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Toesy’s Tale June 28, 2010
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Greetings Friends of the Farm,

The hens go to great lengths to make eggs for the farm stand market. In the summer, I think they actually suffer to do it. It may be only 98 degrees outside right now, but in the nest boxes, the temperature must be well over 110 degrees. Some of that increase, however, is “body heat.” At least seven hens are doubling, even tripling up in just a few nests, as if they are so desperate to have chicks that they’ll share the mothering. Dedicated to their mission, they are generating a lot of heat.

But Toesy is not one of those mommy-wannabees. One of my favorite hens, she is outside of the Hen House every day. She is the diminutive hen with short legs, who, as a little chick, got two of her toes caught in the big chick cage’s metal mesh floor. When I found her, she was “stroked” right out, lying flat on the floor with her wee toes clamped between two sets of wire.

I know how she felt. In early May, when I and my crew were hanging “concrete” wire panels on the t-posts in the tomato beds, a roll of the heavy-duty wire, tightly curled up in the weedy storage area, sprang to life as I wrenched it out of the poison ivy and china berry trunks, and the action pinned my gloved middle finger firmly, way too firmly, in the tangle of wires. I couldn’t find which wire could be moved, and with only one free hand, it seemed it might be impossible to free my fingertip.

Thank goodness, I didn’t reach the “stroke-out” point, as Bess was just fifty feet from me, and came when I calmly requested her to “come here, quickly.”  I am calm in most emergencies; I don’t know if that helps or not, but Bess was able to figure out the offending wire, and pried it off my finger. The nail retained a dent and extreme soreness for a day or so, but I think it felt lucky, as it was one of two fingers I had almost chopped off with a cleaver just a few weeks prior to the wire event. This was nothing.
 
I was able to lift the wires off of Toesy’s toes with a screw driver, and nursed her back to health, although the toes turned black. Later, one tip and most of the next toe departed. (I never found them, in case you are wondering.) She stayed with two other chicks (including Adelaide, who fell on the kitchen floor and had her head screwed on backwards for a month or so, or that’s the way it looked) in the convalescence cage, for a month of recovery. All three chicks survived their ordeals.

But Toesy was never comfortable with the other chicks after that, and they chased and pecked her unmercifully once they all were in the Hen House. She learned that it was safer to spend the majority of her time in the nest boxes and on the perching rails near the feed pans. She would eat from those pans and drink water, only when the other bigger chicks were heading for bed. One of them scratched her eye, which became infected, so I had to medicate it, and finally I had to pull from the eye socket a strange yellow waxy “plug” that was distorting her eyeball and would have caused eventual blindness. Gads, what one must do!

Through all of this, I fed her and brought water and greens to her perch several times a day. She learned to clamor for them as she saw me coming to the Hen House. We bonded over her misfortunes.

But the small hen got her gumption back the minute she started laying eggs.

And today, as Toesy free-ranged the farm as one of the favorites, she noticed me heading towards the Hen House, and ran to me, hollering frantically. She was telling me it was time to lay her egg.

Unlike the Boss Chicks and the Spotty Dotties, Toesy doesn’t like to lay her egg outside of the Hen House. She has her preferred nest box -- tiny, just her size.

So, together (I felt like running too, with the urgency she displayed) we hurried to the gate and I let her in. Immediately she flew up to the rail in front of her nest, and gosh, another hen was in it! OH! She examined the next nest, a big one, but it didn’t suit her, so she barged right in on top of Rosita, her “sister,” and tried to get comfortable.
It takes about 30 minutes to lay an egg, and in this weather, the hens are sweating like crazy. But, like dogs, they pant, with mouths wide open. This is the only thing they have in common with dogs, except for dust baths. Actually they are horrified that they have anything in common with any predator, but that’s the way Nature has handed out the traits.

Rosita, of course was miffed at the intrusion, as she also considers the nest HERS. But she accepted Toesy’s clumsy efforts, and both eventually squeezed together and panted as if the act of laying the eggs would be their last combined efforts at anything, so they would do it right.

Toesy, in emergency mode, laid her egg first. Thus she escaped the oven of the nest, and when I passed by again, she was able to get back to her mulch moving in the great outside.

Meanwhile, with seven hens setting on other hens’ eggs, sharing nest boxes has become a fad. Of course there are many vacant nest boxes, but the hens prefer those that others have used, and even better, those with a potential mama hen, or two, or three, in place. Putting the eggs in with the mommy types gives those hens something to do. Then the egg donors, including Toesy, can go off and do something important, or at least something not so sweat-inducing.

Carol Ann

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