One of the chickens is dead.
The black-and-white speckled one.
The two black and one red one seem fine.
They had mostly eaten their old friend.
I dug a little hole for the feet and legs and some wing and breast feathers.
Their water is served in two little red concave plastic cups attached to a big clear rectangular water jug.
Little plastic yellow sticks with knobs at the ends stick out from the container.
If you press against the stick with your finger or beak, water fills the cup.
The cups were fill of dirt and one had twigs also.
But they still seemed to work.
I cleaned them out.
I couldn’t figure out where the chickens’ food was.
I picked some figs and tomatoes and grass and tossed it with a few waterfall-arcs into the coop.
The tiny fat feathered dinosaurs attacked the food frantically; but this is normal, and I noticed no signs of weakness, nor any confusion beyond what is to be expected of pea-brains.
Nor did they seem overly excited by the water dish I brought them.
One of the black ones drank from it a bit with dainty sips and then alert pop-ups that let the water fall down her throat while she blinked her round eyes.
0f course, they quickly knocked the plastic dish over in their mad dash for the figs.

I mowed the lawn with the electric mower.
You have to be careful of the chord and sometimes it falls out of the socket and the machine stops.
You have to be careful of the hoses that irrigate the gardens, and since I err on the side of caution, the hose paths are now marked by six-inch-wide, foot-tall lines of sprouting grasses.
The too-green seemed less buggy than normal this evening and yet I still netted two mosquito bites from unseen assailants.

I have embraced my role as a tourist here on planet earth.

It’s actually kind of relaxing.

I can see that it might be better if I could make myself useful.
But I don’t see what I can do, where I fit in, what I could say or do to reliably improve the lot of this foreign land.
I suppose it could be argued that I am a human among humans and not just a tourist drifting through an unguided tour, but these wiremesh-cooped chickens are also all chickens together, and you see how much sense they make to each other.
There’s also many many cases, documented, and undocumented, where people pitch in and help out, but actually just make things worse.
Not to disparage all attempts at helping.
But just to point out that sometimes less is more.
And that it isn’t always obvious what exactly one’s activities are working, what they will sooner and then later and then even later have wrought.
In the moment you should be gentle and kind and not peck your fellows apart, leaving behind nothing but a rough outline of wings, a couple stringy legs, and two clawed feet. That much we know for sure. Beyond that, our fancy sometimes carries us away, we outstrip our own wisdom and help create and/or exacerbate situations in which the more innocent die while the less innocent become even less innocent.

Copyright: AMW