The chickens are pooping all over the front porch again, and my wife is a very special woman.

Almost every week, at some point or another, Carolyn says how happy she is to live at Rancho Cappuccino, surrounded by the wildlife and the livestock, steeping in nature’s own exotic brew of life, death, struggle and ecstasy.

Sounds great, you may say, but the chickens are pooping all over the porch. The geese are pooping all over the lawn. The manure in the sheep pen is two feet deep right now and  the pasture where the cattle are grazing, well, it’s a cow pasture. Talk about your exotic brews.

The cow is a virtuosic defecator. They poop more, larger, wetter, deeper, noisier and more often than anyone else on the farm.

But all God’s children leave their mark.

The chickens leave theirs on the front porch.

My wife’s friends are revolted. Who can blame them?

But my wife is a very special woman.

We’ve tried solutions to the chicken problem. We tried fake snakes. The chickens ignored them, then killed a real snake and left it there, next to the fake snakes on the porch, to express their disdain I guess. This really happened. No kidding.

Then we created a barrier of silk flowers in little buckets. The chickens steer clear. Guests have to step over them.

Of course the chickens still do their business all over the sidewalk and the drive way and the lawn.

I’m acutely conscious that there are very few roommates who would put up with this, and almost all of them are men. If you think I’m being a sexist,  you have an invitation to come help me clean the sheep pen. Then we can talk about my prejudices.

I figure if Carolyn decided to divorce me, I could either move to town or be single for life. I try to think of some other attractive woman who would be willing to join me at the Rancho. I can’t. Even some of the best sports I know can’t hide the little grimaces that say, “How can they live like this? How can she live like this?”

So here’s to Carolyn, with all my gratitude. I’ll make sure I take my boots off every time I come inside. Promise. Unless I forget.

It was a small mistake, really, born of wishful thinking. On the farm, small mistakes often have fatal consequences.

In past years, I’ve always penned our new mothers up overnight with their guard-donkeys when the does and ewes are having their babies. Baby goats and sheep are very vulnerable, especially during their first 24 hours. Compared with human babies, the goats and sheep are precocious — they stand up within a few minutes of birth, walk within half an hour and run the next day.

But a sheep that can’t run is known to coyotes as “food.”

When the birthing began three weeks ago, I didn’t shut the pen the first couple of nights. The grass is green and growing and the moms were out feeding at first light every day. If I penned them up they would have to wait for me to let them out on the fresh grass. I might not be there at first light. My insomnia might go into remission.

The second night of lambing we had five lambs on the ground. The next morning there were four.

Worse, in a way, was the loss of another of the pen’s residents. For three weeks a mother goose had been incubating her clutch of eggs on top of a big bale of hay inside the sheep pen. She hissed at us as we walked through. Her husband stood guard just outside the pen every day, then disappeared at night to his own quarters somewhere.

That morning she was gone and I found bloody eggshells along a path that led from the haystack to a wet mat of her feathers in the pasture.

And it was all my fault.

I must admit that I took some solace from the thought of a warm pile of coyote pups asleep in their den with full bellies under the bank of the creek, half a mile away across the pastures.

But the next night I pushed the sheep, the goats and the guard-donkeys into the pen and locked the gate.

Photo by Bryan Welch

BRYAN WELCH

The turkey hen found a pile of chicken eggs had been laid on the floor of the coop in a corner under a ledge. She decided they were hers.

This was about two months ago. I closed off the room where she sat so the other birds wouldn’t bother her. Other than that, I left her alone. Three weeks later she hatched six baby chickens.

If a turkey can be said to have an expression, hers was proud.

Since then she’s raised her little brood flawlessly. The pullets are spooky and mischievous. They seem to enjoy their mom’s stature. They spend a lot of time climbing around on her back. Sometimes all six of them.

Then last week, as though she felt envious, the other turkey hen assembled her own pile of eggs and started setting.

When hens — turkeys, chickens or any other birds as far as I know — get “broody,” they go into a kind of trance. They lose interest in everything other than eggs. The second turkey hen actually assembled her eggs on the metal grate of the perch, surrounded by the rest of the flock. I thought when she failed to get up and go outside in the morning with the rest of the birds she must be injured. I picked her up.  Voila! Eggs. So I moved her in with the other hen.

The pullets consider the new hen a second, equally enjoyable Jungle Gym. From the first day, they were climbing all over her. Now the first hen has taken an interest in the eggs. She has moved in next to her co-parent and they are mutually incubating and sharing parenting duties.

It’s the sort of situation that makes the farmer think, “Whatever.”