Thursday night, our new chick (nicknamed Thanksgiving Dinner), squeezed out of the brood coop through a tiny hole.  His mother couldn't follow him, and apparently he wasn't bright enough to squeeze back in.

Temperatures dropped to the low fifties.  When I found Thanksgiving Dinner the next morning, he was cold and peeping desperately.  I popped him back into the brood coop, but Mama Hen no longer seemed interested in him despite his obvious need for warmth.

The next best bet, I figured, was to rig up a light over a box to warm him the way you do with motherless chicks.  The problem is that we've completely converted over to compact fluorescents and don't have a single incandescent bulb left in the house!  I dashed to town, but by the time I got home an hour later, Thanksgiving Dinner had given up the ghost.

I honestly can't blame this second chick death on Mama Hen.  It's entirely my fault for not chick-proofing the walls of the brood coop better (and for not keeping an incandescent bulb on hand for emergencies.)  I feel awfully guilty (strange since I was going to eat him in a few months anyway!), but have resolved to try again in the spring.  I suspect our second attempt will be a lot more successful --- surely we've done everything wrong that we possibly could on this first attempt!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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