I can't just leave the chicken story. So here's how it progressed up to when we packed up and headed north. When I last wrote, there were 8 chicks and a hen...>>
Just before leaving for a towntrip to Zihuatanejo, we saw the mother hen lurching and falling, wings spread all cockeyed. A village kid said that clearly, she had been stung by a scorpion. Give her garlic. We ground up a clove and got it down her mouth, put her in the shade, with water, and propped up upright with two bricks. One chick was also missing (presumably scorpion as well). The remaining six chicks hovered nearby as we left for town...
When we got home, our neighbor had taken the hen back to HIS yard, where he just left her flopping on the ground. He gave her no water/food/garlic. Said she didn't want any. The chicks slept by her at night and wandered our yard by day. Not surprisingly, the hen died. The chicks continued to sleep where their mother had lain....
Well, if anyone is actually reading THIS far: those 6 surviving chicks were reduced to 4 in a 3am tlacuache attack... The screaming survivors came racing over to our yard, waking us up to their desperation. We covered them up with a big flower pot, and that became their new safe home.
Of those 4, one actually had already also SURVIVED a rat attack that temporarily crippled one leg. We called him Hopalong, of course.
Then an eagle swooped down and reduced the flock to 3... Three roosterlets.
Those 3 continued to sleep by our porch each night under the flowerpot. Every single evening at dusk, they came and waited for us to drop it over them! If we were late, they'd huddle on the spot where the flowerpot SHOULD drop.
When we left Mexico, we turned them over to our neighbor who insisted that all these chicks were theirs in the first place (but made little effort to protect them). We will probably never know the ending.
