I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat

I think my husband is a glutton for punishment.  He bought three baby guineas last week, and one of them has already left for guinea heaven.  In the first place, they were just hatched, so they were extremely small.  We were keeping them in a cardboard box under a lamp, but with the cold, wet, weather we have been having, I was worried about their getting chilled.

Then a few days ago, our son, who has been a little skeptical about our poultry projects, calls and tells us he has bought 75 baby chicks!  The farm store made him an offer he couldn't refuse--$1 apiece.  (Our guineas were $6.99 each.)  We saw that Greg had made a cozy place for the chicks from a round, metal stock tank with wood shavings on the floor and a heat light, all inside a farm building. 

We thought our two remaining "keets" might like it there better and stay warmer with all that downy fluff around them.  And they seem to  have adjusted well!  Frail and timid at first, they now run energetically with the golden horde, although the two of them stick together.

But horror of horrors! The other evening Greg was checking on them and found the cat behind the shed with a chick in its mouth!  Somehow it had breached the pen and got into the round stock tank, which must have seemed like the biggest bird nest it had ever seen!  With so many chicks, they are impossible to count, so there is no telling how many chicken dinners the furry feline enjoyed.

The pen has been secured and the flock has been safe the past few nights, so today Howard went to the farm store where they replaced the keet that had died, plus he bought an additional one!  (We are making sure to feed the cat plenty of food from the can.)  We put the new keets in with the mixed flock, and at first the little strangers were scared and shy, but before we knew it, one of the "old" baby guineas came over and made them welcome!  Now the four of them hang together as birds of a feather.

Hopefully, there won't be any more farm casualties!    I don't know if my husband was cut out to be a farmer or not, but I'm beginning to think I wasn't cut out to be a farmer's wife!