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September 22, 2009 "Adelaide and the Patients"
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    Greetings Friends of the Farm,

    I don’t really think of myself as a nurse. In the spirit of hospice, I’m more like an end of life caretaker, one who helps the patient, the beloved, leave this world in a dignified, peaceful way.

    But there I was Saturday after market, the week-old chick in one hand, spoon full of water in the other. Trying to coax “Adelaide” to drink. It’s a baby, you know, not a being who has lived a full life and is ready to go on to whatever lies ahead.
    On our farm, a chick has a fair chance to live to be ten to fifteen years old. Almost as good as being a parrot. And that’s kind of a problem. At 65 years old, I hesitate to get a cat who may live to be twenty years old. There is the pain of thinking of a pet living past its human friend --  perhaps no one else wants the mourning cat; perhaps she’s a burden; perhaps she has to be “put down” as she is so forlorn....

    Adelaide made her way through the kitchen chicks’ cage’s wire walls and fell three feet to the wooden floor. FoF Jody, who came in from the farm stand to see the babies, came out alarmed that Adelaide was out. We hurried in, and Jody trailed Adelaide to the stove and fetched her.


    But she was not quite right after the fall. She was a bit addled. She’d look at you with one eye, and then turn her head and look at you with the other eye. Then she’d turn her beak upward, like a swan and look at the heavens. Addled for sure. She walked addled, too, stumbling about. (Of course if I was always looking upward, I’d be stumbling, and soon I too would be addled.) But in the afternoon following her rescue, she was near death, so I cupped her in my hand for warmth, and dipped her beak into  the water in the spoon, and she drank, and even ate a few crumbs of grain.

    That afternoon, all the chicks were trundled by Larry and Wayne to the new cage in the barn. Larry built this cage, quadruple the size of the cage below, of closely spaced wire, to withstand any predator  -- no chicks can get through the walls either. It should hold the chicks for a while.


    Adelaide was too weak, even after her treatment, to be in with the rambunctious flock, so Larry suggested a tiny trap cage. You use what you have.

    We placed Adee in the trap cage with feed and water and set it down in the big cage. Adee looked lonely. But then another chick came up lame in the foot, with specks of blood, and became a protein magnet for those chicks who had nothing else to do with their beaks. In she went, after resuscitation by the “nurse,” to stay with Adee. The other 76 chicks were thrilled with the new toy. They scampered all over it.

    Big mistake. We went out to eat Saturday afternoon, and when we returned, I hurried to the chicks to make sure all was ok. It wasn’t. Two chicks were hanging by a foot, side by side, head down, on the end of Adee’s cage, their feet bloodied by the experience. After extraction, I had two more patients to tempt, with water at least. Eventually they responded.

    The trap cage had lived up to its name, so I replaced it with the Saltillo bird cage. In the years before farming, when we habitually took our children (our chicks) on forays through Mexico, our daughter Tracy and I couldn’t come home without this handmade cage, even though we had no bird for it.

    Adelaide and the trio of sufferers fit in it perfectly. All were presumed to be on the death watch, so I moved them and the bird cage back to the kitchen. Accompanied by a lamp warming the towel that covered the cage, three of the chicks settled down for the night. Only Adee walked about, twisting her head this way and that in an unsettling manner, peeping the loudest peep imaginable.

    “Well,” said Larry, a patient, caring man, “we won’t be able to sleep with that going on.”

    “She’ll calm down soon,” I hoped, “as soon as we turn out the lights.” We turned out the lights and Adee lay down with her friends, all four arranged in a row, like lady fingers.

    Sunday morning, they all were alive. A miracle. Especially for the little yellow leghorn, who had the worst toe scrapes and also abrasions under her wing. I was amazed she was still with us; if threatened, she’d pull the injured foot up into her feathers like a flamingo and stand on the good foot. I took the Saltillo cage to the barn and set it on top of the chicks’ cage, in the sunlight. Some vitamin D would help them. Sunlight is an amazing curative I think, and the sun shines also into the big cage, so all the chicks will benefit.

    Through the day the patients became more energetic. Four little chicks, the leghorn hopping on one leg, the other two, with their less-scraped feet, all looked rather spritely, including Adee who seems to be permanently addled. They all drank, eagerly ate their chick grain, peeped, and walked or hopped.

    And into the kitchen they came in late afternoon. Too bad, they didn’t get to baptize the dust-bathing pan, which was teeming with wee bodies. Not that there was room to take a real bath, but the bathers managed to peck the dirt anyway and that was real fun.


    Even with today’s two-inch+plus rain, the chicks love the dry-dust bath tub and life is generally grand in the big cage. It’s outfitted with a second light now, as the season has turned too cold for babies. In fact, the cage is wrapped up with a big brown tarp to keep in the heat and out the drafts and dampness, and it’s underneath the big barn’s roof, so rain is not a problem.

    But the patients couldn’t be outside at all today, as they have no tarp, so they play and eat and nap when they are tuckered out, and heal ... on the kitchen table once more.



(The Patients, with Adelaide in her classic sleeping pose.)
    Carol Ann

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