Silver does not want to give up her eggs...or anyone else's, for that matter!

If you were to just pop into my house, and open up my refridgerator and see my eggs, you'd probably freak out. They're dirty! Yup. I snatch them from under the hen and pop them straight into the fridge, even if those hens have been walking through the mud to get to their nests and the eggs are dirty.

Why wouldn't I wash them? Well, I do wash them when I'm ready to cook them, but not before. When you wash an egg, you risk the water soaking through the pores of the shell, carrying bacteria inside the egg. If this bacteria is harbored long, you run the risk of contaminating it and making yourself sick when you eat it. The risk of salmonella is incredibly low in raw eggs, did you know that? Most salmonella is on the outside of the shell, which means if they've gotten wet and sat around, you've got yourself a potential problem. Personally? I still eat raw cookie dough =>

I sat down to the computer the other day and as I began pulling photo off my camera I came across a set that I hadn't taken. Judging by the looks of the fingernails in the photos, Darling hadn't taken them, either.

This pic shows the chick's third eyelid.

The turkey eggs never hatched. I got word that the one remaining hen turkey over at my friend's managed to hatch out nine babies. But the incubated eggs? Well, they just went through too much stress. Too cold, I suspect, between loosing their mamma and getting into the incubator here.

We're down to two ducklings. One died the first week. The three remaining ducklings had been moved outside to a pen alongside the horse and sheep. I got up the other morning to feed and found the yellow duckling missing. I'd hesitated putting them in with the hens, as chickens can be very aggressive. However, it was worth the risk for the last two ducklings. Thankfully, they're bigger than the hens and everyone is getting along fine.

Another loss. One of our chicks died. I found it with it's head in the water, no doubt trampled by it's brothers and sisters while trying to get a drink, causing it to drown. That is the sad side of farm life. You invest time and emotion, and you suffer loss. After a while, you begin to accept the losses without so much grief, especially with poultry; they do everything they can to kill themselves, and they're quite good at it. I suppose I don't feel the same grief because I've invested more emotion in sheep, dogs and horses. Which isn't to say I've never felt sad when we loose a chick or duckling. But it's part of life.

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