Rotary Eclub- Butterfly StoryBook Participant
Age: 7 years old
Creek Infant School
Cayman Brac, Cayman Islands
WHEN I BECAME MUMMY TO ELEVEN BAY CHICKS
Catrise J. Connor
Since hurricane Paloma, there have been a lot of wild chickens all over Cayman Brac.
The roosters are so annoying, because from early morning and throughout the day, all they do is crow! They wake me up long before I need to get up for school; and on weekends or during holidays when I can sleep late, they won’t let me because of their annoying sounds.
The hens are always scratching and digging up our yard. Then I have to rake it over as that is my chore! Sometimes I wish that there were no chickens!
But then one day, several months ago, I changed my mind.
One day after school, as my friends and I were playing in the neighbourhood, we saw a big brown hen scratching along the roadside. By her were eleven baby chicks. My friend Annie and I thought they were so cute.
Suddenly, the mother hen decided to go across the road, and a car was passing at the same time. The car hit her! We screamed in shock, but it was useless. The car didn’t stop and the mother hen had died!
Her eleven baby chicks scattered all over the place, chirping and tweeting! They were so scared and so were we!
Quickly, we decided to try to catch them. It was not easy to do. They kept us running back and forth. Then they would stand still and not make any noise so we couldn't find them!
One by one we caught them, and put them in a clothes hamper that my Mother used. They looked so tiny and afraid. I felt especially sad for them because they didn’t have a Mummy any more.
When my Mother came home from work, we told her what had happened. She told us that because they were so young - probably only a day old - they might not survive the night because they needed their mother to keep them warm and protect them. This made me determined to help them.
I got old clothes and put them in the hamper, and covered the hamper with an old window screen. Finally they settled down, and I felt all better. During the night, I got up to check on them, and they would look at me with little sad eyes. I felt like crying.
The next morning, the first thing I did as I awoke was to go check on them. We had put them in the garage for the night. I was so happy they were ALL alive and well! My mother told me to wet some bread and feed them with it. They started eating it right away! Now we had to decide what to do with them.
Should we let them ago? Or try to raise them until they could take care of themselves? I told my parents I wanted to raise them, and they told me that it would be my responsibility to take care of them. I agreed.
My Dad built a little chicken coop and we put them inside. I could even get inside it and stand up! The little baby chicks got used to me feeding them and giving them water. When they saw me coming, they would make tweeting noises like they were happy to see me. I think they thought I was their Mummy!
Weeks went by, and they grew. My Mother asked me if I was going to ever let them out of the coop. I didn’t know what to do! I had grown to love them so much.
Finally I decided to open the door of the coop to let them out. They looked at me strangely, then one by one came out. They scratched and dug at the ground so happily. The young roosters (there were four of them) looked like they were play-fighting with each other! The young hens flapped their wings like they were showing off their beauty. It was a sight!
The strange think about MY chickens, as everyone started calling them, was that they would go off scratching/digging/crowing/clucking all day, but every evening they would all return to the coop to sleep. The roosters would crow at 5:00 a.m., but I had gotten so used to them by now that it didn’t wake me. Stranger yet was that the hens started laying eggs in the coop - so many that my Dad made it all bigger for them. We had fresh eggs for breakfast and to put in cakes!
My Grandmother, who grew up raising chickens as a child, said that because we had rescued and raised the baby chicks, they were returning the favour by providing us with alarm clocks and eggs.
I like that idea of hers. And I like that I did something nice.