Don't look the gift horse in the mouth. Or maybe you should. Sometimes.

I have not ever really had that saying hit home like it did the time my uncle decided to get us some "banty chicks" on his trip to Kentucky.  My uncle goes down to Kentucky often and on these trips he usually stops once a year at a critter auction that is in southern Ohio. 

A few years back as he was heading down to Kentucky for one such visit he asked me if I would like for him to pick up a few banty chickens for us.  At first I kept saying no because we had a very fine flock of birds and I knew what Rodger's response would be: NO.  We do not need more chickens.  Rodger has a degree in saying the words "no".  It might even be considered a gift. 

Mind you, he was still concerned that we were going to have the plague of flies due to the chickens we already had.  Which, by the way, has not been the case at all.  The chickens have been great as far as that goes. 

So anyway, my uncle kept on asking if I was SURE I didn't want him to just grab a few for us.  I mean, they are cute and all and they lay tiny eggs.  Wouldn't that be nice?  So I caved.  I have been learning the fine art of saying no, but I caved on this one.  I thought, surely two little banty hens won't kill us.  Rodger won't even know they are here.  Right?

So my uncle goes on his trip a while down the pike and I get a call from my dad telling me that Uncle Robin is back in town with my banty's.  Great!  I'll just call him and plan on the drop off. 

By the way, um, he didn't get banty's.  Those were my dad's next words.  Oh, ahem, and he didn't get just two.  He has 20 baby chicks.  Oh, and he doesn't really want 20 himself so if you don't take some of them then we're not sure what he'll do with all of the others...

Yea.  So much for two banty's.  We set up a time for Robin to bring the chicks over.  I decided that we could take ten of them ~ remember that mortality rate.  I was out when he was dropping off the chickens and Rodger was home, so he got to pick out which ten we were getting. 

There was a bit of a disturbance in the force and few good chuckles over getting "two banty's".  Now we had ten extra chickens.  But hey, if they all turned out to be good laying hens then that would be ok.  People love fresh eggs and I'll just sell them.

The people my uncle had gotten the chicks from said they were all laying hens.  That is excellent because who in their right mind would want ten extra roosters???

Fast forward a few weeks and my dad called about the other chickens my uncle had taken home with himself.  Apparently he had a critter getting in his coop and it was picking off his birds and were we interested in taking the others because he was going to have to get rid of his birds...

So after wrestling with whether or not we wanted more birds I said yes!  Why can't I say NO??  WHY?

We got the other birds and after a few weeks we started to let them out a bit in a secure area so they could get acclimated with the other birds we had.  Well, as the new chicks were growing I noticed something a little strange about them.  The comb on the new birds' heads was growing bigger than the other hens we had.  So were the wattles on their chins...  Surely these aren't all roosters, are they?

Oh yes they were.  Out of 20 new chicks, about fifteen or sixteen were roosters.  What in the WORLD are we going to do with fifteen new roosters???

Well, because I have no desire to feed that many unnecessary birds, we did what any logical person would do.  We advertised on craigslist.

This was the first time I had ever put anything on craigslist so I didn't know what to expect.  I mean, who is going to call about roosters?  Maybe if we are fortunate someone will want a few of them.

I'll tell you who.  Crazy people who said their mother-in-law had a farm and she was wanting a few good roosters to get her own chickens going, blah blah blah... 

Well seriously, I didn't really think to much about who called and why they wanted them.  Call me naive, but I really didn't think there could be a black market for people wanting roosters.  I still have no conclusive evidence that this was the case, but after we dropped the chickens off, Roger and I just stared at each other like, "what in the world did we just do?" 

It's just a guess, but when the fella who called and is getting the chickens comes out of his house with his wife beater shirt on, stains all over it, teeth missing, and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth (wedged between the gap of missing teeth), it leads me to think that maybe, JUST MAYBE, there was something fishy going on.  I mean if you want to smoke and be unhygienic that is ok and that is your perogative, but first impressions can lead to a lot of speculation. 

So off our roosters went to their new "farm house" and, that is the last time I will be getting free "banty chickens" from anyone.  So if you call and ask me if I would like your birds, I'm not afraid to say no. 

No, I don't want any new chickens.  No, I don't care if they are free.  No, I don't think we need any more of that "special kind" of chicken here...  no, No, NO.

Love from the land of "no",
Tammy

This is the rooster that got to stay, because I love listening to him crow.