I hope all the maimed chicken photos aren’t turning anyone’s stomach. It’s just that I find it fascinating that a bird that I thought I watched die in front of me not only lived, but has managed to live with no skin covering her skull for almost a month.

Further, after Cora’s injury I did lots of internet searching for “chicken head wound” and other, even more disgustingly descriptive terms. I was trying to gauge her prognosis compared with similar injuries, and just about everything I read reported that her odds weren’t good. The wound was so extensive, it was summer with its increased risk of fly-borne infection, and on and on.

But, I am here to report that Cora is still alive and seems more fit than I would have ever hoped. Here she is last weekend. You can still see what’s still exposed of her skull—it’s that bone seam near the top of her head. At this point her left ear has grown back on to her head as the wound closed.

And here she is today. The wound is filling in from the edges with nice pink new skin. She’s even regrowing feathers, on her head and where her wing was bloodied.

As you can see, her skull is almost completely covered.

I have doctored her every night since the attack with Neosporin, and sometimes in the morning. My gut is telling me that keeping the scabs moist is helping with the healing as well as deterring flies. Guess it must be working…

Yesterday my coworker told me two dogs broke in to his goat pen and killed his three pet Nigerian dwarf goats. He came home from work and as he pulled up to the barn wondered why all his goats were lying down in the middle of the day. He’d bottle raised these animals from babies and had them many years, pampering them with home-built playgrounds made from cedar he’d milled himself.

This is a tough old Southern farmboy who walks with the swagger of a man used to being able to outmuscle or outsmart anyone he comes across, a sixty-five year old Vietnam vet, and yet his eyes skittered from mine and his hands busied themselves patting papers on his desk when he said, “They were so tame… They’d follow you around just like puppies.”

He left their bodies lying where they fell hoping to entice the dogs—which were feeding on the carcasses and had run as he’d approached—to return. Because the dogs were wearing collars, he got the county sheriff to set live traps. But he’s also got his gun by the door loaded with, “something that’s not going to just sting their asses,” and the sheriff has agreed to look the other way if he’s called to collect empty traps.

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Tucker spent all yesterday evening fussed up over something in the woods. He worried up and down his invisible fence line until it was dark and time to go inside. When I let him out around 11, he ran straight to the woods and barked and barked. After a few minutes of that I called him and he flew in the door, the most keyed up I’ve ever seen him. His tail was sticking straight up and bristly, and he kept nudging aside the kitchen door curtain to look out at the night. When that didn’t get me to open the door, he ran to the front door and stared out the sidelight, running back to bore his eyes into mine with the gravity of this message. He was clearly telling me something was going on Out There that was offending the order of his kingdom.

I know too much about what can happen in the woods in the dark to let him back outside, so I waited until he calmed down and put him to bed.

Then in the middle of the night I awoke to a bark directly under my open bedroom window. As I surfaced to consciousness I heard other canine voices join in chorus, so close to the house that I could follow each distinct animal, and I heard them pacing. These weren’t the neighbor’s dogs, nor the hounds at the hunt club behind my house. The noise and its proximity chilled my spine. It didn’t sound like coyotes, which I frequently hear up on the mountain. These sounded like dogs.

And then as quickly as it began the chorus died and the normal night noises flowed back to fill the space left by the canine sounds.

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No harm came from this late-night visit but I couldn’t fall back asleep. As I was attempting to reenter the stream I remembered a conversation I’d had with Tucker’s breeder as I was debating the merits of neutering a male dog. She told me that where she lives, in Ohio, she’s known packs of coyotes to lure unneutered male dogs out of their yards. Then the whole pack gangs up and kills the dog.

It might be time to get that shotgun.

Amazingly enough, the scalped pullet has lived for a week past her attack. She looks like hell, but she’s not dead.

She is entirely missing the skin and muscle from the top of her head down to where her neck joins her body. I don’t know how it’s possible that a creature can survive without so much skin, but she is. Each night I squirt her with Bactine spray and coat her entire wound in Neosporin. The first two days were horrible. After disinfecting my hands I packed the cream into the cavity between her remaining neck skin and muscle just like you would stuff herb butter into a chicken you were preparing to roast. For a few days last week I thought her left ear would peel off because it was just sort of flapping in the breeze. I could feel the terrible pain she was in and often doubted my decision to try to save her.

But, she’s eating and drinking and doing chickeny things with her brothers, and her wing and back wounds, which didn’t involve skin loss, have scabbed over and healed. So we’re taking it one day at a time and I’m remaining vigilant for any signs of infection.

Oh, and I have named this little girl Cora, after the heroine in The Last of the Mohicans, a story not short on scalpings.

Suffice it to say that integrating my youngest birds into the flock didn’t go well.

To back up, in early June, after I got rid of the guineas, I bought a bunch of chicks from a breeder near Richmond. I was really going for her Wheaten Ameraucanas, which lay a turquoise blue egg. But she had some Black Copper Marans and beautiful Lavender Orpingons and threw a Barred Olive Egger in the mix. All would have been well but the Ameraucanas were a couple of weeks younger than the others. Though the breeder said they’d all be okay together, it wasn’t until the Ameraucanas started dying of malnutrition that I realized the older birds were outcompeting them for food.

So I separated the bunches, put the older birds in the coop and the Ameraucanas in a coop in the garage. I had three cockrels and one pullet—already not good odds for blue eggs. Yesterday I put the Ameraucanas into the coop with the older birds, and Lilac and Iris, and watched them very closely. Chickens are known for attacking interlopers, and I was wary. But the young birds seemed to be holding their own, even standing up to Lilac in battle. I checked them first thing this morning, and every couple of hours through the day. I know that adding new chickens to a flock is fraught with peril, which was why I was so reluctant to split the babies up in the first place.

Then around two today I checked again and found my Ameraucana pullet missing most of her head and neck. She’s a pulpy mess, pecked down to the membrane surrounding her skull and wounded again on her back. The cockerels are also all injured, though none as much as the pullet, and she’s the only one I was planning to keep.

I snatched the four young ones out of the big coop and moved them back into their garage coop, and carried the pullet inside. Her blood ran through my fingers as I tried to page through my chicken book one-handed, searching for first-aid advice. I didn’t want to wash her wounds because they were so extensive and I feared that if they started bleeding again I’d lose her. She was in shock, and when I set her in the sink to squirt her with Bactine her eyes closed and her body deflated like a balloon and I thought I was watching her die.

I picked her up, knowing that the more handling I did of her in this state the worse it would be, and returned her to her brothers, who all got Bactine showers. They are all resting now, drinking water. I expected the pullet to be dead this afternoon, but at last check she was alive. Here’s hoping she pulls through though I don’t have high hopes.

All this despite trying my best to be cautious about this move. At least I am not surprised. But what gets me is that in the recent fetishization of chicken keeping, no one mentions days like these. It’s all tweely decorated pastel-colored coops and sweet little names for “the girls,” and yet, here we are. The girls are brutal, the boys are fierce, and between the blood and the shit and the flies there’s rarely much that’s pretty about it. I am tired of the propaganda, such as last week’s piece in the New York Times, “Tour de Cluck Boomlet, a Survey of Chicken Coops,” that paints only the positive side of keeping chickens.

There’s a dark side, but in mainstream media no one is talking about it.

Since three p.m. today:

I’ve jury-rigged an outdoor pen for my fifteen chickens, fighting to pound t-posts into rock-hard dry ground though I wanted to give up, and my reward was watching young birds safely explore the outdoors and find their way back into the coop at sundown.

I have a story told in cuneiform on my shoulder, written by the claws of a terrified young cockrel who sought shelter on my body when I tried to integrate him with a flock of larger birds.

I’ve cut my loses in the garden, accepted that a week without power and water plus half a month’s vacation neglect during a drought added to hundreds of marauding squash bugs equals a big fat zero for my garden. I ripped out three rows of pumpkins, eggplant, kale, chard, zucchini, beets, and radishes.

I ferried three heaping wheelbarrows full of my former garden to the compost pile, then came back and took my flamethrower to the insect-infested soil.

I dumped another wheelbarrow filled with fly-infested chicken manure on the compost pile. Green, brown, green, brown. I felt the heat rising as I wrenched the wheelbarrow end over end, green briars drawing blood on my legs.

I took six brushloads of hair out of my unkempt dog and learned that painful grooming is more easily tolerated when done by a pen full of young chickens. It’s like t.v. for dogs.

At nine p.m. I came inside to shower, and when I peeled off my sweated bikini top it left dirt outlines on my skin.

Two weeks ago I was in London wandering the Damien Hirst exhibit at the Tate Modern, appropriately grossed out by his maggoty cow head and formaldehyded farm animals. It makes me wonder: If that’s considered art, then what is it that I do?

As I mentioned in my last post, one of my reasons for getting rid of my guineas was that I had new developments among my poultry stock. Since May 27 my hen Iris has been vigilantly tending 13 guinea eggs in her own little maternity coop in the garage.

Iris has gone broody at least four times this spring, and I finally decided to indulge her instincts. For one week I very unscientifically saved guinea eggs in a carton in my guest bedroom closet, turning them every day, or when I remembered, until I had a baker’s dozen. Then I set up a little house for Iris and gave her the eggs. She marched right into her homemade cardboard nestbox like she’d owned it all along, and there she’s remained for the past three weeks.

And is she ever serious about the task at hand. The only way I’ve gotten her to eat is to lift her off the nest and offer a palmful of scratch feed. She always goes for the corn kernels first, and then if she can shake off the fog long enough she’ll peck at the seeds or maybe take a drink of water. After a few bites she considers herself sated and zombie-walks back on the nest, rolling and tucking her eggs under her as she settles back to the task at hand. Her single-minded determination is really humbling to see. I know we’re only talking about a chicken here, but to so strongly feel a desire to fulfill a single purpose must be so wonderful freeing.

Guinea eggs incubate for 28 days, which means that if all goes well, we may have a hatch next Sunday on June 24. I don’t have high hopes for this whole reproductive foray, as my method of collecting and storing the eggs was less than professional, and I have no way of knowing if they were even fertile. I really just wanted to let Iris live out her dream, and if I end up with baby guineas, well, I guess I will be back in the guinea business.

My five remaining guineas left the farm tonight in a crate in the back of a rusty black Ford pickup. They’re on to a new life as pets of a poultry-loving, 80-some-year-old woman, my coworker’s mother.

Although their departure makes way for new developments, I am sad to see them go. They caused me no end of stress and heartbreak with their ironic mix of idiotic wildness, and yet I already miss them. Watching them travel about the farm in their dapper little flock was entertaining and usually hilarious.

Some people see guineas as hideous dinosaurs, but I think they are extremely beautiful in their dappled coats and with their turquoise heads. I think my favorite part of owning guineas is what most people mention most hating about them—their noise. Their raucous alarm screams always alerted me to strange goings-on, and their standard “buck-wheat” calls, which I could hear even from my bed at night, told me all was well with the farm. And my favorite—their soft and murmury singing when contented—will always be one of my sweetest sounds. Tonight it’s too quiet around the yard and doesn’t quite sound like home.

The five baby bluebirds are still alive and busy outgrowing their nesting box. I have to open the box very slowly so they don’t tumble out. Mr. and Mrs. Bluebird have begun divebombing me as I check the nest—so I do it really fast. I am glad they are upping the security as their babies get closer to fledging.

Sneaking a stretch out the open door.

Look at that cute little tail! Had to tuck this little foot back inside before shutting the box.

Mama bluebird appears to have found the time, while raising this brood, to also lay a single egg in the nest.

In less joyful bird news, I lost a guinea hen today. For the past week she’d been looking off, and had been getting picked on by her coopmates. I set her up in her own crate in the garage with medicated electrolyte water, and she just kind of sat around, crying herself hoarse for her flock. Today I let her loose with her buddies as they free-ranged, thinking the sun and fresh food and companionship would do her good.

Well, in a couple of hours I found her dead right by the coop. I picked her up and chucked her in the woods for the foxes and their kits.

It stinks to lose a charge, but in some ways I am grateful to not have to mess with a sick animal, particularly a guinea as I am on the fence about whether they are earning their keep and I’m devising potential exit strategies for the flock. The only thing that really makes me sad is my mom says she likes the guinea eggs, and now I have only one hen left. The era of the guinea may be coming to an end at Bonafide Farm.

Unlike the chickens, which will return to the coop to lay their eggs, the guineas just drop them wherever. Including in the middle of the driveway! When you’ve gotta go…

“I love her.” Reminds me of one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons.

Tuck’s in love with a chicken. Iris, to be exact. She’s gone broody again, and this weekend, in between searching for “fertilized eggs” on CraigsList—something I never in a million years thought I’d do—I did everything I could to snap her out of it. With the guineas free ranging and her sister, Lilac, needing the nest box to lay her egg, it was quite an exercise in strategy to keep Iris out of the coop and away from the nest box. After a morning of repeatedly lifting her off of the nest, I gave up and held her in a bucket of cold water up to her wattles. If anyone out there is listening, I want you to know that I want to be remembered like this: dangling an overheated broody hen in a five-gallon bucket while raucous guineas churn about me and a young dog dances thinking this is the best action he’s seen since I dropped the venison sausage on the floor.

After her bath I tossed Iris in a cage and set her near the coop. For the rest of the afternoon Tuck took it upon himself to offer her companionship and perhaps consolation. Each time I came outside he was lying right next to her, calm as could be. I think he’s in love.