Although I embrace the faiths of all people, I am not a particularly religious person however, today I got a visit from a guardian angel of sorts. This morning I headed out with my girls to check the mail and grab some much needed groceries to restock the fridge after my 48 hours of obsessively fine tuning my crowdfunding pitch on Indiegogo and after about an hour I checked my phone and had a text message from Adam saying: Your chicken coop is on fire!
I had a cart full of groceries which I immediately steered to the side of the aisle and ditched where it stood. I hustled back to my truck and the girls and I went back to survey the damage. To my profound relief, none of the chickens were harmed and the fire had been caught before it got too out of hand by a friend of my father in law who had come to visit and check out our plans for the farm. Adam has another two weeks of bed rest due to a buldging disk in his back and was in our home taking a shower and didn't hear a knock at the door. He was alerted to the fire when he got out of the shower and his dad was frantically calling him on the phone. He immediately ran outside in a towel and slippers to see what was happening.
I came home about 15 minutes later and began checking on the birds. The building is salvageable but there was one casualty in the fire, the youngest of my four quail hatchlings, all of which I was going to release into the greenhouse today, passed on from smoke inhalation as they were in the coop with a light for the last two weeks.
If we were to hypothesize the cause of the blaze, I believe it was my flashy polish crested rooster who had recently taken to perching on the beam which supported a single indoor lamp. The lamp was firmly fastened and doubly reinforced but, alas, apparently not well enough. I will have to rethink coop heating in the future but I now believe that maybe I was just over babying the birds, and really, our winters are quite mild and they probably don't need the extra heat.
So, this evening, I am full of gratitude for the kind fellow who today was my guardian angel, and saved my coop and chickens and probably a whole lot more from the disaster that could have been. And on that note, I pass along the balance of my good fortune to you and sincerely hope you are all able to catch a little break in the future, when you need it most, as I did today.
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