Dazed and Confused

Most evenings on the farm are quiet and calm. I said most. The guys finish with the daily chores and tasks around 3:00 and try to get home to their families before too late in the day. Monte and I enjoy going around the farm later in the evening which leaves just enough time for something to have potentially gone wrong.

Side note: Something really interesting to me is how often we've had this happen and we had no real reason to go out to check things and found something that could have been really serious. It's like there's someone watching over things here and telling us to go out and check the animals. I'm not sure who or why, but it's a good thing.

On Monday evening that was exactly the case. We were enjoying a peaceful evening by the pond and a friend wanted to stop out to look at the Milpa plot we had planted to see how things were growing. Just at sunset on our way back I noticed in the distance a large group of hens far away from their barn on the hillside where the barn had been earlier in the day. We've experienced this one other time when we moved the barn too far during our daily move and the hens were confused and didn't know where their house had gone. We spent a couple of hours that night trying to gather chickens in the dark and putting them into the barn. You can imagine what a great exercise that is in marital communications. When the sun starts to set chickens become kind of lethargic (that's a nice word for dumb) and if they can't roost they will huddle into groups on the ground to sleep laying out a coyote "all you can eat buffet". We would like to stay in the egg business so it's rather important to find a solution to the problem.

Having had this previous experience we put the marriage saving call out to Remington and Matthew for assistance. We attempted to get the hens to walk to the barn but it just wasn't going to happen. I suggested to Monte the easiest way to get them into the barn was to move the barn back to them. It worked! They were all happy to see the barn back and started jumping inside while it was moving so they could get settled in and perched for the night. Once they were all back inside and perched, we moved them back to the new location where in the morning would be no problem at all. It's like carrying a sleeping child from the car into their bed...they wake up and have no idea how they got there.

For us it was another night of dinner at 10:30 and falling into bed so we could get back up and start fresh again the next day still happily married.
No harm...No foul! (pun intended)
 
From the Farm,
Robyn