Birds in the Bathroom

The list of livestock that you can successfully raise in your bathroom is shockingly small. In fact, it consists almost completely of poultry. Learning about and raising poultry has been great fun. It kept me occupied for over year, and with two guinea hens still alive it still entertains and drives me nuts on a daily basis.
We had chickens when I was a kid. We also had geese, pheasants and turkeys and various times. I remember collecting eggs when I was about 7 or 8. It was a great time. Chickens are a great livestock. They're useful, small and legal to keep in most places. A few chickens around laying eggs would make our little acre and a half sort of like a farm. Chickens make sense. That's one reason I wanted guineas. Guineas are pretty weird birds. They are originally from Africa and seem sort of like a cross between a chicken and a turkey and a small dinosaur. They eat bugs with an appetite that can't be matched. They'll even eat fire ants. They also hate snakes and will actively chase them out of the yard. With kids and rattlesnakes both being around that is a huge plus. Everything I read said that they were loud, but not so loud as peacocks. How loud could they really be? So I decided that having chickens was way too normal, I'd get guineas.
I ordered them in February and I knew that it would be too cold to keep them outside at first I'd have to start them in the bathroom. I can't explain how incredible my wife is when I come up with ideas like this. "Baby guineas in the bathroom? Sure, just don't make a mess." Sweet!
So I built a brood pen with a heat lamp and got water and food dishes and waited for the chicks to come in the mail. That's right, you order chicks, and they deliver them in the mail. It's some sort of archaic postal law that was supposed to help small farmers years ago and somehow the rules are still there. Chicks do fine without food or water for 24-36 hours after they're hatched. So if you ship them the day they hatch you can get them pretty much anywhere as long as you pick them up right away when the post office calls you. And as cute and chicks are, the ladies at the post office want you to come get them RIGHT NOW! Who knew?
The guinea chicks finally came and when I opened the box I was surprised to find not just the 10 chicks I had ordered, but another 12 chicks that they included for 'free' to help keep the guineas warm on their postal journey. They were male Rhode Island red chicks. Roosters of an egg breed. Useless. They don't put on meat like a meat breed of chicken and being roosters, well, no eggs. If they didn't send them to me they would have to be killed. So now I was supposed to kill them? I can't do that. Not until they're big enough to eat anyway. Now I had 22 chicks in my bathroom.  One of the roosters died in the first few days, these things happen. But I successfully raised 21 birds for just over four weeks in my bathroom until they were big enough, and it was warm enough for them to go in the coop outside. Another 4 weeks outside and they were big enough to roam around during the day as long as I got them inside the coop at night so nothing would eat them.
Eventually the roosters started to crow and I had to butcher them. I knew it was coming, and they were delicious. I left one alive to help the guineas figure out how to get back into the pen at night. They're pretty stupid. In fact, chickens, which are known to be shockingly stupid, are really really smart compared to guineas. Tragically a pair of dogs got into the yard three days later and killed the last chicken. The guineas may be stupid, but they're also much much faster than chickens and they escaped. I lost one guinea early to a bird of prey. Our dog has killed a few, which is still an issue between her and I. They have laid eggs and tried to nest, which always ends in tragedy when something comes to eat them in the night. I ran one over with the truck. A couple have just vanished. About 18 months after this whole thing started I have two guineas left. They occasionally climb on my truck and scratch it and I threaten to kill them. They seem to be unfazed by my clearly empty words.
Someday I'll loose the last two and I'll be sad. I really like having them in the yard.
Maybe I'll get ducks next. I should do some research on building ponds.

Books read this week:
Strides, Running Through History With an Unlikely Athlete -  Benjamin Cheever
Locust, The devastating rise and mysterious disappearance of the insect that shaped the American frontier - Jeffrey A. Lockwood
Book that I have abandoned:
Basic Writings - Martin Heidegger

Strides was good, it was a pretty light history of running and a look at current running peppered with the authors experience. It seems that one can't write a running book without believing that the audience is deeply interested in your own running. Maybe we aren't, maybe you have to prove through anecdote that you have suffered the trials of a runner to be worthy of writing a book about it.
Locust was pretty interesting. I learned about the largest extinction in North America in recorded history. Not only was it accidental, but for 30 years or so nobody even knew it happened, nor were they sad that it did. The middle of the book has way too much information about the history and major players in early American entomology, but once you make it through that, it's a really good story.
I abandoned basic writings. I'm enjoying reading Cicero and Marcus Aurelius right now and I thought I'd try a modern philosopher. The problem is that it's like picking up a book hoping to find out about how a light bulb works and how it affects society and instead getting a book that talks about quarks and the essence of electrons and really really pouring over what we might really mean when we say the word light. I'm sure there is some really neat stuff in there but I'll be damned if I can tease it out of the writing.