The year’s second batch of bluebirds hatched early this week. There were four eggs, and now three hungry babies.

I found these little guys high in the big azaleas by the garage. It’s been a challenge to get a good photo of them—when disturbed they tuck their heads into the nest and flatten their bodies. Here’s their nest ten days earlier, for those of you who are working on your nest/egg i.d. skills:

This is the first cardinal nest that I’ve found, and it’s right in my yard. As everyone’s sounding alarms about the decline of our native songbird populations, because of habitat loss and home and agricultural pesticide and herbicide use, I am very happy to be fighting back by maintaining a property that supports birds’ needs well enough to encourage them to breed here. To some people a bird’s nest is just a bird’s nest, but to me it’s a sign that I must be doing something right on this tiny scrap of land I’ve chosen to take care of.

As expected, the eggs under the broody hen began hatching this morning. I was outside doing chores and cleaning up the garage for a long time and heard nothing. I finally peeked under the hen and all these teetering yellow fluffballs started peeping. My heart almost burst from a combination of gratitude, excitement, and awe.

I can’t really explain this emotion I get from hatching chicks, but it’s addictive and drug-like and makes me feel better than few other things. I suspect it stems from bearing witness to the divine, to seeing something so commonplace and taken-for-granted as a chicken egg turn, in just twenty days, into a walking, chirping, perfectly formed and bright-eyed living being.

I don’t consider myself particularly religious, and I don’t have children and probably never will. But I imagine that what I feel watching these chicks develop in their eggs and hatch is a microcosm of both experiences. A microcosm of a miracle. So infinitesimal, and so huge.

Tonight I snuck a peek inside some of the eggs incubating under the broody hen in the garage. It is much warmer tonight than last Sunday, so I felt comfortable taking a few photos to show you the developing chicks. Again, for a candler I just use a Mag-Light flashlight with the end duct taped but for a dime-sized hole. Here’s what the embryos look like at 14 days:

I didn’t candle all the eggs, but I did enough to determine that I have at least a few little Wheaten Ameraucanas (baby Coras) in development. The pale blue eggs are much easier to see into than brown eggs. If you want to see what the embryos look like inside at this stage, click here.

I didn’t make out too much movement, but that’s typical for this stage of development. Each embryo should soon be flipping around in its shell, pointing its head toward the rapidly-shrinking air cell (the bright, clear blue area in egg) in preparation for breaking through it with their egg tooth at hatching.

There are nine possibly viable eggs left under the hen. Props to the still-unnamed broody hen for keeping all these eggs warm during some seriously cold temperatures last week when it was well below freezing on her nest. If all continues to go well, we might have some St. Patrick’s Day chicks!

All that pottering in the garden yesterday was barely enough to keep me warm. To get the blood flowing I split some kindling, enough to get a few more wood stove fires going. I tore into a few rounds of of choke cherry cut this time last year when I cleared my wood line. It felt really good to split this beautiful red wood that I knew when it was still a living tree, festooned with honeysuckle and girded with wild brambles.

I was heavily supervised by the quality control team, which didn’t seem too perturbed when an errant piece of cherry clocked one of them in the head. That Griz (rooster, lower right) really keeps an eye on everything. He’s a personable rooster if I ever saw one—maybe because as an embryo he was rescued from a refrigerator and I held him in my hand within seconds of him kicking free of his eggshell?

That makes me think of one of the most unexpectedly wonderful, and sometimes heartbreaking, aspects of this whole farm life. Whether it’s working to turn a living tree into fuel to heat my house or raising generations of homegrown chickens, it is beautiful to see cycles, and lifecycles, complete themselves under my watch.

I started stacking the kindling and this one, my English shadow, maneuvered himself right into portrait position and smiled for the camera with no direction from me. The Cora photobomb was similarly unscripted.

Speaking of Cora, she’s another country heard from with yesterday’s egg collection. Along with two small green eggs, and one large brown Dahlia egg, I found a pointy blue egg that could only have come from Cora. It’s one of less than ten that she’s ever laid in her life, which makes each of her eggs worth probably $100 when you figure in the cost of feed. If I hadn’t felt this little dear die and resurrect under my fingers, if I hadn’t become intimately acquainted with every muscle and vein of her skinless head as I fought to keep infection and fly infestation at bay, she would have long been Craigslisted by now.

But Cora still here, and once in a blue moon she lays a pointy turquoise egg. To my appreciation and great delight.

Another olive egger pullet has come online. Yesterday I got two olive pullet eggs, and I figured out that their mother Dahlia is responsible for the big brown egg. She’s setting a good example!

These little olive eggs are so amazing. They’re like the eggs of some exotic species. And today I got one more! The pullets are twenty-one weeks old this week. Eventually the pullets should produce full-size eggs—these are just their starter eggs. Thus I am especially appreciating them because I know they are a fleeting phenomenon.

Something I never knew before I had chickens is that a hen will consistently lay eggs of basically the same shape and color, with the same amount of speckling. If you pay attention, this makes it easy to know which bird is laying which eggs, and how often, and gives you a good idea of a particular hen’s productivity. For example, I can tell from looking at the photo above that different pullets are laying the olive eggs, even if I didn’t know they were both laid on the same day, as one egg is browner with speckles, and the other is a clear, lighter olive. And the first egg I got this week was laid by the pullet that produces speckled olive eggs.

I had a completely unexpected surprise today as I was feeding the chickens. I glanced into their nest box and saw this:

Ever since the girls quit laying for the winter—many weeks ago—I’d stopped checking their nest box for eggs. But it turns out that even without any supplemental light, and headed into the darkest days of winter, at least two chickens are making an effort. One, laying the large brown egg, is either Dahlia or her Black Copper Marans sister. And the other laying chicken is a homegrown olive egger pullet, which is a total surprise as the chicks were born so late this summer that I hadn’t expected any of the four young pullets to lay before next spring.

This little olive pullet egg is the first egg from a chicken born and raised right here on Bonafide Farm. She’s a second-generation Bonafide bird, and a science experiment begun two years ago when I raised her Wheaten Ameraucana (blue egg-laying) and Black Copper Marans (dark brown egg-laying) parents with the hope that their genes would combine to produce a chicken that lays an olive egg.

And today, with this first beautiful olive pullet egg, I can claim success. Well, as much as one can having not actually laid the egg myself!

For more on how this pullet came to be, head on back to July 2013…

I had a very intense encounter with an insect today. I was cleaning up the front garden when I looked down and saw a bright green praying mantis at the base of the porch. It was clutching an identifiable insect, and I had obviously disturbed its head-first meal.

The mantis watched my every move, swiveling its triangle head to stare at me with all-seeing eyes. I’ve experienced this before with mantises, but this time the mantis began to move exactly like a mammal. It tucked its bug under its arm like a football and carried it deeper under the porch, eyes on me the entire time. I had the eerie sensation of watching a wolf drag a deer haunch deeper into a cave. This insect had caught a meal, and there was nothing I could do that would scare it from abandoning food.

I am so used to being around easily frightened birds and insects and even large mammals, all of which usually drop whatever they’re doing in my presence, that the deliberateness with which this mantis protected its quarry while strategically repositioning was nothing short of astonishing. The intelligence of its deliberate movement gave me chills.

And I was happy to for it to go on its well-fed way. Praying mantises are treated as gods around here for the benefits they bestow upon the garden by eating all sorts of insect pests. I’ve gone so far as to clip mantis egg cases from shrubs in the about-to-be-bushogged field, only to relocate them to a safe place in the garden. And today, after seeing this mantis off, I found a mantis egg case in the mint patch by the garden. Every scraggly stem, but for the one that bore this egg case, was clipped and carted to the compost pile.

Ever since April I’ve been hoping one of my hens would go broody and hatch some chicks. Why? Because baby chicks are some of the things that make life worth living, of course. That and I am seriously curious to see what kind of crosses would result from my Wheaten Ameraucana rooster over Black Copper Marans, Lavender Orpingtons, a Barred Olive Egger, and whatever mix Lilac and Iris are (Black Australorps and Mottled Java, according to their breeder).* Iris and Lilac are in their second year of lay, and it’s good to have younger pullets coming along to take over egg-laying duties. And finally, now that I am free-ranging the birds outside most days, I anticipate that at some point I will have predator loss and don’t want to be caught out with not enough laying hens to keep eggs in the fridge.

A broody hen is a wonderful creature because she manages all the care, feeding, and warming of young chicks. If you have ever raised chicks, you know that it’s a big, messy job to monitor their brooder temperature, clean up after them, keep them safe from drafts and predators, and make sure they get enough to drink and eat. So I told myself that the only way I would raise chicks this year was if a hen did all the work for me!

Last year Iris went unbreakably broody and I ended up giving her a clutch of fertile guinea eggs. She brooded them in a dog crate in the garage and hatched out and raised nine guineas. Here’s one at several weeks old, posing for its CraigsList portrait:

Last night, right in the middle of one of my usual nightmares, I was awoken by a terrifying sound. It was coming from directly in front of and below my bed, and sounded like heavy footsteps right on my front porch. I lay silent, blind eyes open in the dark. Then I heard it again, several loud thumps, booted feet just outside.

Cold adrenaline filled my veins in the time it took to sit up and and turn on the light by the bed. It was just after 1:00 a.m. I opened my nightstand and took out the can of pepper spray that’s always there. For an ironic second I remembered the recent day I visited my friend Aaron and he showed me a small Glock pistol, suggesting it would be a good thing to have stashed in a bedroom drawer. He, like most of the men who know how I live out here, wants to see me armed.

I crept out of bed and over to the “oh, shit” floodlight switch on the wall. I’d asked for this switch to be installed when the house was built for just this sort of event, so if I was ever feeling threatened I could flood the yard with light without leaving my bedroom. I turned on the lights, praying they’d be enough to frighten this person off my porch, and stood listening.

It was quiet.

I moved to the top of the stairs, and undid the safety clasp on the pepper spray.

Still quiet.

I steeled myself for a confrontation, and walked down the stairs and over to the front door. I looked out the sidelight into the night.

And there was a raccoon, doubled over at the end of the walkway, eating something. And instantly I knew what it was. I’d been using some heavy glass eggs in the chickens’ nesting box to try to induce one of them to go broody. I’d removed them yesterday because a real chicken egg had cracked, coating the glass eggs with raw yolk. I’d stashed these eggs in a planter on the front porch until I could take them in to wash, and of course I forgot about them.

So this raccoon had managed to get a glass egg out of the planter, no doubt creating the crashing sounds I heard on the porch, and was trying to eat it. My glass egg, which by the way, was very pretty and kind of pricey and sold as a decorative objet at fancy boutique store downtown.

I opened the door, and the raccoon started running down the driveway. With my glass egg. Dammed if that little bastard was going to give me the fright of the year and make off with my home decor. I ran after the raccoon, down the driveway in my pajamas and sock feet, making my best frightening noises.

And when the raccoon got to the road, he dropped my glass egg and disappeared into the tall grass. Triumphant, and oh, so relieved, I picked up the raccoon-spit covered egg, returned home, and deposited it with the others in a bowl, inside.

Then I went back to bed, where I couldn’t sleep from the stress hormones still zinging in my bloodstream and the nausea they induced. I lowered the air conditioning in the room by four degrees, and opened a fairly technical book on perennial pruning to try to bore my mind quiet. My cat jumped on the bed and sat watching me, her toes touching my flank, as she conducted some of my fear energy away.

And when my eyes began to close, she jumped off the bed, I turned off the light, and we both went back to sleep.