New chicks and prairie flowers

What can be cuter than a box of baby chicks?

Box o'chicks

We got the call from the post office at 6:48. I’d been up since 5:15 waiting. Hilda and I drove to the post office in the rain to pick up the cheeping box. We mixed up a half gallon of water with a half tablespoon of sugar and a half teaspoon of Chick Starter (which was shipped with the chicks) and gave each chick its first drink by dipping its little beak in the water trough.

Rhode Island Red--a new variety for us

We have 21 chicks: 15 meat chickens (the big white ones), three Americauna (various colors, some striped), and three Rhode Island Reds (small uniformly light browh). We put them one by one in the brooder box. Some ran straight for the food. Many ran for the water as soon as we put it in the box. After drinking their fill, they stood in the heat of the lamp, shut their eyes, and began to sway. We left them alone, knowing that nap time was just around the corner.
The video shows the first few hours of arrival from the box to nap time. Toward the end, you can see on of the meat chickens stretching on leg. This is very common behavior. A Rhode Island Red tries to fly and knocks herself over. Not so common behavior.

In other news, Gracie has gone broody again. After Nelly Elly had her second go-round in the cage, I left the cage up for several days just to be sure we wouldn’t need it again. Approximately 10 minutes after I took the cage down and put the cement block back on the storage stack, Gracie started hanging around in the nest boxes too often. In a few days, she was in there all the time, puffed up and squawking when disturbed. Yesterday I hauled the cement blocks back and set up the cage again. Once I had Gracie in the cage, she seemed unperturbed. All the other girls gathered around her. It would be nice to think that they were there to give moral support and sympathy, but really they are just after her food. It is, of course, identical to the food that they all have available in abundance in the coop, but we all know that food tastes better al fresco, especially if that food belongs to someone else. In the video, you can see one of the Buff Orpingtons stick her head through the wires to get at the bowl. Gracie cooperated with the effort by flinging pellets from here to kingdom come when she ate.

Terry mentioned that he’d seen a lot of purple flowers back by the railroad bridge over the creek. He didn’t think it was purple loosestrife, but he wanted me to check. Hilda and I took a walk yesterday to check the creek. We’ve had quite a bit of rain this week, and we wanted to see how close we were to flooding. The creek still had a long way to rise before overflowing its banks. Hilda went back to the house. Not remembering exactly where the railroad bridge was, I bushwhacked through reed canary grass over my head and shoulder-height stinging nettle along the creek. The vegetation was so thick that I often could not see the ground. I walked very slowly, feeling for sink holes and slippery logs. When I finally got to the bridge, I saw that the purple flower in question was spiderwort, which is a native plant. Also, the bridge was about 30 paces from the path that Terry keeps mowed around the perimeter of our property. Note to self.

Spiderwort by the train tracks

My long-time blog followers may recall that I spent an inordinate amount of money buying native seed for part of our hay field in the fall of 2013. Last summer, Terry kept the area mowed to discourage invasive alien weeds. On June 7, I wrote about cutting out the curly dock and observing a number of forbs. Well, the blooming has commenced! The field is now full of Penstemon.

Penstemon in the restoration area

What kind of Penstemon? I looked it up in my Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers, which had the genus listed in both the white section (which is the kind in the restoration) and the purple section (which I have growing by the tractor shed). In the white section, it said, “There are at least 8 white or whitish species in our area, mostly westward. A difficult genus, separated by technical characters.” And the purple Penstemon? “The 17 species in our area are often difficult to identify without recourse to technical manuals.”

White Penstemon

Purple Penstemon

In my case, that means Swink and Wilhelm’s Plants of the Chicago Region, which is a true botanical key filled with words like pubescent, glaucous, and glabrous (which mean, respectively, hairy, waxy, and hairless). I brought both the white and purple flowers to the house to work through the key. It came down to a choice between with or without thick white hairs on the back of the anthers. I pulled the petals back for a better look. The stamen (male structures) were beautifully curved to follow the inside of the floral tube. I didn’t see any hairs on either the purple or the white flower. I read the book again. Oh! Anthers. I had been looking at the filaments. Silly me. I got my hand lens. Sure enough, the white one did seem to have coarse hairs (although I would not have called them white) on the anthers and the purple one did not. The long description of the species below the key verified my identification by stating that Penstemon calycosus (smooth beard tongue) was purple and Penstemon digitalis (foxglove beard tongue) was commonly white. I can’t be sure, though, because they also say that P. digitalis can be purple and P. calycosus is more common in southern Indiana and the Ohio River valley. It would be good if I could remember where I got the plant.

Curved stamen (filaments are white, anthers are black ovals at the end) of P. digitalis. The straight white structure is the style, part of the pistil (the female part)

Foxglove beard tongue seeds were in the mix that we sowed. There is some daisy fleabane blooming also. This was not in the seed mix, but it is a native. I wonder what will bloom next!