Praise and prayers

I would just like to take a moment to congratulate our friend and neighbor John Wells of the Field Lab blog for being interviewed for his own feature article in the New York Times!

A New York City artist travels across the country to far West Texas, escapes the drone of 8 million people for the quiet of the sparsely populated Chihuahuan desert, and ends up making a splash big enough for the Times to take notice!  It must be fate (not to mention a lot of hard work)!

Keep up the good work and the cool projects! Congrats John and Benita!

And now for something completely different ...

We are still waiting for rain, and every day the clouds tantalize us with visions of precipitation far off in the atmosphere! When will it fall on us?!  Oh well, patience is a virtue.

The clouds are a very good sign, though.  Seeing thunderheads form -- even though they are far off and come to naught -- means that we are getting closer to the rainy season.  Almost all of the rainfall here comes from heat storms, which is why is mostly rains in the summer.  So when we're sweating our butts off, it is some solace to know that the heat brings us closer to much-needed precipitation.  Pray, dance, and sing for rain!

Speaking of heat, we had our first "hot" day yesterday -- temperatures hit 96F in Terlingua -- and one of my cockerels bit the dust the same day.  Coincidence?  Maybe....

But the breed I chose, Brahmas, are known for being very heat-tolerant.  In fact, my first batch survived 120F in the brooder at just a few days old!  That batch was from Murray McMurray hatchery, and I was extremely pleased with the birds. 

My second batch came from Welp hatchery, and I have had problems from the start.  Many of the chicks had badly formed feet, they were more aggressive (and dumber I think, but that's hard to prove), and less hearty overall.  But I thought the breed traits would be the same. 

Now it seems these birds are having trouble with the heat, and it's not even Spring officially!  I have five hens leftover from my last brood, and they are still doing fine; they don't even seem to notice the heat.  The birds from the new batch are panting already, and I suspect the cockerel overheated and died (though I can't know for sure).

I am very frustrated with the hatchery, and I don't think I'll ever stray from Murray McMurray again!  Their birds are simply from much higher-quality breeding stock.

So guess what I did when the day reached its hottest hour.  I dipped my birds.  Yeah, sounds weird, but I think they liked it.  I simply took a five gallon bucket of water down to the coop and dunked them in it one by one.  They were very muddy after they got back in the coop and tried to dust bathe, but there was no more panting! 

I just hope the birds acclimate soon so I don't have to make "bird bathing" a daily routine!