This video shows the latest location Sparrow has been laying, the most difficult one she has devised.  I’m afraid there are other locations she can reach that are more unpleasant to crawl to than this one was.  One lesson learned – do the crawl with thick gloves on.

The summer I was eight years old, we lived in a cabin in the woods of Minnesota for a month or so.  The nearby general market was run by an elderly couple in a building on the edge of their farm by the side of a main road.  When we visited, I got to hunt for eggs in the barn where the chickens roamed and made nests.  It was quite a fun challenge to find the cozy little nests these chickens had bundled together.  Here on the urban farm, the places Sparrow and the other hens can find outside of their built-for-them nests are fewer than on a larger farm, but equally well hid and protected from, at least, human predators.

We usually clip the feathers of the birds so they don’t get out of the coop, but now we have our main property gate complete and it’s less likely that the chickens will wander in to the street.  So we’re tolerant of Sparrow.  She is persistent, and seems to be a bit of a loaner.  The other birds like to flock, and when we let them out to peck in the yard, they follow each other around.  Sparrow is more of an introvert, and I can relate to that.  It’s hard to begrudge her the sanity she must get from doing what she needs in being alone and free, and as long as we can keep finding her eggs, we don’t have too much incentive to get her laying back in the hen house.

Looking around for other pictures of Araucana eggs, I found this blog post where the bird and eggs look very similar to our Sparrow.

When I come back with a rental car, if there is time I like to run a few errands before returning it to the agency. The below videos are a quick view of how I fit three rice straw bales in the back of a Toyota Corolla:

I put a tarp down to cover the rear seat. This is a lesson learned from past experience.  One time I brought back a mini-van that I had filled with seven bales of straw, then did a fair but not perfect sweeping job on it. When I returned it, the rental folks were bent out of shape. I was kind but firm; I didn’t do anything wrong, really, and I offered to clean the car further, especially if they’d lend me the shop vac, but I wasn’t paying any fees.  In the end, it turned out they thought I had laid down a bed of straw to transport farm animals. Sheese!  It’s just some straw, folks.

While I was checking the videos, I found Nancy Day, a woman in Ontario(?), who last year who got thirteen straw bales on her Toyota Corolla. Wow!  However, when I watched how she loaded and strapped them in, I realized I could never get that load home across my city.  She mentions at the end of the second video that she has to drive home via back roads.  There aren’t back roads between my straw sources and Fairy-Tale Farm.  I could get lucky and not be spotted with a huge load, but I’m more likely to get a citation for an unsafe or too-large load.

Next time, though, I’m going to shoot for five straw ebales using some borrowed techniques.