Overall, this was an exciting day on the farm. Phil got up first thing and moved the hen hut back onto our land. I don't know if he even counted birds to see what the loss was, but he moved them back to safety.
Around 9am, Butch came with his amazing piece of equipment to take out six piers that were poured in error last year. With six huge chunks of concrete in the ground, Phil had tried for months to figure out how to tie them in to his design for the metal building's foundation, but finally gave up. The piers needed to go. And since the idea of digging them out, two feet down, with just a backhoe seemed like a bad idea, we had Butch come.
He pushed one over in about two seconds.
Phil wrapped an 8' cord around the middle.
Butch hoisted the concrete with a tong, and set them down in a clover patch.
Six times, and done.
Next, Butch went and got his bulldozer. With a whole lot of lumber stuck on a trailer at the bottom of the hill, we needed a stronger piece of equipment to help the dually pull it up slope. Phil said later that he kept the truck in neutral up much of the slope: it was doing nothing.
Somehow the front fender deformed: maybe Phil put the truck in drive too late.
Then Butch regraded our driveway. That's a hard thing to capture with a camera, but a great thing to feel as we drive. We shouldn't bottom out anymore.
After lunch, Butch came back and he and Phil did something awesome in terms of laying out the foundation dimensions. Butch knew what he was doing, and Isaiah and Jadon helped and observed the air gun and the general surveying.
After 14 months, we are actually starting progress on getting up the metal building!
To allow all the traffic around the farm, Phil parked the van in the midst of some clover. I thought it looked like an ad until Jadon pointed out that there was a missing hubcap. (Our last tire rotation didn't get the hub seated quite right, and after losing it and finding it a couple of times, we lost it altogether.)
Then we decided to go to Monticello. After three years of living within a half hour, we finally went to see Thomas Jefferson's house. After the house tour and a leisurely stroll around the grounds, we went out for dinner. It was almost 8:30 when we got home, rapidly growing dark.
Phil was surprised to see that there were no chickens roosting in the hen house. Apparently the daily moves had discombobulated them too much. Seven hens or so were around their roosting site for the last several months. But we figured the remaining birds must have headed back to their house next door.
We found no living birds. Two dead carcasses and a good many collections of feathers. Morning will tell whether more birds hid in the trees, or whether our cock led his flock into the jaws of death.
I remember raging, when we first moved here, over how perpetual vigilance was required lest an animal die. And I suppose there is a part of me that wonders, "Really? Did half our flock really have to die because we wanted to take a few hours away from the farm, just for sightseeing and fun?"
But we've seen so many beautiful things that we certainly didn't cause or control. A calf born yesterday without intervention. A bee swarm when I just happened to be outside to see it. An overall lack predation for the last three years.
And there's been plenty of catastrophes even when we were as diligent as we knew how to be.
Had Phil been sawmilling and I making dinner around the farm, would we have noticed the birds walk away to their death? Possibly not. And that would be, perhaps, more guilt-inducing.
Have I become jaded towards death? Perhaps some. But we had a great day. We enjoyed our time off the farm. Should the loss of some birds overshadow all that came before?
I would have preferred to come home to a happy hen hut full of layers, but to come home to a few survivalist hens in the trees and some ecstatic puppies ... there's worse things.
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