by H H "Hub" Brown

  While looking through some old photos yesterday, I came upon some old ones that took me back a long ways. Someone had snapped a picture of Ag down in the basement of the barn and she was trying to cajole an old Banty hen into coming down lower so Ag could get her hands on her and pet her. Later on I found another snap of the old Banty hen's mate. Whereas the old hen was a rather somber color, the rooster was a beautiful bird. Both had names then, but I don't remember them now. 

 I do remember one old hen had stolen her nest up in the hay mow. She didn't really make a nest, she just squatted down between two bales of hay and started piling up her eggs. By the time she decided to start setting, she had 18 eggs in a sort of pile. With no protection from the cold at the bottom of the pile, she was only able to keep four eggs warm enough to hatch. 

 We learned all this after the chicks were hatched. Because I was using hay from the mow on the other side of the barn, I had never noticed her huddled there on that mound of eggs. The reason I did find her was by accident. 

 I was doing chores on the ground floor and I heard a thumping sound on the floor above me. I ran upstairs and found the old hen pecking a little baby kitten. He was just old enough to be able to crawl and had gotten too close to the nest. That's when I discovered the nest - the eggs, rather for there was no nest but I found the dried skin of another kitten that had probably got too close to her eggs. It looked as though she had spread the skin to protect the eggs from the cold. 

 I was telling Gerry Shirley about it and he found another dried kitten skin. We never found the bodies or bones of the kittens. So whether the hen ate them or something else ate them, we don't know. 

 As soon as the four chicks were feathered out, she got them to roosting and she went back to laying another setting of eggs. This time she only laid 10 eggs and then she started setting. She hatched 10 chicks and when they were able to follow her around she would traipse them all over the place. 

 There must have been something distinctive about her voice for I've see her call her brood of chicks and go right under a cow's nose and cull through their grain, and the cow would wait for them to get out of the way. When this brood was old enough to roost she enlisted the help of her old boyfriend.

 Billy Welch had nailed some horizontal sticks to hang the horse's harnesses on and these sticks were where they all went to roost. She would have two on each side of her on the stick under her feathers and one on each shoulder and he would have one on each side and one on each shoulder. She had fighting cock blood and Bantam blood in her breeding and he was straight Bantam. She made me think of some other birds that were a lot bolder than I ever suspected. 

 A policeman friend up in Endicott had given me a pair of ring-necked pheasants and I had built a run in back of the stone house. All at once they were eating twice as much grain as before. One morning when I went to feed them, there laid two full-grown rats that they had killed.

 Another thing I learned about pheasants. When the baby birds were feathered out they could come sailing at their fence made of two-inch poultry fence, fold their wings, and sail right through.