Some Chicken Background

We have chickens, and our friends have gotten used to us giving them daily updates on the doings of our 11 hens and one rooster. We had 12 chickens back when we lived in Massachusetts, and got rid of them 10 years ago during our move to Cornwall. Last fall, our friend Colleen asked us, the only people she knew who had kept chickens, about getting chicks for her teenage daughter Emma for Christmas. "You can't get chicks for Christmas," we told her. "They aren't available until Spring."

You can buy day-old chicks at the local Agway in April, but you are limited to a few boring breeds of layer (as opposed to meat) chickens. It's much more fun to order chicks by mail from Murray McMurray, the huge hatchery in Iowa. They have dozens of breeds of laying chickens in varying sizes and colors, including chickens with pompadours and chickens with feathers on their feet. However, they must ship at least 25 chicks so that they can keep each other warm in their overnight journey.

We were ready to have chickens again, so we agreed to split a box of 25 chicks with Emma. We suggested that Emma order four each of six different breeds, with as widely varying colors as possible so we'd be able to tell them apart. She also ordered one Turken, a naked-neck chicken that looks like (but isn't) part turkey. Emma wanted the chicks as soon as possible, which turned out to be hatching on February 4th and arriving in our post office on the 5th.

The post office called Emma's house to let them know that there was a small box with air holes and a lot of cheeping noises, waiting for pickup. The two families split the chicks up the next day. None looked like (or turned out to be) the turken. There were yellow chicks, black chicks, and a bunch of multicolored chicks that looked a bit like two-legged chipmunks.

We put our chicks in a big cardboard box in a utility room (so we could keep out the cats) with a heat lamp to keep them at the required 90F degrees. Unfortunately, I was away on business at the time, and Jordan was worried about the chicks getting cold during the day while no one was at home. He put the indoor temperature sensor that came with his snazzy new weather station in the room with the chicks, so the temperature would be recorded and would appear on the screen of the computer in the kitchen. Then he installed a remote-control program on that computer, so he could log into it from his office computer to check the temperature. Clever!

However, the next day, Jordan was standing next to the kitchen computer when he noticed a DOS command window pop up onscreen -- with no one at the keyboard or mouse -- and a command appeared, letter by letter, at the prompt. Someone had hacked into our computer! He yanked the network cable out of the wall to disconnect us from the Internet and checked the computer for viruses, worms, and other unsavory software. It appears that keeping chickens is more dangerous than we thought.