In surgery, as in anything else, skill and confidence are learned through experience — haltingly and humiliatingly. Like the tennis player and the oboist and the guy who fixes hard drives, we need practice to get good at what we do. There is one difference in medicine, though: it is people we practice upon.

And you don’t want to it to be you. You want to wait until your surgeon has honed his skills on other people and then have your appendix removed or your kidney transplanted or your hip replaced. Yet it is in our collective interest to have a new crop of surgeons every year, or we’ll run out of appendix removers, kidney transplanters, and hip replacers in short order.  And so the patient of the new surgeon makes a sacrifice to the common good – although, if the bargain were put to him in those terms, he might very well change his mind.

That essay has come to mind often, as I’ve done so many things for the first time over the last few years. Not many of them are physical skills like surgery, which require a very specific kind of learning, based on repetition, that hard-wires the procedure into your brain. But even more general undertakings – designing a hydroponics system, building a hoophouse, making a souffle – have a better chance of success when they’re undertaken by people with experience. The Internet will take you only so far.

As I venture out way beyond my comfort zone, I’ve been grateful that it’s not people I practice on. The soufflé falls, and the worst-case scenario is take-out Chinese. Nobody’s going to die on the table.

But livestock is different. It’s not people, and I am very clear on the difference. But it’s live. The animals we raise are sentient, can suffer, and are completely dependent on our stewardship. When we bungle it, nobody dies on the table, but it’s not take-out Chinese, either.

And bungle it we do. There’s no way to venture into taking care of animals without making mistakes born of inexperience. Almost all the deaths we’ve had around here could have been prevented if we’d simply been better at our job.

I’m not being hard on us here. I know that mistakes come with the territory, and you do your best and try and learn from what goes wrong. But I am responsible for our animals, and it sometimes feel like they got a bum deal being stuck with us instead of, say, Jen over at Milkweed & Teasel.

The issue at hand, this time, is our first attempt to hatch fertilized eggs. We bought six turkey eggs about four weeks ago and popped them under Queenie, our broody Buff Orpington hen. About a week before we were expecting chicks, we found one of the eggs cracked open, so we were down to five. We did, however, learn that at least that one egg was fertilized, so we had hopes for the remaining eggs.

Then, four days ago and a day ahead of schedule, we had an actual chick! It was peeping and eating and drinking, and Queenie was being very attentive to it. We were hopeful that the remaining four would follow suit.

Queenie, distracted

But then things went south. Queenie seemed to have trouble attending to both the chick and the eggs, and she abandoned the nest to keep the chick warm. We had set the Varmintcam up above the brooder, and we knew from the timestamp that the nest had been empty for at least four hours. Was the brooder too big? Did we put the food and water too far away from the nest? We didn’t know.

By this time, the full 28 days had elapsed, and we thought it was possible a chick might have survived, but didn’t have the strength to get out once it had gotten cold. So we tried opening one of the eggs. There was a chick, barely alive, and we tried to warm it and revive it, but our efforts failed and the poor thing died inside ten minutes. Was it a mistake to open it? We didn’t know.

Three eggs were left, and Queenie clearly wasn’t going to be able to keep them warm. But Kevin had the brilliant idea of putting them under Blondie, who was also broody and had hunkered down in a nest box in the coop. I also sent an e-mail to Jen, who assured me that chicks were sometimes much hardier than you think they’re going to be, and told me not to give up hope.

And I didn’t, but it was close.

After Blondie had been sitting on the eggs for a day, we checked on her. She was exactly where we’d left her, but she had moved two of the three eggs out of the nest, and had only one under her. We checked the two eggs she’d rejected, and they were clearly long dead. How she knew is beyond me – and I think she did know, because the one she was sitting on was alive. There was a little hole, with a little beak! And I heard a little peep!

We wanted to make sure the chick bonded to Queenie, so we gave it some help getting out of its shell and put it in the brooder with its little sibling and surrogate-mother-to-be. And Queenie took to it. She tucked it under her wing and kept it warm. An hour later, it was almost dry, and looked comfortable.

But by evening it was dead.

If you had told me this story, I couldn’t have imagined being so sad about a three-ounce, just-born turkey, but I actually had to hold back tears. When we’d found that second chick alive, I’d been elated – yes, actually elated – that our chick would have a playmate, and that little death of an hours-old creature affected me as much as any livestock death ever has.

Partly, I mourned the failure. I suspect we made a number of mistakes, because all the eggs were fertilized and all had developed substantially. Was the brooder too cold? Did Queenie get enough to eat and drink? Should we have put the other eggs under Blondie as soon as we realized Queenie was having difficulty? Should we have watched more carefully so we could have taken corrective action more quickly? But, our role aside, I feel bad for this little chick. I don’t think animals, with the possible exception of cats, should be alone.

We will get more turkey poults from the feedstore when they get a batch in a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping everybody will be young enough for the flock to integrate successfully. And I am glad that we got at least one chick out of the effort – and a mighty cute little chick it is, too. But I wanted to do better. I really wanted to do better.

On the plus side, at least I’m not a surgeon.

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She’s got four more eggs to go (one broke), and we have yet to see whether she can teach them life’s basics, like eating, drinking, and avoiding being crushed by a well-meaning but clumsy mother surrogate.  But we have a poult.

We have a poult.

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We have, as we speak, a hen sitting on six turkey eggs. She’s been there a week and, with any luck, she’ll be there three more. She gets off the nest once or twice a day to take a bite of food and a sip of water, and to poop. She stretches her legs and wings, and then goes right back to the eggs, before they get cold. Kevin and I check on her a few times each day, and it’s always the same. There’s Queenie, hunkered down in the corner on a big pile of clean hay, completely covering the eggs.

I cannot fathom sitting still for a month. Just sitting! I keep wanting to bring her something to read.

Meanwhile, down the street at the herring run, there are animals going to the opposite extreme.

Herring, like salmon and shad, are anadromous fish. They live in salt water, but swim upstream in rivers to spawn in fresh water.

Swimming from the sea to the spawning grounds has always been a slog – it’s upstream the whole way – and we humans have made it tougher. There are places where our dams and culverts and streets block the route completely, and other places where they merely interfere with the commute. And there are fish ladders.

Our herring run

A herring can’t jump up a four-foot dam, but it can – astonishingly – jump up four one-foot dams. So, down the street from us, and at many other spots on the Cape, thoughtful citizens have built many small dams where one large dam used to be.

We’re having a record herring year, and Kevin and I went down to the run to watch the fish jump up the ladder. It’s an amazing feat of strength for a foot-long fish, and a testament to the power of the drive to reproduce.  So amazing, I went back with the handy-dandy underwater camera and took some video footage.

After watching the fish, in slow motion, hurtling themselves up a dam bigger than they are, I am forced to conclude that John Edwards just ain’t got nothing on a herring.

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No, strike that, my favorite video of all time is the one of the crow snowboarding. My second-favorite, though, is the otter and the dog.

Friend, enemy, or dinner?

We don’t have much cross-species success at our house. Our late lamented cat, Cat, never got on particularly well with the poultry. She investigated them in a rather predatory way when they were small, and ignored them studiously when they were big. Kevin thinks she wanted to make friends with them, but didn’t understand just how uphill a battle it is for a cat to make friends with a chicken. In any case, we didn’t get any cute pictures out of it.

Chickens? I don't see any chickens.

We did try one cross-species experiment last year. It just so happened we had a broody hen when we got our six Pekin ducklings, and we thought we could get Blondie to raise our ducks for us, but that was a non-starter.

This year, though, we’ve got another experiment brewing.

Our turkeys have a been a success two years in a row, and we’re planning to do them again. We were going to get poults from a neighbor who keeps a Standard Bronze pair, but her hen mysteriously stopped laying just as we needed her to step it up. We were just about resigned to getting poults from feed store when Kevin came across an interesting ad on Craigslist.

If you were out looking for fertilized turkey eggs, my guess is that you’d have to leave no stone unturned. But if you’re browsing the Farm + Garden section of Craigslist with no particular end in view, they’ll jump right out at you.

Turns out there’s a guy in Chatham who keeps a few turkeys – two hens and a tom – and he’s got eggs to spare. He’s not sure just what kind they are, but I don’t think that’s a problem. They look a little like our usual Standard Bronze, but a little smaller and a little browner (if you’ve got a guess, let me know).

And it just so happens that we have a broody hen. Queenie, a three-year-old Buff Orpington with a long history of regular broodiness, is just dying to hatch a few eggs.

Queenie's brooder. That's her, tucked away on the right.

I drove to Chatham and picked up a half-dozen eggs. We set up a brooder in the shed with plenty of hay and feeders for food and water. I was afraid Queenie might be suspicious of turkey eggs – they’re bigger and they might smell different – so I put her in there with some chicken eggs first. Once she’d settled happily in the nest, we subbed out the eggs.

That was two days ago.

A chicken doesn’t have a wide range of facial expressions, and I’m not at all sure it’s possible for a hen to look contented. I suspect Kevin and I are imagining, or maybe projecting, when we say that Queenie looks happy and fulfilled. I believe she’s one of those chickens that feels compelled to hatch eggs, and I hope that, by giving her this job to do, we’re making her life complete.

Don't you think she looks happy?

Turkey eggs incubate for 28 days, and we have no idea what to expect in 26 days. For all we know, the eggs will be duds and Queenie will want to sit on them until the world ends. If they hatch, I’m not sure she will recognize them as her own. If she does, I’m not sure whether she’ll want to – or know how to – take care of them once they start getting big, which is in about seven seconds.

But if we do end up with a chicken mothering a bunch of turkeys, I’ll make sure to make a video. Crowboarding, it’s not, but maybe it’ll give that otter a run for his money.

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This morning, I found one of them wandering around the yard. I put her in the coop with the rest of them, and my heart sank when I realized the other one wasn’t there, either. I did a circuit of the property with a scoop of corn, but couldn’t find her.

Kevin found her, eviscerated, under a bush about twenty feet from the coop.

I understand that, no matter what we undertake, mistakes are inevitable. If your undertaking is woodworking, you will, at some point, have boards that don’t quite meet at the corners. If it’s gardening, there will, one day, be stunted beets or wormy cabbages. Pushing the cooking envelope? Prepare yourself for the occasional take-out Chinese.

If it’s livestock you’re raising, something will die.

It’s happened to us before. One of our turkey poults drowned because we were careless. One of our chicks got picked off by a hawk. We lost a full-grown chicken to what we suspect was a liver overtaxed by chicken treats. And now this.

It was absolutely, positively, unequivocally my fault that our chicken got torn apart by what was probably a raccoon. It’s gut-wrenching.

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A Fry Baby is the world’s smallest deep fryer, and we got ours at a Yankee swap hosted by our friends Tommy and Ali, for which all the guests were instructed to bring something that’s been lying around the house for ages but never used. We brought a platter we’d bought at a yard sale a few years back, but somehow never warmed up to. But one couple brought this 1970’s-era miniature deep-fryer. Imagine! They had it for years, and it was still in the box! There’s no accounting for taste.

A Fry Baby, with jam for scale

It’s not really called a Fry Baby, but Kevin started calling it that and the name stuck. It was made before we had all these pesky safety regulations, and there’s no visible means of controlling the temperature of the oil, and no automatic shut-down if you forget to unplug it. It’s clearly a house fire waiting to happen, and perhaps it’s the element of danger that endears that little appliance to Kevin, who’s been deep-frying anything that’s stopped moving.

If you have a Fry Baby and you have chickens, it won’t be long before you start wondering just what would happen if you tried to deep-fry an egg. You’ll go to the Internet, and you’ll see all kinds of videos of people trying to do it, with results that range from failure to tragedy. Than you’ll eventually stumble on one of Jacques Pepin doing it, with perfect results.

The lesson you should take from this is that you should only deep-fry an egg if you’re Jacques Pepin. The lesson we took from it is that, hey, we can deep-fry an egg!

Pepin does it in a shallow pan of oil, and uses two wooden spoons to gather up the white as it spreads. But, before he does, he gives the critical piece of information. Make sure, he warns, to refrigerate your eggs so the whites don’t spread so much.

Anyone who’s ever opened an egg just out of the nest box knows that, the fresher the egg, the more coherent the white. As eggs age, they ooze carbon dioxide and the whites lose their viscosity.

So, we figured, if a cold egg is good, a fresh cold egg is better. So we heated the oil and, when it was hot, we took a couple eggs right out of the 38-degree chicken coop.

I broke an egg into a bowl, and slid it into the hot oil. I had my two wooden spoons ready, but I didn’t need them. The bubbles that rose up around the egg had the effect of keeping the white close to the yolk. I flipped the egg over mid-fry, but it’s not really necessary. There’s enough oil on the top that it cooks pretty evenly. When the white began to brown, about 45 seconds in, I took it out with a slotted spoon and drained it on a paper towel.

It was perfect, with whites completely set and a liquid yolk. There was a little crispy edge on the whites, like you get with a pan-fried egg.

The sandwich was better than the picture

Kevin had found another way to do it, and we tried that, too. You soft-boil an egg, peel it, and then coat it with flour, then eggs, then breadcrumbs. Then into the oil for about thirty seconds. It works great, but I don’t think it’s worth the extra work. Kevin, who can’t resist a crispy panko crust, disagreed.  Which is fine by me, because it means he may occasionally make one for me.

We made open-face sandwiches of crusty bread, goat cheese and bacon, sautéed beet greens and garlic, and topped them with the eggs. They were terrific.

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Which raises a very important question: What on earth is the point of an omelet?

Not for omelets, please.

I certainly see the point of mixing eggs with things like cheese and onions, mushrooms and ham. But it makes so much more sense to simply scramble all those things together.

It starts with the pan issue. If you’re making an omelet, you either have to use two pans, or use one pan serially, first to sauté the filling and then to cook the omelet. A scramble uses one pan, once. Cook your onions, add your sausage, finish with spinach, then mix in the eggs and cheese. No getting bowls dirty with fillings, no worrying about little bits in the pan that will interfere with the omelet-making.

But that advantage pales in comparison to the other, more substantive advantages. It’s not easy to make an omelet so the eggs are cooked properly all the way through. Generally, you end up with a tough skin on the outside and an undercooked layer on the inside. But, even if you get it perfect, the eating experience is suboptimal. You get bites of all egg and no filling around the outside, and bites with too much filling and not enough egg on the inside.

And then there’s the texture of the egg. Eggs are best when they’re cooked in soft, creamy curds, not firm, spongy pancakes. The egg in omelets is the equivalent of well-done meat.

As far as I can tell, there is one, and only one, advantage to omelets. An omelet is an opportunity to show off. You get to demonstrate your professional technique and slide the perfect yellow semi-circle out of the pan and on to the plate of a suitably grateful diner. Well, bully for you.

I’ll take the scramble, with eggs just barely set, and cheese distributed evenly throughout. Every bite has a little onion, a little sausage, a little spinach. I’ll take my scramble over your perfect yellow semi-circle any day. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that omelets top my list of over-rated foods, a list that also includes cupcakes, vegetable juice, marshmallows, and the downright disgusting Philly cheese steak.

I wonder if being an unyielding absolutist has anything to do with my not having all that many friends.

Nah.

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And you’re studying Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart to figure out how to pick your breeds.

Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart is indispensable for anyone considering keeping chickens. It’s a comprehensive list of breeds, with their origins, egg-laying potential, heat- and cold-tolerance, and notes on their behavior. I love Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart, and I encourage you to spend time reading about your many choices.

When it gets serious, though, and it’s time to actually buy chicks, I can help you cut through the indecision. There is one chicken breed that’s beak and wattles above all the others.

You will be tempted by the breeds, like Brahmas, with froo-froo feathers, but those feathers decorate chickens that have less in the way of brainpower than your average chicken – and that’s saying a lot.

Pretty is as pretty does

You will be tempted by the ones with the big floppy combs, like Leghorns, because they look like Elvis. But those combs get frostbite instantly.

I'm all shook up

You will be tempted by the ones that are docile and friendly and good with children, like Orpingtons, but you will get very tired of the frequency with which they go broody and have to be kept in a cage for a few days to be convinced that, no, they’re not going to hatch a brood of chicks.

You will be tempted by Araucanas and Ameraucanas, because they lay eggs in pastel shades of blue and green. And they do – every other Thursday. They are freeloaders.

The go-to chicken – drumroll, please – is the Rhode Island Red.

These plain brown hens are barnyard stand-outs. They lay big brown eggs, practically every day. They’re curious and engaged, but not needy or clingy. They don’t bully, and they don’t tolerate being bullied. They never get sick and they never go broody.

It makes sense that it should be that way. If you’re doing the selective breeding, it’s much harder to get feathers and combs and Easter eggs coupled with temperament, egg production, and disease resistance than temperament, egg production, and disease resistance all by themselves. Focus on what’s important, and you get a plain brown hen.

George

The favorite in our flock is George, who’s always the first to come investigate when we’re working in the yard. She’s friendly and calm, and she hangs out near us, scratching for bugs and clucking. If she decides nothing interesting is going on, she rejoins the rest of the flock.

There’s a lot to be said for a mixed flock, with its quotient of stupid ones, flighty ones, and broody ones. We love our motley crew and, if you’re just now venturing into chicken-keeping, I’d encourage you to go that route. It makes watching them and caring for them more interesting, and it sure makes counting them easier. As much as we like them, I don’t think we’ll ever have a flock that’s all Rhode Island Reds. But we’ll never have a flock without them.

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Until now, we’ve had a pretty good record protecting chickens from predators. This year, we lost our runt chick, Rocky, to a hawk, but that’s our only casualty. It’s possible that Baldie, a full-grown buff Orpington, died of post-traumatic stress disorder about six weeks after she had the feathers off her back ripped off by what might have been the same hawk, but we don’t count that as a predator death.

We’d like to keep our streak alive, so we kept an eye on the gnawed spot. It didn’t seem to be getting any bigger, so we didn’t worry much.

Then, last week, we walked around to the backside of the coop. There, one of the battens had been almost eaten through. A two-foot section had been scratched and bit to splinters, and the nails were sticking out.

This couldn’t be allowed to continue. I decided that whatever was trying to get at my chickens was going to be in for a rude shock. I took one of the super-duper fiery habaneros from our hydroponic system, and put it in the Vita-Mix with some water and cornstarch to make a slurry. Birds don’t taste capsaicin, so the peppers wouldn’t bother the chickens, but most mammals (I think) are pepper-sensitive, so I figured I’d be able to deter whatever it was that trying to get in.

I painted the exposed wood with my slurry, set up the VarmintCam, and waited.

The first couple of nights, I got nothing. And then, when I checked it this morning, the drama unfolded:

At 9:12 PM, a rat comes and cases the joint. He walks around, and maybe takes a tentative gnaw at the wood.

At 9:51, he gets a real taste of the habanero. Or at least that’s what I picture.  Doesn’t that look like a rat trying to get the taste of pepper out of his mouth?

At 6:26 AM, he’s back. Or maybe it’s his friend. Either way, he’s not what I’m looking for.  A reatively small rodent couldn’t eat away a 1×2 piece of wood three feet off the ground unless he invited seven of his friends and they stood on each other’s shoulders.  While I wouldn’t put this past a rat (I don’t put anything past rats), I didn’t see any evidence of it.  

The next morning, at 3:36 AM, I got a more probable culprit.

Two minutes later, he’s back with his friend. These could be the same two who were robbing our turkey feeder a few weeks back.

But then, two minutes after that! Could this be a picture of a raccoon in pain?

The only other raccoon appearance that night came at 4:51 AM, and if ever I’ve seen trepidation written across a a furry face, this is it.  He never came any closer.

I think maybe, just maybe, he’s reconsidering.  Or maybe not.  In any case, it’s reassuring that they seem to be after the chicken feed, which is directly inside the gnawed batten, and not the chickens themselves.

I know better than to chalk up a victory in the raccoon wars; the best I can say is that I didn’t suffer a shattering defeat. But they’ll be back. Raccoons always come back.

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First we had our sick chicken, Flopsy, who couldn’t seem to stand on her own two feet. Then we had my father, hospitalized with an EKG that looked like one of those seismic meters during an earthquake. Then the cat, who’s become decidedly indoorsy in her old age, disappeared on, of all things, a rainy night. To cap it, I went out this morning and counted five turkeys instead of the usual six.

Flopsy, much improved

Today, though, all is well. Although Flopsy is not one hundred percent, she’s doing much better. She started eating, drinking, and clucking, and stopped nestling down in the straw lining her cage. We took her out today and reunited her with the flock. She’s still slow on the draw, but we have high hopes for her recovery.

My father is out of the hospital, pacemaker/defibrillator successfully installed. He can boast a steady pulse of 60, something he hasn’t seen in at least a decade. His career as a porn star, however, is definitely over.

The cat simply reappeared, pissed on the floor, and left again. We’re thinking it’s the beginning of the end. It is, at any rate, way past the end of the beginning.

And the turkeys? Well, seems I can’t count. When Kevin came to check them mid-morning, they were all there, present and accounted for.

It was the trifecta of crises: livestock, pet, family. I’m happy to report that we’re all stable and optimistic.

The car, though, is making an ominous creaking noise.

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