Relics and Escape Artists

 I have finally overcome my resistance to cleaning out my parents’ stuff. I’m making good progress. I found two typing erasers in my mother’s desk. I swear to God, these are the very same erasers she had when I was a child 50—maybe even 60—years ago. Why would they continue to be manufactured after the invention of Wite-Out?

Tools of the past--typing erasers, c. 1960's

Back then, you had to roll the paper up, erase the letter with the erasers shown, which, by the way, were different from a regular pencil eraser because they had grit in them to scrape away the ink, and brush away the eraser tooties with the brush on the end. If you weren’t careful, the eraser would make a hole clean through the paper. The paper got rolled down, and you continued typing. Oh, and if you wanted a copy of your document, you put two pieces of paper in the typewriter with carbon paper in between. If you made a mistake while doing that, you had to erase both copies. It was totally a lot of fun. Interestingly, this history lives on in “cc”, an abbreviation for “carbon copy.”

When personal computers were invented, my typing got a lot faster and a lot less accurate.

The automatic chicken door is working well. The netting around the run was not working so well. It was a worry. We kept finding chickens outside the run, and if a chicken was outside the run when the door shut for the night, we could easily lose her to a predator.

Our number one escape artist was Miss USA, so named because her white head resembles a bald eagle. She is bold and always looking for adventure, although once she’s out, she tends to just run around the outside looking for a way to get back in.

The bold and beautiful Miss USA

Miss USA’s closest friend, Miss Congeniality, follows her wherever she goes. They are often outside the run at the same time. Miss C. ventures farther away sometimes.

Miss USA's BFF, Miss Congeniality

Terry noticed yesterday that Miss C. has a white rump, which he thought looked like she was wearing a diaper.

Miss Congeniality's white rump

The annoying thing is that both hens seem perfectly capable of getting back in the run, but they don’t seem to realize it until we are chasing them. Under duress, Miss USA flaps and runs up the netting to where the holes are larger and slips through. I’m sure Miss Congeniality could do the same, but I haven’t seen it.

Blackbeard, the other first-year Americauna, also frequently escapes, not because she is looking for adventure but because she is especially skittish. If I throw scratch grains into the run too vigorously, she takes such  fright that she flies over the fence before she knows it. I chased her all the way around the glass greenhouse on one occasion only to have her fly back in under her own power.

Blackbeard, named for her spectacular cheek feathers

Even though the hens can fly over the fence, we suspected that was not their primary means of escape. Longtime blog readers will remember the year we raised three turkeys. We got the poults from a local man who told us that they would be “perfect” in time for Thanksgiving. In reality, the jake (male) weighed 36 pounds when he came back from the butcher, and the two jennies were in the upper 20’s. Anyway, because we kept the turkeys until Thanksgiving, they were separated from the pullets and meat chickens early in August. This was before we put the hens in the orchard for the summer, so the turkey enclosure was right next to the hens/pullets. The turkeys went crazy with loneliness, pacing back and forth on their side of the fence and pecking at the netting. We fixed the holes, but the netting continues to break at weak spots. Breaks are harder to find than you might think.

I was distressed when Terry told me one day that all of the hens had gotten out. That was a complete failure of the fence! He quickly confessed that he had left the gate open. Three hens were out initially. He opened the gate with the intention of shooing them in and then got distracted. I am not one to point fingers, as I get distracted a hundred times a day. However, I am able to keep my mind on the mission when I open the gate to the run. Be that as it may, when Terry’s attention returned to the chickens, all 11 of them were scratching happily around the base of the magnolia tree. He herded them back home.

Regardless of that episode, it was time to replace the netting. I placed the order, and we waited. It came late last week. Luckily, it was warm enough Friday to get the posts in the ground. As we were taking down the old fence, I realized that I had neglected to put earth staples in between the posts. It is possible that the hens were just sneaking out under the net. Oh well. We put up the new fence anyway. We have not had an escape since!

The new fence