Quail, just like Little Man Tate.

By SearchNet Media from Tucson, Arizona, USA – Gambel’s Quail ChicksUploaded by Snowmanradio, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10238518

Unfortunately, this is all life on the farm. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s not that great. I let our friend, George, know what happened. I thought he’d be rather upset, but he just thanked us for trying and said that he probably had a much longer life than he would have left all to his own as a bitty chick. Well – that was nice. We still feel rather bad, though it has shown us that more steps may be taken to secure the brooder before we us it for actually brooding chicks.

That’s it for now, I suppose. I’ll see where else we get to later.
Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading.