Hey that’s life on the farm: Gender Ambiguous Chicken

If you’ve been following along, you know that our farm has not historically offered chickens the longest lifespan. There was the malfunctioning automatic door incident where we learned that technical solutions are never 100% reliable and then the time someone left the egg door open where we learned that humans are not 100% reliable. Still, we’d prefer not to have to keep our girls locked up all day, albeit in their amply-sized coop and run. Letting them range during the day gives them access to grass and bugs that make their eggs that much better and while they’re pecking and scratching for treats, they’re spreading the sheep manure around the pasture and clearing away leaves piled at the bases of trees or along fencelines. Plus, they just look so happy and add an unquantifiable feeling of “farminess.” And in the worst case, at least the free-range, organic, pastured predator population will be well fed. But, hey, that’s life on the farm.

Five months ago, we drove down to the feed store in town with a cardboard box in the backseat of the car to pick out some new chicks. We’d had nine chickens our first time around, and once they all started laying, would get close to three dozen eggs a week, far more than we could possibly use and close to the limit we could even pass off to friends. So this time, we’d decided to take a more sensible approach and pick up four new chicks to add to our current flock of two, a 2-week-old Ameraucana who our mother hen had hatched (the only survivor of the recent raid) and our seemingly unkillable Rhode Island Red who had thus far survived each of the bloodbaths. As we entered the back room filled with cages for the adolescents and warmers for the chicks, some dark black birds with caramel accents caught our eye. We settled on two of these Golden-Laced Wyandottes, about four weeks old, which would mean we’d get eggs from them in about 3-5 months. For the other two, we decided on some 2-week-old Hampshires (a breed developed from crossing the hardiness of Rhode Island Reds with the egg production of Leghorns) who would be the same age as our Ameraucana.

Whoever laid out the chick room had clearly gone to a retail marketing seminar and figured out to put the adorable little fluff balls right by the exit. Week old chicks are the Dentyne, Altoids and US Weekly of the poultry section. With two more peeping impulse buys (Delawares) playing “Jello” in the cardboard boxes in the backseat of the car, we headed home. Okay, so we now had eight chickens. Still better than nine, right?

In the first few months, the chicks grew quickly, losing any remnants of the light, wispy feathers they were born with to longer, more defined new ones. At that point, they enter an awkward adolescence best compared to that reported by reflective supermodels on late night talk shows; They’re gawky, splotchy, uncoordinated and the older chicks pick on them. It’s not uncommon with pairs of animals of the same type or breed to have what they call a “poor doer.” We started to notice that one of the two Hampshires we’d picked up just didn’t seem to be “doing” as well as the other. We chalked it up to competition for food and figured she’d just catch up a little later.

Then one night, I found myself perusing the forums at Backyard Chickens and came across a section called “What breed or gender is this?” When we’d hatched out our chicks, I’d spent some time Googling how to determine the gender of day old chicks. While there were plenty of techniques discussed like dangling them from their feet or necks (the males are supposed to curl up to peck or scratch while the females give up), most amateurs were excited to report that they could get it right about half the time. I could get those numbers with “eenie meeny miny mo.” The experts at the hatcheries use more advanced techniques like inspecting feather growth or peering into the vents that contain the sexual and elimination organs. Still, the signs on the incubators at the feed store can only promise 90% accuracy. Lessee, if thus far we’d bought 10 chicks (4 the first time and 6 this time) from the feed store, that would mean that the odds are… hmmm… carry the 2… add the remainder… ? Damn, I’m so bad at math. Someone help me out here.

I started composing a post on the forum. Yes, one of our Hampshires was growing much faster than the other. Yes, the larger one had a more pronounced comb and waddle and yes, it had slightly more coloration in its tail feathers. But, as had been explained by the members of the forum in responses to other posts, all that could be explained by different speeds of maturation or slight variations in the breeding. The key, they all concluded, was in the behavior. Did the chicken in question behave like a rooster? I went outside to take some video.

I posted the thread anyway, but after having been charged by the bigger Hampshire every time I pointed the camera in its general direction while the others scattered, there was little doubt in my mind. A few weeks later, we heard the first attempted crow. Pretty sad really, like a teenager whose voice is changing, but he slowly became a man.

For some, that proud call would be a death sentence. Most neighborhoods don’t allow roosters, if they allow chickens at all. But we’re fully immersed in Ag country 5 miles outside of the city limits, not to mention Petaluma’s history as “The Egg Basket of the World.” Heck, our neighbors run an organic chicken farm. We’d happily keep him if only so I could ask everyone who visits if they want to see my co... [EDITED FOR CONTENT BY ANN].

But hey, that’s life on the farm.

Shadows in the pasture

We’ve been on our four acres an hour north of San Francisco for just over a year now and are starting to feel the rhythm of the place. We’re not surprised when the chill of fog spills over the hills from the Pacific Ocean thirty miles to the West at the end of a 90 degree summer day. We know the giant buckeye tree supporting the tree house built by the previous owners for their grandkids will be the first to show its leaves in the Spring and the first to lose them in the Fall. We know that a single zucchini plant in the garden can produce enough vegetable matter to feed a village, that if left unchecked will grow gourds the size of a speed skater’s thigh and that every neighbor within 10 miles has the same problem and does *not* need a loaf of Ann’s signature zucchini bread.

We’ve started to get a sixth sense when looking out towards the pasture from our long farm table in the kitchen. In addition to telling the time of day by how far Petunia, the 8 year-old Vietnamese Potbellied Pig who has been a long term resident of the property, needs to walk from her nest of straw to find a swath of sunlight to warm her leathery skin, we can tell when something is not quite right. We’ll look up just as one of the sheep bolts across our view and watch closely for anything with four legs, teeth and claws that might be pursuing it. We’ll notice the black and white cat, born to a feral mother under a pallet leaning against an old chicken house in the back of the property, slinking mischievously along the fence line with one eye on our big Rhode Island Red while her head is down pecking and scratching at the dirt.

The evening of May 20th, 2012 seemed to come early, the day not fading so much as the dusk sneaking in. A weight was in the air, an ominous feeling that told us something was different. While the shadows grew long in the pasture, the remaining rays of sunlight had a distinct precision. A pull could be felt from the west, and we were drawn outside onto the deck like zombies, eyes trying to make sense of the changing light. While Ann held the baby close, I found two pieces of white cardboard and poked a hole in one. The pinpoint of light projected onto the blank canvas showed the beginning of the eclipse, the moon sliding between the sun and the Earth.

We’d become so sensitive to the patterns of the sun since moving to the country. Knowing where and when it would shine was essential for laying out a garden, providing shade to the animals, keeping the house cool and avoiding the heat of the afternoon for the hardest farm chores. And when the sun would set, an impermeable black, unspoiled by the light pollution of the city, would lay heavy like a blanket. With the darkness came the unknown. Plants wouldn’t grow and animals huddled together for warmth and waited for the relative security of the day. Watching the premature nightfall on the pasture, it was easy to imagine the uncertainty people living before we had knowledge of the planets and their orbits must have felt. Even with access to 24 hour news and the Internet, it was hard not to feel pretty insignificant as something 2,000 miles across and 200,000 miles away begins to obscure our sun.

As the eclipse progressed, each surviving ray of sunlight began to mimic the crescent shape projected on our makeshift viewer. Soon, we were surrounded by tiny half moons filtered through the trees.

 

 

I expected the animals to react more dramatically to the changing light, but they turned towards it and awaited their fate with the rest of us.

A few weeks later more unusual shadows darkened the pasture, and again, brought with them an uneasy feeling. Ann was home alone with the baby while I was out all day. She’d just called after lunch to check in when she saw them, dark swatches slashing across the grass. At first, it looked like a low flying plane momentarily obscuring the sun. After all, Liberty Field, a dirt landing strip nestled between cow pastures and strawberry patches, was located just a few miles east, and we often waved to small aircraft as they passed overhead while we were working in the garden. But these were circling. Then, just on the other side of the fence, Ann noticed what looked like a turkey. Then another, and another.

Suddenly two dark figures took up posts in the trees, passing solemn judgment on the scene below. Those were not dopey turkeys, wandering around mindlessly waiting to become Thanksgiving dinner; Those were vultures, and they were the ones settling into a meal. Where there are vultures, there’s death, and as Ann walked out towards the small gate at the end of the lawn that leads into the pasture, she saw the explosion of white feathers and began to fear the worst.

We’d lost chickens before, most recently after being gone for two weeks on the other side of the world. We’re new to the farm life and still working to find a balance between our desire to let our animals roam free and the need to keep them confined for their safety. We’d decided that just because we would be gone, there was no reason to alter the schedule for our nine chickens. The automatic door on the coop would still open on a timer in the morning allowing them to roam our 4 acres and close securely at night after they’d reliably returned to their roosts just before sunset. We didn’t count on a historic electrical storm hitting the Bay Area that would knock out power and skew the timing on the door; They were caught outside one night and killed by an opportunistic passing predator. Well, all but two were killed. One, a Rhode Island Red who had taken to escaping from the pasture and roosting in the feed shed, remained, as did an Ameracauna who had decided to set on the nest in an effort to hatch several (unfertilized) eggs the flock had laid in the previous days. That was the last time we’d seen vultures in the pasture.

But out of the dark had come light, from tragedy had come hope, hope in the form of eight fertilized eggs we’d procured from a nearby farm for our insistent mother to set on. For twenty and a half days, she diligently rotated the eggs and kept them warm until on Mother’s Day, the tiny, wet balls of fluff emerged from their shells.

As Ann approached the pasture gate, it was clear that the meal the vultures were enjoying was our faithful mother hen. And the chicks? Ann looked left to find the egg collection door, just inside of which the vulnerable chicks would have been nestling in a bed of hay, wide open. Inside, she was crushed to find that they had met the same fate as their mother.

As we tried to reconstruct what had gone wrong – Which one of us had left the egg door unlatched? What could have jumped or climbed 5 feet up to it? Had the mother left the coop in an effort to lure the attacker away from the chicks? – the Rhode Island Red came strolling up like that one character in a movie who’s timing is always just a little off? “Hey guys, what’d I miss?” Putting aside for one second the theory that she’s been the one decimating our flocks the whole time and then playing innocent, she must have once again been off exploring the far reaches of the property or hanging out in the feed shed.

For many, the idea of “returning to the land,” providing their own food and restoring a link to nature is an idyllic notion. But along with new found awareness of the cycles of light and dark from the sun comes a connection to a deeper cycle of life and death on the farm. For some of the animals we raise, there comes a day when all of the life they experience is converted into sustenance for our own lives, and for the chickens we’ve lost, sustenance for a fox or a coyote or a raccoon or a skunk – or even an innocent looking red chicken. We’ve come to understand that there’s an emotional toll for lifting the veil on the source of our meat or eggs, but when presented with the options of CAFO’s and overcrowded and unsanitary chicken houses, we’re willing to pay it.

As the satiated vultures beat their huge black wings back into the air, off to cast their shadows on another pasture, there was a flash in the coop, a white gray streak low along the mesh wall; It was one of the chicks, bobbing a weaving like she was still evading pursuit. She had survived, likely by using the same tactics that eventually caused me to give up on catching her and putting her in a cardboard box under a heat lamp each night. Like her mother – and that unkillable Rhode Island Red – she’d beaten the odds and given us glimpse of the light in a time of darkness.

The next day, we went down to the feed store in town and picked up 6 more chicks: 2 Golden Laced Wyandottes, 2 New Hampshire Reds (we’ve had good luck with red chickens from the northeastern states…), and 2 Delaware Whites. I’ll add a spring to pull the egg door closed and a better latch to secure it tightly, and we’ll enjoy these chicks and the eggs they’ll start laying in a few months while we have them.

Everything’s back to normal on the farm for now, but we can’t help but keep one eye on the pasture, watching for shadows.

Circle of Life

“The seller has accepted your offer but with a condition.”

“What’s the condition?”

“That they can leave behind the two sheep and the potbelly pig.”

This was likely the first time our real estate agent had spoken these words to a client. And though we weren’t looking to get animals right away, seeing Petunia run to meet us at the pasture gate was quite endearing. And the sheep? Well, the sheep were just dumb; They spooked and ran every time we got within sight of them, and we figured they would just hang out and eat the grass. We agreed to take on the mini menagerie.

“Oh and by the way, the sheep probably haven’t been sheared in a couple years and need it pretty badly.”

So we got the number of a local guy and had him out to shear the sheep. As you may remember from the blog post about it, this guy stalked the skittish beasts like a wolf and ultimately pinned them into a corner before dragging their wooly masses across the pasture to his shears. When I called him again this year, he remembered me.

“Any chance you there’s a smaller area you could get them into so I don’t have to chase them around like last time? I’m just afraid they’re gonna hurt themselves bolting around like that.”

“No problem,” I assured him, “I have some electric fencing now. You may find that I’m not quite as green as I was a year ago….”

Before he arrived on Thursday morning, I laid out a small enclosure of maybe 40’ square using my Kencove electric mesh, kinda like a long volleyball net with tent poles every 10 feet. I figured I’d just herd them in there when he arrived, but as soon as they saw his car come through the gate, they were edgy. I mentioned the last time he came that I wouldn’t have been surprise if he had some canine blood in him, and they smelled him from a mile away. So like last year, he ended up stomping around the pasture after them, creating frenzied stampedes as they bolted anytime they felt the least bit closed in. When particularly panicked, they would crash themselves into the fences, trying to squeeze their 250 lb frames through holes that even chickens couldn’t fit through.

But these weren’t entirely the same skittish beasts he’d come out to shear last year. No, being conscientious new farmers, we’d done a Google search for “how can I get my sheep to like me” and based on the results, ran down to the feed store in town for some COB - a mixture of corn, oats and barley - that they loved. Nowadays, anytime we went out into the pasture, one of the dumb sheep would be nudging us with his huge black head like a puppy dog looking for a treat. So despite being a little worked up from the chase - and with the shearer/wolfman hidden behind the door of the shed - I was able to lure the big wether over to me with a bucket of the stuff. When his head was down, I made my move, grabbing two huge handfuls of that plentiful fleece on his back and holding on for a few seconds of sheep rodeo before help arrived. Together, we backed him – apparently easier than getting them to walk forwards – over to the shears. No one ever said short term memory was a strong point for sheep, and the ewe fell for the same trick a few minutes later. See, I' told you I had a new trick or two up my sleeve since last year…

Now switching topics briefly to chickens. We recently spent two weeks traveling with my family in Japan and couldn’t bring ourselves to lock them in their coop for that long. On a typical day, the flock would roam the 4 acres of the property, sifting through piles of leaves gathered along the fence lines and lounging in the shady limbs of a Cypress tree before returning just before sunset to their roosts. An automatic door on a timer would shut them in for the night, safe from marauding predators. While we were gone, we decided to allow them their freedom, scheduling a neighbor and our landscaping guy, Pedro, to come by every couple days to collect eggs and throw some alfalfa to the sheep.

The second weekend we were in Japan, we noticed all our friends commenting on Facebook about the huge electrical storm in the San Francisco Bay Area. There was even a “striking” photo of lightning hitting the Golden Gate Bridge.

Worried about the electric timer on the chicken coop, I emailed the neighbor who assured me that he’d never lost power during the storm and everything looked good with “the girls.” Unfortunately, that weekend, our web cams stopped working, I assumed a glitch with the cable internet connection caused by the storm. Yes, we have a few cameras set up around the property – the front gate, the garden, the back pasture, and the chicken coop – which we can call up from our living room or the lobby of the Westin Miyako Hotel in Kyoto. I’d used some of my past-life experience as a Web techie to write a script that would rotate the camera in the coop to face the door, snap a picture and email it to me each night, and then do the same for the roost. That way, I could confirm that everyone was in their place and safe. I hadn’t received one of these emails in a few days…

I got the text from Pedro while we were on a small tourist train from Takayama connecting to the bullet train back to Tokyo.

“Hi dave I have bad news somethin eat d chickens”

The imperfect English combined with text shorthand made the information all the more hard to grasp while winding down through rocky canyons and across bridges over green blue glacial water 5000 miles from home. I sent a reply to Pedro asking for more info – Did any survive? Did the door malfunction? What was the current scene? – but it disappeared into the 15 hour time difference, and it would take a few more days of text-tag before we knew the whole story.

Neither Ann nor I are particularly dramatic people. It’s not our style to run around to everyone and tell them the news. Instead, we just sat quietly in our train seats and talked through it. Should we have locked the coop door while we were gone and not let them range? It would have been safer but they wouldn’t have been as happy. We’d arranged for them to be checked on and the door timer could have gotten messed up even if we’d been there. How did we feel about the loss? Sure, we’d had favorites like “Mongo” who would break out of the pasture every day and stroll into the house through the sliding glass door, but at the end of the day, they were chickens. People, ourselves included, eat them every day. Just because we project some element of personality on them doesn’t mean they were aware of it themselves or wanted anything more than to scratch up the dirt and eat bugs. Clearly, we’d get more chickens and surely would think they were the best bunch we’d ever had. So, sad yes. A bit shocking, yes, but I think we were both surprised by how far we’ve come in accepting the ups and downs of homestead life. Things like this were going to be a reality, especially if we wanted to continue travelling.

When we got home, we confirmed that the door timer had lost power and likely shut the chickens out before they could get into the coop for the night. But, we also found that two of our nine chickens had survived. One, “Red,” would commonly sneak through an open corner of the pasture gate to lay her eggs on top of a fluffy bale of alfalfa in the feed shed. After some suspicion, a motion detection camera trap actually caught a farm cat sneaking into the shed to steal her egg. She likely was likely in the feed shed, roosting on top of a bucket, when the others got locked out. 

The other survivor, one of our Americaunas, we found sitting in one of the nesting boxes and refusing to leave. When we asked the neighbor about it, he said she’d been doing that all week. It seems that while we were gone, she’d slipped into maternal cycle that has mostly been bred out of commercial laying chickens but still persists in the more pure breeds. When a hen “goes broody,” she stops laying eggs (which is bad for business in the egg factories) and sits on the number she’d like to hatch, called a “clutch.” Well, while this behavior likely saved her life by preventing her from being locked out of the coop, the eggs she was sitting on had not been fertilized by a rooster and hence were only good for making omelets, not baby chicks.

But, it just so happened that we were in need of some new chickens right about now. On the long flight home from Japan we’d talked about how and when we’d replace the chickens we’d lost. We were planning a few more weekends away so maybe later in the summer we would get some chicks or adopt some rescue hens. But this opportunity was too good to pass up. Our team needed a win, here. The circle of life needed to be completed. I got on Craigslist the morning after we got home and found a farm 20 minutes away in Santa Rosa offering fertile eggs from an Americauna rooster and an assortment of hens. By noon, 10 eggs new eggs were nestled under a very happy broody hen who would leave them only briefly for food and water over the course of the next 21 days.

We hadn’t realized that the 21 day incubation period would end on Mother’s Day, but it seemed fitting. Actually, our Google searches indicated that chicks hatched by a hen often arrived late on the 20th day, while those in an incubator waited until the 21st. Also, it’s interesting to note that the incubation period doesn’t start until the hen actually sets on the eggs, so though they may be laid over the course of several days, they all hatch within hours of each other. We’d spent some time on the morning of the 20th day adding fresh bedding to the nests and refilling the feeder so mama hen wouldn’t have to go far for food. Actually, we’d poured some pellets she didn’t seem to like out in a corner of the coop and replaced them with a crumble she preferred. As you’ll come to find out in a few paragraphs, I don’t mention that detail without a good reason. And sure enough, as we left for a friend’s birthday party at a nearby brew pub that afternoon, we could hear “pipping” coming from the eggs and one had a little crack in it.

We returned home that evening at dusk, the extra IPA I’d had in the last 10 minutes of the party resigning me to the backseat with the baby while Ann drove us home. As she put the little one to sleep upstairs, I walked out to the chicken coop in the fading light to check on the progress. Making my way to the egg door around the side, I noticed a fluttering inside the coop. It seems that since the automatic door was working again, a random bird stealing feed had gotten trapped inside when the door closed. Remembering that I’d read about Blue Jays killing baby chicks, I opened the large coop door at the front and left it ajar for the bird to find its way out. 

Around the side, I could already hear the chirping as I approached the egg door. When I opened it, I saw a solitary head poking out from beneath our mother hen’s wing and could tell there were more wriggling around beneath her. I had heard that you shouldn’t touch the chicks until they are completely dry – remember, they’ve been slimed with egg whites for 21 days – so I took a picture with my iPhone and texted it to Ann upstairs in the baby’s room. “They hatched!”

Just then, I noticed more movement in the main part of the coop. The little bird had flown out, but now the pig and one of the large Suffolk sheep had snuck in and were gorging on the chicken pellets I’d poured out in the corner. Remember those?  Despite my still IPA-influenced state, I managed to calmly sneak into the coop and slip around behind them so they had a clear path to the door. I eased closer to them, applying pressure through what I’ve heard livestock handlers refer to as my “concentric circles,” the proximity to animals at which they sense your presence at various levels like the ripples in a pond. Well, a huge rock musta fallen into the pond ‘cause out of nowhere, the big sheep panicked, lunging against the mesh that made up the side of the coop as if she was trying to get away from the man/wolf who had sheared her earlier in the week. On the third thrust against the 1/2” hardware cloth, she broke through and bolted off into the dusk, the pig waddling merrily after her through the opening left in the side of the coop. I would love to tell you it was in the perfect shape of a recently sheared sheep, but in fact it was just like the coop had been peeled open like a can of tuna.

I had to just stand there in the fading light for a second thinking, “Did that just happen?” And despite my usual rule of not mixing power tools and alcohol, found that I had little choice but to walk to the barn, fire up my compressor and grab the staple gun. With a work lamp illuminating the new emergency exit in the now dark pasture, I reattached the mesh siding as best I could, pondering how my life had changed in the past year.

The next morning, we could finally see our proud mother and her chicks. I had put 10 eggs under her 21 days before. I knew we were down to 9 because while lifting her off the clutch sometime around day 7, I’d missed one tucked under her wing; It fell from about a foot and cracked. Now, all but one of the remaining eggs was waddling around in the form of a fluffy little chick. We gave the 9th another day but when there was no movement or sound, wrote it off.

We’ve got quite an assortment: two that are very light like their surrogate mother (a Blue Wheaton Ameracauna), two that are grayish with a dark line on the head, and four that are darker red or brown. It will be really interesting to see how they all develop. And while I’ve watched more than a few YouTube videos and read articles on how to determine a chick’s gender, most end by saying that unless you’re a pro, you’re accuracy is likely to be about 50/50. I’d get the same results with eeny meeny miney mo.

It’s incredible what an instinctively good mother our little hen has turned out to be. Whereas we had to keep the chicks we got from the feed store inside and under heat lamps for the first five weeks of their lives, all these need is a warm spot under their “mother’s” wing.

I extended the nest where they had hatched by adding a cardboard box filled with hay to bring it up to the same level and set out the chick feeder and water. That night, I woke up from a deep sleep with a realization. When I checked the camera I’d set up on the brooding box, my fears were confirmed; I’d put the box directly below where “Red” roosts every night, and Mama Hen was getting brutalized from above as she sheltered her chicks under her wings. I added a feed sack thrown over the roost the next night to encourage Red to find another spot.

Baby Wynne seems very interested in these little puffballs. Little chicks and a little chick.

Around Day 3, Mama Hen led her chicks out of the nest and onto the raised mesh floor of the coop. When they reached the elevated door and ramp leading to the coop floor, Mama walked down while the chicks chose to anxiously approach the edge and throw themselves off, falling to the straw below with featherless wings flapping frantically. Once everyone was down, Mama excavated huge holes with her claws and showed them how to peck and scratch for morsels. We didn’t know what to expect but Red seemed incredibly tolerant of the little ones, even looking the other way when one jumped up to peck at her red wattle.

So while we’ll keep the coop door closed for a while to prevent entry of both predator and sheep, we have the makings of a new flock. Out of tragedy, came a triumph. Out of death, came life. The circle of life on our little farmlet is complete.

The first days

And then everyone left the hospital room. The doctor, nurses, our moms. It was just us and this hours-old baby. Fortunately, exhaustion overpowered anxiety and our minimal newborn training kicked in enough to dig through the drawers on the rolling bassinet - more of a clear tub on a metal cart - to find some clean diapers. With Ann laid-out from the surgery and groggy from the drugs, the task of wiping away the sticky black meconium (a tar-like substance made of up everything the baby ingests while in the uterus: amniotic fluid, bile, mucus) that seemed to be in every crevice from front to back fell to me. While I’d later learn that this secretion is all but sterile, I winced and gagged as I cleaned the girl parts for which I’d never before been completely responsible as best I could. I found it helpful to pretend I was wiping caked grease off the swing arm bearings on my ‘73 Honda CB750, and this stuff was about as gooey. They’d warned us that newborns aren’t able to regular their temperature for the first 48 hours (and consequently had denied Ann’s request for a fan in the stuffy room), so I executed my best swaddle and pulled one of the knit caps the Petaluma Ladies Auxiliary makes for the nursery down over her tiny head. She, thankfully, fell deeply asleep.

But a few hours later, in a pattern that would surely repeat itself in some form or another for the next year or so, our little angel woke up crying. Actually, Ann heard her crying and had to yell across our long thin hospital room to my bed on the opposite wall to wake me. It seems that while Ann was already keyed into the sound of our baby crying, I was still only conditioned to rouse when Ann called. I jumped out of bed and scooped up our tightly swaddled bundle, wailing wildly by this point. Fortunately, I remembered a technique I’d seen some friends use with their newborn - I call it “the broken elevator” – in which they let the baby fall suddenly only to be caught softly at the bottom of the drop. It worked!  A few of these seemed to snap her out of her panic, likely as she saw her short life pass before her eyes, thinking the ground floor was coming up fast.

I also remembered another tip, this one gleaned from a book given to me for Christmas by Ann’s brother, himself a new father. Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads had advised that the most effective way to soothe a baby was to mimic the walking motion of the mother.  Turns out, most people take about one step each second, and the reggae beat of Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier” just happened to be at 60 beats per minute. With my free hand, I grabbed my iPhone off the bedside table and swiped to a metronome app I’d downloaded one time after swearing to work on my timing on the mandolin. I keyed in 60 beats per minute and bounced around the room like a college student just off the plane in Kingston as Wynne drifted happily back to sleep.

The second day in the hospital consisted of extended and repetitive photo sessions and mass social media announcements. As I commented online, “The only thing that makes you feel more popular than birthdays on Facebook is apparently... well... birth days on Facebook.”

The picture below seemed to be everyone’s favorite…

It was great to have Ann’s mom in town during our days in the hospital, both to have someone taking care of the farm and to bring us meals from our freezer and the nearby Whole Foods. Though we told the nurses each day that we wouldn’t be needing the hospital meal tray included with Ann’s stay (I was forced to go downstairs to “Dr. Beans” for bagels and coffee), it inevitably showed up, and we’d politely send it back. They told us later that our rejected meals had been feeding the other fathers on the floor.

We’d also told Ann’s mom that nothing really needed to be done on a daily basis at the farm since the automatic chicken door was working and everyone had plenty of food.

We had neglected to mentioned however, that in addition to free-ranging around the pasture, several of the chickens had also taken to finding holes in the fence and roaming around the sun garden, shade garden, lawn and driveway. They would always find their way back to the coop each day before the door closed automatically. In fact, each night we would confirm their safe return - much to the amusement of the nurses - via a wireless web cam in the chicken coop that could be remotely rotated to see all the girls up on their roosts and the silver coop door securely closed.

But Ann’s mom didn’t know that. She returned from a hospital visit to find chickens everywhere and spent the rest of the day frantically chasing them around and shooing them back into the pasture only to have them magically reappear behind her. Counting them proved all the more difficult since she had been sure we had ten chickens; We only had nine. We explained all this when she called us at the hospital, exasperated. We felt a little bad for all the effort she’d gone to, but also that we hadn’t been watching the web cam while she was out there herding chickens. It would have been pretty tempting to have used the two-way audio capability of the web cam to mess with her. “Bok bok! You can’t catch us! I’m over here! Behind you!”

 

Back in the hospital, we had two patients in our room, Ann and Wynne, so the door was never closed longer than 20 minutes before another nurse would walk in to take vitals or review the feeding and diaper records we’d been told to keep (for Wynne). When we’d neglected to record an entry in the middle of the night because one of the nurses had not returned our chart, panic flowed through the chain of care all the way to our pediatrician, and we were roundly reprimanded for letting the baby go more than 3 hours between feedings (which we hadn’t). Frankly, we’d had enough of the supervision.

That is, until about 3 am on the second night when Wynne woke up crying inconsolably. Soon, her face turned tomato red, and she seemed to stop breathing between wails. No amount of near-death elevator-related simulated mishaps could snap her out of it. When white foamy bubbles began coming from her mouth, we panicked and rang the nurse call button. When the nurse came in, she explained that the white bubbles were the remaining fluid in the stomach that had not been suctioned in the operating room and would have been squeezed out during a vaginal birth. “She’s normal,” the nurse said. Then she looked at us and asked, “First time parents?” When we looked up with bloodshot eyes, hearts still beating in fright, and nodded, she said, “You’re normal too.”

And we got further confirmation of that fact soon after. Another new parent friend had told us that we should let the nurses take the baby to the nursery at night so we could get some sleep. We’d brushed it off figuring that sleep deprivation was inevitable, but after our recent frothing fright, we were fried. The room went dark and silent once Wynne was rolled out the door in her plastic tub, and I drifted off immediately. Once again, I was awakened soon after by Ann’s voice and, once again, she was sure she heard Wynne crying out the door, past the nurses’ station, down the hall and in the nursery. It’s amazing how quickly that motherly instinct kicks in.

The nurse we called at 3:00 am had also given us a little bit of extra advice, “If they’re red, they’re okay. If they’re blue, something’s wrong.” When we met our pediatrician for the last time before leaving the hospital, we grilled him for more simple wisdom we could follow at home before calling 911 (!). He mentioned the irregular breathing patterns of newborns and basically trying not to focus on them to avoid worrying constantly. A good tip. Now, we’re not really worriers, but we’re not really overly casual either. Yes, we drove 10,000 miles over 5 months through Mexico and Central America where our family and friends assured us we would be robbed, kidnapped and killed within miles of the US border (ironically enough, probably the most dangerous area!), but we also planned and researched for a year and prepared ourselves, our vehicle and our gear extensively before leaving. And before our next adventure, having a baby, we’d similarly done our homework and knew what we were getting into. And because of that, we knew that our baby girl would go through a mini menstruation in which she would discharge blood into her diaper and that we might find brick-colored specks once her kidneys started to function. I mean, these are the “911 moments” we were trying to avoid and yet no one at the hospital found it necessary to mention either. One Google search shows that new parents are freaking out about these things on a minute by minute basis. How about a little heads up, medical professionals?

So like all new parents do, we left the hospital on a Saturday afternoon feeling a bit on our own but excited to be bringing our new baby home. We walked through the sliding automatic doors and into the parking lot carrying the car seat we’d brought to the hospital empty, now occupied by a tiny human we’d created from scratch. Ann sat in the back seat worriedly watching her breathing while I craned to see the mirror we’d mounted in the back seat to double check.

It’s notable how similar the feel of that drive was to the day we pointed our truck south…