With 49 eggs last week, production is down, in part owing to the dog attack that traumatized one of the Reds. But the drop is not entirely because of that - it might be that some of the layers are winding down for winter since the days are getting shorter and the nights are cooler. I am also wondering if the traumatized Red isn't still laying because I keep finding eggs on the floor or in the cubbyhole where she's taken to staying.

She stayed in the cubbyhole pretty much for two days. It's next to the water, so I didn't worry about that, but I left her some food. By the third day after the attack, she pecked a little scratch from my hand, then left the coop for a while to peck around. She's still staying there, probably sore yet from the attack and not wanting to rouse the interest of the roosters while she's recovering. I thought about isolating her for a while, but she seems to be doing fine on her own.

The chicks continue to grow and develop, and they survived the weekend without the heat lamp. An electrician has been working on the barn, and he cut the power to the barn on early Saturday afternoon. It should be back up sometime today. I wasn't worried about it, and I'm not obsessing over keeping the chicks at a precise temperature, because I realized that it's something that not even a mother hen could do.

I guess my point is that I see people trying to be very precise with everything they do with raising chickens, with some getting in a tizzy if they, say, lowered the brooder temperature six degrees instead of five. My contention is that God gave nature a large margin of error. It has to be that way, otherwise the Earth's biosphere wouldn't function as well as it does. Some winters are harsher than others, some summers cooler, some years have more hurricanes than others. Eggs don't get turned precisely by hens, hatchlings aren't always kept at 95 degrees for the first days of their lives, yet they all seem to do fine. Each year there are enough chickens to keep things going - and we see this same pattern all through nature.

As a result, there's a little cynic in me that says the poultry company gives out such precise instructions for the chicks because if they expire, the city folks who won them will say, "Gosh, it's hard to raise chicks! Thank heaven we have this large poultry company to raise them for us!" But my son the recently graduated business major says the instructions are simply their way of optimizing the efficiency of raising their product. That makes perfect sense to me. Of course, I'm not about that, but then, I can afford to let my chickens free range, too. I don't expect Big Poultry Magnate to care for chickens like I do, and I'm sure they have no worries about me going into the poultry business. They don't even sell eggs, and I've been giving them away for the most part.

End of lecture. In other barnyard news, the doe goat is still suffering from a cold she picked up at the fair, and our Broody hen was successfully broken, simply by shooing her out of the nestbox a couple of times. She broke easily, and just when I was thinking I wanted her to sit on some eggs that might still have some of Jean-Bob's genes floating around in them.

Oh, well. There's always spring - for hatching eggs and finding chicks at Tractor Supply.