A week ago last Friday, the electrician who was working on my father-in-law's barn (where the coop is located) told me he was disconnecting the electricity so he could finish the re-wiring job between my FIL's other buildings. He said, "The electric company should be out here on Monday to hook things back up." The only thing I was concerned with was the chicks, but I thought they'd be old enough to survive without their warm red light.

As you have deduced from the title of this post, ten days later and there's still no sign of the electric company for whatever reason. The chicks have done fine, but it's getting old tending to them in the morning now that the sun is late in rising.

Also, as a direct result of this, I have lost one of my laying hens. It was the one who survived the dog attack. Last week I went into the tack room to do a little work. It was dark and I didn't see her hunkered down in the straw, continuing her recovery from the attack. I didn't know she was there until I stepped on her.

She squawked and protested big time, running out of the barnyard. I tracked her down and gently coaxed her into the coop so I could lock her up with the others that night. The next morning she slowly toddled out and that was the last time I saw her. I suspect she a) went somewhere to recover and was set upon by a critter, b), went somewhere to recover and died, or c), went somewhere and just plain died.

(Grumbles incoherently)

All of that notwithstanding, I collected 49 eggs last week. The Ross chicks are at that ratty looking stage right now, where their pinfeathers aren't quite thick enough to cover them and the big feathers haven't started coming in yet. I've already made a very special appointment for them. On the 15th of October, they're going to go for a ride in the car. On the 16th, they will return here, but will stay in a new location - our freezer.

(Yes, I said October 15th, a scant 19 days from now. Rosses are bred to grow to maturity (read: "proper size to process") in 42 days.)

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.

So yesterday evening I come home to a report from my daughter. She says one of the hens is acting "traumatized" and Jean-Bob is missing. I go out to take a look at the chooks, and while I'm out, I collect the following pieces of evidence:

-- One of the Reds is indeed acting traumatized. She's hunkering down and keeping to herself. Feathers are missing from her back, forming a bare spot, and several feathers on her breast are sticking out as if something tried to pull them out.

-- Jean-Bob is indeed missing.

-- On the west side of the barn is a scattering of a large amount of feathers - Silver Laced Wyandotte feathers.

-- There are canine pawprints in the mud around the area where the feathers are scattered. There appear to be two different sizes of pawprints.

From this I put together the following scenario: one of the Reds wanders off to the west side of the barn, looking for some fresh forage. Jean Bob follows the hen, maybe looking for fresh something else. Red encounters dogs, one of whom actually gets her in its jaws (the disheveled feathering would be consistent with being picked up in the jaws of a large animal). The Red squawks in alarm, triggering the Rooster response in Jean-Bob, namely, to rush in to the rescue. So Jean-Bob rushes in and attacks the dog, who lets go of the hen in alarm. The Red runs off and Jean-Bob fights the dog until the dog wins out.

I ran this by my wife, who said it might also have been a coyote. There are two things about this, though. Wouldn't we be hearing them howl at night, and wouldn't they have attacked at night? I can't see a coyote coming to a barn and grabbing a chicken during the day when the fields are full of rabbits and groundhogs.

Then one more piece of evidence came in. My wife called her cousin, who keeps llamas, to warn her that something was going on. The cousin reported that she saw three dogs in the fields - one Lab, another Lab-sized, and a third, smaller dog. They were making their way east, which would have been in the direction of our house.

So the theory pans out. Dogs grab hen, rooster wades in for a fight, doing his rooster duty by giving the hen a chance to escape.

After we put this scenario together, my daughter said, "I'm glad that if we lost him, that he died heroically. It'd be stupid if the dogs just got him."

My wife postulated that we might have wandering dogs now because we haven't had a dog around for a year or so. That could be true. We've deliberately not gotten another dog because of our recent string of bad luck with them, but it may be time to reconsider. It would have to be trained to leave the chooks alone or watched every second it was out, though. I love dogs, but not when their owners don't take care of them and watch their behavior - which really ticks me off about this attack.

Losing chickens is the price I pay for letting them free-range, and it's a risk I'm willing to take. The benefits far outweigh the costs - so far, anyway. And if the chickens were people and could say so, I'm sure they'd take the risk, too, quoting Jefferson about the price of liberty.

I do know one thing, though. I'm glad I had "too many" roosters. If I hadn't, I'd be short a laying hen right now - maybe more than one, depending on the ferocity of Jean-Bob's fight. So from now on, I'm going to make sure that I always have a couple roos too many. Even if their motives are less than sterling when they follow the hens around.

Not that I've been waiting for a hen to get broody, but it's nice to know I've got hens so inclined since I want to try and let one hatch out some chicks after the coming winter. The chook in question is one of the Wyandottes, one of the first of them to start laying this summer. I'd probably have let her if I didn't have any chicks from the fair because that area of the coop is where I'd keep the broody and her clutch. Instead, I'm raising the Rosses for the dinner table.

On the Ross front, I lost one chick in the first week. That's not bad, though. In the year that I've been keeping chickens, I've had 24 chicks and have raised 23 of them to full chookhood. That's only a 4% mortality rate.

Just for fun, I'm going to see what it costs to raise the Rosses up until butchering time. I'm not counting electricity or labor or coop space, but will track everything else. So far I've spent less than three dollars on all nine, and I have an Excel spreadsheet that will even give me a per-chick cost. Stay tuned.

63 eggs last week. Now I'm running out of space in the kitchen drawer earmaked for egg cartons that are being brought to me by family members and work colleagues. I've only sold a dozen-and-a-half by request (not counting the dozen my father-in-law paid for even though I tried to refuse it). It's been great fun and a huge blessing just to be able to give the eggs away.

Eggs from 9/1 to 9/4: 32
-- Pity my niece and nephew who collected them for me while I was tied up at the fair. I talked to their mother (my sister-in-law) on Friday when she called to frantically announce that she was being overrun with eggs (part of the deal was that I told the kids they could keep whatever they collected). They ended up giving two dozen back, and still had plenty for themselves and my mother-in-law.

Ribbons collected by my daughter: 5
-- You can read her account of events here on her blog, but suffice it to say I'm one proud Dad. The best ribbon was for the hardest work, the harness goats. She was the only competitior this year due to a twist of fate, but the judge doesn't have to give a top ribbon. This one did, said my daughter had made great progress with the goats, and told her she was ready to start training them on an obstacle course.

Chicks collected from local poultry company: 10
-- I signed up - one pair is awarded out per family. Several relatives in other families - younger ones - as well as some friends from out of state all signed up. Many won, as did I. Then it got fun. The poultry company rep told everyone how to take care of their chickens and suddenly it seemed like a lot of work to them. Naturally, they turned to their Uncle to bail them out.

Contacts made for future pullets: 2
-- A couple of different people who traffic in Americaunas and Buff Orpingtons. One is more interested in Bantams, but the other, a home-schooling parent, looks promising.

Amount spent on fair food: Too Much
-- All the usual fair fare was in abundance. The winners were the 1/2 pound steakburgers (which my wife and I split), the roasted corn, and the Key Lime Pie ice cream. And the lemonade, if you got it at the right stand.

So ends fair week. Exhausted and sunburned, but proud and happy.