The call comes promptly at 7am.

A sleepy sort of shaky-excited voice says, “I’m calling because your chicks are here!” Twenty-nine new chicks arrived at our post office this morning.  P went to get them while I set up the bin and heat lamp on the porch that will be their home for a week or so until they can transition to an outdoor coop.

These will be next years’ layers.  We tried to restock earlier this summer, and raised 40-some lovely egglayers and meat birds to strong fully-fledged teenagers, only to lose all of them to a huge raccoon attack.  That was two months ago, and it’s still hard to talk about it.  Few can really understand how farmers feel about marauding predators until they see for themselves what animals will do to each other.  Most of us carry a fantasy ideal that predators will only kill what they need to survive.  In my experience, raccoons will usually eat portions of one or two birds, and simply bite the rest of them in the head and neck and leave them lying there, going from one to the next until they kill all they can, or are interrupted.

So that unhappy history is the background to these new chicks.  Our flocks are also aging now, we have fewer eggs coming in, and we’ve lost some adults this summer to either a hawk, a coyote, or a fox, as far as we can tell.  No sightings, just a random chicken vanishing into the thicket here and there.  We also have 9 2-week old chicks hatched out under 2 setty hens, and another hen setting eggs due to hatch in a week and a half or so.  But we can expect half of those to be roosters.  Next week, meat chicks arrive.  Today’s new little ones are pullets - a mix of Aracaunas, Buff Orpingtons, and Black Australorps.  They should be very nice, and we’re excited to start over…again.