Egg farming in California

CHAPTER I.

Boyhood Days

MY earliest recollections are of the hens my mother kept on the old farm in Indiana. Well do I remember the medley of colors and varieties in our flock of barnyard fowl. I played among them and always had my pets. I call to mind one old black hen that to my childish mind seemed almost human. My childish fancy made me a chicken and I played chicken until the hens themselves looked upon me as one of them. How often have I made a nest and sat on it like biddy until my youthful patience was exhausted. Why, I even could understand hen language and talk to them with as much understanding as they could talk to each other. When I clucked the whole flock would come running for the dainty morsel without hesitation. Hen nature is very interesting to a boy and well I knew all the moods and habits of biddy.

As I grew larger I naturally had charge of the setting hens in the Spring time, and the joy of bringing out the first brood of fluffy chicks is beyond words. With our motley mongrel breeds in those days the little chicks presented all colors. Some were black as crows. Some had a white spot on top of the head with black back and breast. Some had brown stripes down their back. Others were spotted, or white or grey or red.



I can see now the crude coops I used to make by driving sharp stakes in the ground .alongside of the garden fence and making little pens about three feet square in each of which was a nest box and each covered with a shabby clapboard roof. As the hens became broody I tried them out in their respective coops and if they "set" would place the .eggs under them late in the evening. I tell you life was pretty full for a boy when these hens began to hatch out the most beautiful fluffy chicks and they had their first feed. Soon they would run outside through the slatted front, out into the wide, wide world. With what fatherly pride a boy watches the little ones scamper here and there in search of insect life. .One can sit for hours and watch them scurry and scratch and flop their little wings. They have no lessons to learn, no dead language to deaden their animal spirits, but joy of existence is complete. Their lifework is already laid out and they accept it gladly.

Once the mother of fourteen new hatched chicks died and they were left orphans. My boyish ingenuity was exercised to know how to take care of such a helpless family. With the help of my mother I made a brooder with felt strips hanging down for the little ones to nestle in. It was not long before they accepted this for their home after being shut in between their first feeds. Soon they looked upon me as their foster mother. To this day I can remember nothing that gave me more pleasure than this motherless brood of chicks. They followed me all around the farm just as if I were the hen. I clucked to them and kept them together on our rambles after insects. They knew my call when I caught a grasshopper or cricket for them. How they would fall over each other trying to get to my hand first. They would follow me out through the fields and be ready to jump for the worms and bugs as I turned over each little board or clod.

They would eat crickets and grasshoppers best of all. Some bugs they did not like, especially beetles. I soon learned which "game" they liked best and what fun it was to fill them up and see them grow. One day a rain came up suddenly and one became lost before I could get them all in. When I found it it was half drowned. I took it in to the fire and tried to revive it, but it peeped and peeped such a pitiful little cry that my heart ached, and in spite of care it died. To my boyish mind it seemed like one of my own children, and I cried myself to sleep. Next morning my sister and I had a solemn funeral back behind the old woodshed. There we made a little grave and placed the dead chick in a little wooden box for a coffin and buried it with tears in our eyes.

The balance of this brood grew up to market size and always ...