As rare breed enthusiasts (and local egg lovers) know, Laurie Maus and her partner, Bob Garner, of Hawk Hill Farm in Dunvegan raise Partridge Chantecler chickens. Dr. J.E. Wilkinson developed this uniquely Canadian heritage strain in Alberta in 1919. The breed’s stunning, partridge-like plumage acts as camouflage in free-range conditions. The birds are also extremely cold resistant and, unlike their more proletarian Leghorn sisters, lay more eggs in the cooler months. All in all, the breed attracts a small, but steady, number of inquiries about breeding stock. However, since the onset of Covid-19, Laurie and Bob have been receiving an unprecedented number of calls from all across Canada from folks desperately looking for pullets.
“Laying hens appear to be the new toilet paper,” says Laurie. “The recent lockdown seems to have sparked a huge interest in setting up backyard chicken coops.” And not just in the country. Bob and Laurie tell me there are plenty of would-be feather farmers calling them from the city. And Hawk Hill Farm is not unique. Laurie has checked with a number of hatcheries and, while they still have meat birds, layers are no longer available. For example, Mill Pond Hatchery in Grafton, Ontario has a notice on their web site informing visitors that, due to unprecedented demand, they are sold out of layer chicks, as well as all ducklings and goslings, for the duration of 2020.
In the sociological equivalent of Newton’s third law — for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction — there’s a good chance that these chicks (or chickens, by that point) will come home to roost once there’s a nip in the air and waterers start to freeze. It’s happened before. In a 2013 National Post article by Sarah Boesveld on urban farmers abandoning chickens because they’re too much work, she said that, according to a Chicken Run Rescue spokesperson, more than 500 birds were dropped off at animal shelters across the US. “It’s the stupid foodies,” Chicken Run Rescue owner Mary Britton Clouse is quoted as saying in Boesveld’s article. “We’re just sick to death of it…. People don’t know what they’re doing.” So don’t be surprised if you find a few repatriated chickens wandering along Dunvegan Road in the late fall. I just hope that the unwanted dogs and cats city folks also drop off each year don’t eat them.
Happy Stepparent Day
It’s said there’s nothing new under the sun. Perhaps this is true, but the touching Father’s Day card I received in the mail from my daughter Ursula, might be one of the few exceptions. Now, there could be an equivalent cuneiform tablet or scrap of papyrus in a dusty museum somewhere. But I for one have never seen a Stepfather’s Day card before.
The cover read, “You may not have brought me into this world, but you help to show me who I want to be in it.” It was a very sweet sentiment from someone I love having had the privilege of watching grow from a wee tyke to adulthood.
I also marvelled out loud to my daughter that greeting card manufacturers were slicing and dicing the world into ever more narrow market segments. She pointed out, though, that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. And she’s right… in the United States, at least. In Canada, the average rate is estimated to be around 38%. Either way, it means there are a whole lot of stepchildren and stepparents out there. More than enough for their own section in the greeting card rack.
Five seconds per inch
The marketing bumf reads “North Glengarry… Ontario’s Celtic Heartland.” While I’m sure this drags the tourists off the 417 in never-ending droves, I think a more accurate tagline would involve something with rocks. They’re inescapable here. Always have been. Always will be.
In the latter part of the 19th century, a few Glengarry farmers were fortunate to have access to a Jamieson Stoning Machine. This ungainly, wheeled device was used to move boulders from fields to fencerows. Men would chisel notches in the boulder so the unit’s large tongs could grasp the stone. Then real live horsepower would be used to winch it out of the ground and the horses would pull the machine, and the boulder, to the edge of the field. The process would probably take a crew the better part of a day to move just one stone.
In a recent email, reader Ken McEwen talked about what was done when rocks were too big to tow to the fence line with horses. “You built a fire over the stone with scrap wood and kept it going for a few days,” recounted Ken. “Next, you threw cold water on it, which usually cracked it into moveable pieces.”
Then Alfred Nobel arrived on the scene. He was the Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist who invented dynamite and, in the process, amassed a fortune large enough to underwrite the annual awarding of Nobel prizes. Even in the late 1950s, dynamite was readily available for landowners to blow things up… rocks, stumps and beaver damns. Back then, it was usually considered poor form to blow up your political and ideological opponents. I still remember my dad and two uncles using a star drill and a stick or two of Mr. Nobel’s concoction to shave the top off a couple of oil-pan-destroying rocks in the steep road to my grandmother’s cottage.
Dynamite also figured in a recent recollection from Ken McEwen. As I mentioned in last week’s item on butter making, there once was an oval-topped building on Catherine Street West in Maxville. After its butter making days were done, the late Bill MacEwen used the building to store inventory for his feed store… including his stock of dynamite. Back then, his feed store was the only place in the area authorized to sell the sticks of explosive and the requisite blasting caps and lengths of fuse. “In the days before bulldozers and backhoes,” Ken recalls, “it was one of the only ways to shift big rocks from your fields.”
Ken McEwen’s dad did the blasting in the St. Elmo East area and Ken used to help. “A lot of people were uneasy about handling explosives,” Ken wrote me in an email. “When it blows, dynamite expands equally in all directions.” After all these years, he still recalls that the fuse used to burn at a rate of five seconds to the inch. So, depending on how much you used, you knew exactly how much time you had after lighting it. “Dad never ran after lighting the fuse,” Ken told me. “You used enough so you walked at ease to a safe distance.” Makes sense when you consider that falling in haste and twisting your ankle could cost you your life.
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