Kimberly Returns

For a couple of weeks now we've been wondering if Kimberly, the pretty Buff Orpington hen--and the lone survivor of the clutch of Buff Orpington chicks we acquired last April--had gotten herself et. (That's not a typo. "Et" is a colloquialism down here for eaten.) She had spent many weeks being an attentive mother hen to her brood, some nine chicks she'd hatched out back when we were hatching clutches in the office incubator. Then I noticed her adolescent brood fending for itself, with her nowhere to be seen. After I had been missing her for several days, I mentioned her absence. When the next evening she appeared as the others went to roost, I was relieved but failed to deliver the news indoors--which seemed to have been a good thing as she vanished again the next day.

 Today the mystery of Kimberly's whereabouts was solved when she appeared again in the home pasture, with a new brood of chicks--some eight or nine, I'm not yet sure--in tow. She's very attentive and works hard showing her chicks how to scratch for food. We're glad to have her back, and very glad that she's a productive and responsible bird, a true working member of the farm community.

Some of her first batch of chicks have taken to roosting atop the alpacas' hay feeder--a practice I would like to discourage because I don't like them pooping on the hay cover, or worse--in the hay.