*Sigh*
You remember me joking about "no good deed goes unpunished?"
Well . . . .
Y'all remember the Rat Snake that I removed the golf balls from, right?
Yesterday morning, as I was on the back porch putting on my shoes, I heard loud cheeping coming from over near the workshop. Chick-in-distress type cheeping. I had a Serama pair in a rabbit hutch over there; the hen had been sitting on some eggs and had hatched 3 of them a few days earlier. I hurry over, and find not one but two of the chicks on the ground; somehow they had squeezed through the 1" x 2" wire. When I opened the hutch, I found the hen dead, the remaining chick nowhere to be seen, and 5 feet of Rat Snake curled up in the nest. I can't say to an absolute certainty that it was the same snake, but just how many 5 foot long Green Rat Snakes are we likely have around here?
That's gratitude for ya.
So now I have two orphaned chicks. I could have put them in the brooder, but I just gotten the last ones out about a week ago and I hadn't cleaned it up yet. Besides, they would still be traumatized and screaming, possibly for hours.
Possibility - I had another Serama hen that had gone broody. She'd been setting a long time, I was pretty sure the eggs were duds but hadn't gotten around to candling them yet. Maybe I could get her to take these two?
BB2K and I rounded up the remaining two cheepers, and we went to see the remaining broody. She growled and screamed at us, but we tucked the two chicks under her. BB2K stuck around to see how things went. She reported that the hen was growling, she just wasn't sure if it was at the chicks or her. When a chick popped its head out from under her wing and the hen gently pushed it back, it was clear - she was growling at BB2K. We gave her some space.
This morning, they were still tucked all snuggly in the nest. When I put some fresh food in with them, the hen started "cluck-clucking" and walked over to it, and the chicks came running.
*Whew*
