A Folly of Poultry

We have just ordered baby chicks and ducklings over the internet. (Why do we say ‘baby chicks’? That’s like ‘tuna fish’) We don’t know when we’ll get them; the hatching of all the different varieties we ordered must come off at the same time for them to ship them all in one box, like some harmonic convergence of poultry. They must all ship in one box to keep each other warm. We ordered four varieties of chickens and two types of duck; hopefully there will be a launch window for them this spring. With six varieties of bird all having to hatch on the same day, it’ll be a touchy thing.

We were only going to order two types of chicken- Barred Rocks and Americaunas- but the Marek’s vaccinations is a $10 minimum at 15 cents a chick. Tim’s mind could not get around spending ten dollars for a $1.50 job, so he figured that by ordering twice as many birds we’ll get a little more of our monies worth out of the $10. So now we are also getting five White Rocks and five Cherry Eggers as well. Come autumn, we will be up to our butts in eggs.

We are also getting three Swedish Black ducks, because they are calm natured and we should be able to turn them loose in the garden during the day for slug patrol and still be able to capture them in the evening. And three Khaki Campbells, because they lay a lot of eggs. As if we’ll need more eggs with all those chickens.

So now we will wait in suspense, wondering when we’ll get an email saying “They’re on their way! And by the way, to fill your order in this time frame, we’ve had to substitute 6 geese for the ducklings!” *shudder*