This weekend was pretty eventful in the poultry department. The first batch of chicks hatched, which is always fun. I only put five eggs in the incubator, and didn’t expect an oddly shaped small one to hatch. But I’d have been happy with a hatch of four, and that’s exactly what I got. Besides being the first of the season, it’s also the first batch from my new Sportsman incubator, a big fancy one.

Last year I had really various hatching rates, but that was with a lot of shipped eggs. The post office can be hard on them and you’d never know it. The best hatches last year were from my own chickens and one batch that was only shipped from Oregon. This year I have my breeding birds all separated out and I’m hatching my own. I intend to sell some, but Wyandottes take so long to mature that I’m going to have to raise quite a few to adulthood in order to see if I have anything that’s worth breeding next year.

These four were all Blue Laced Red Wyandottes, and they’re very cute.

I’ll have more every Saturday until three weeks after I stop putting the eggs in the incubator. I’m collecting for Batch #5 with now.

Then on Saturday was the big Pacific Poultry Breeder’s Association show in Stockton. I’ve looked forward to this show all year. Last year was my first year attending, and it was so overwhelming. This year, I had some specific goals in mind for my shopping and I wanted to see what other people are doing with Wyandottes. Turns out, not much. There were only a few large fowl Wyandottes entered, which was disappointing. In fact, it spurred me to enter my own birds next year. I plan to start small, and will enter a show in Fresno next month, which is overwhelming in its own right.

Last year at this show, I’d put in for a raffle of some Marans hatching eggs. I was already home when I got the call that I won, and did not want to drive back up there, so I told them to reraffle them. I turned out that a lady I know won them the second time, so that was nice. So this show makes me feel lucky, and they raffle off some donated birds every year too. I bought a bunch of tickets and put them all on a trio of Blue Andalusians donated by a local breeder who has very nice birds. Then I made myself stick around for the raffle this time, and sure enough, I won them! I was very glad that I hadn’t filled up the crates I’d brought with gigantic geese.

But after the raffle, and as people were clearing out of the sales barn, I decided that I couldn’t go home with empty crates. I’d intended to buy some Pekin ducks to raise as meat birds if there were any for sale, but there weren’t. What there were, however, were some silly Runner Ducks. They were marked down and I could tell that a pair really wanted to go home with me. So they did, and they are destined to become beloved pets, not dinner. I’ll do the meat ducks a little later in the year.

I’m still working on putting better tarps over my breeding pens, which are now all full of miscellaneous critters. The ducks will eventually run loose with the rest of the flock, as this is my meat bird pen, but they’re a little shy right now. I really enjoyed the weekend spent with my hobby; they give me a lot more joy and less hassle than the hounds did, reinforcing my conviction that getting rid of them was the right thing for me to do. I miss them, but my poultry generally don’t bark, and that’s much more pleasant to live around.

Seamus is really hooked on this trapshooting thing. He gets a little antsy when he hasn’t been able to shoot for a while. I think he gets that from his step-father, who has the same syndrome. And since I don’t care all that much for competing and he’s better than I am anyway, I decided to throw my discretionary ammunition fund his way instead of using it for myself. While he’s at it, he’s also using my gun and my shooting glasses. He’s really quite good with the shotgun and if he puts his time in practicing, he may be able to go pretty far with it.

A couple of friends of mine have sons his age who are big duck hunters, so they know how to handle a shotgun too. When the trap league didn’t have enough kids interested to round out a junior team of five, I asked these other two boys if they wanted to join in on the fun. They were thrilled to be asked, and very much interested in shooting with Seamus this year. I discussed this back and forth several times with the league secretary, who promised me that they’d have a spot and she would help find a fifth kid to round out the team (there was already another boy on it.)  The club associated with the league was even offering to sponsor the team. While I was at the New Year’s Eve party, I got a call from another parent who couldn’t commit her son to the team unless she had help driving him now and then, due to her work schedule. I told her that I’d help her, and just like that, we had a junior team!

Or so I thought.

On Friday, barely 24 hours before the first shoot, I got a text from the league secretary, the one who’d committed to these five kids that they could shoot this season. She said that she now had to fill one of the spots on the team with a member’s kid (we are not members at the moment, due to some shenanigans she pulled on our family a few years back) and that only two of my kids could shoot, and that I would have to pick which one couldn’t. So I called her up to try to find out what was going on.

She said that another league board member had promised another kid a spot on the team, and that the girl was dying to shoot, and she had to hold up that promise. Now, mind you, this is fully a week after she’s committed to the team we thought we had in place. She’d already promised these five kids that they could shoot together, but was willing to go back on that word.

Oh no. I don’t think so.

I promised my three boys that they could shoot, and I sure wasn’t going to kick one of them off because someone else was weaseling. So instead, I did something that she completely didn’t expect. I told her that these three boys were shooting together no matter what, and if she didn’t have room for all of them, then they were all off the team. I’d find a team for them and sponsor them myself. If I had to stand up there and shoot with them, then that’s what I would do, fronting a regular league team that just happened to have four junior members instead of a junior team. She was not prepared for that, but at that point I was done with her nonsense.

So after a little calling to some friends, we had a junior team put together again, this time under my name. One of the kids is the son of a long-time friend of Junior’s, and the other one is a friend of the first kid, who happened to shoot with Seamus last year but had walked away from that trap club due to the politics. The same politics that I was experiencing first hand, as it happens. But however we found them, within half an hour, we had another team.

I felt bad for the original two kids on the other team. It wasn’t their fault, that’s for sure, nor the fault of the one trying to squeeze in. I called the friend to whom I had promised driving help, and told her what was going on so she would be aware of it, reiterating my promise to help her transport her son if she needed it. I didn’t have the other kid’s phone number, but I did see his father at practice the next day and apologized to him personally. He understood that I had to stand up for my own kids and didn’t hold it against me. As of Saturday afternoon, those kids still didn’t have a team set up, but it was no longer my problem. My boys were taken care of, and now the woman who’d failed to uphold her own commitments could do the scrambling.

Things came to light a little more clearly on Sunday morning. I saw that the other kids had a team, and the final two members were two girls who shoot very well but are starting to become interested in other activities. They’d had to be talked into shooting. The father of our last team member let it slip that he’d talked to the father of the original girl that the secretary was trying to slip onto the team. And that they hadn’t gone begging to the league at all, but it was the other way around. The league secretary had come calling to him recruiting his daughter on Thursday evening. I see what happened there; that woman is so interested in winning that she wanted a team with a known shooter in place of an unknown. After all, who knows how well my two friends’ sons could shoot? And that’s why she was so bent out of shape when I pulled Seamus from the team. He’s a pretty good shot for his age.

That’s not supposed to be what the junior shooting events are about. Sure, winning is nice, and some other clubs have some really good junior teams. But my three boys are there to have fun, not to dominate the event. And they simply wouldn’t have fun with one of them missing, or split up into two teams. It wouldn’t be fair to them. So even though she didn’t stick to her word, I sure did, and now I’m extremely proud to be sponsoring both a junior team and a regular league team.

Junior had told me about the politics of the place, and I believed him, but I hadn’t seen them in action before.  Now it’s clear that there’s a bad apple in that barrel. They’ve lost all three of these kids for the scholastics program they are trying to start, as well as the fifth kid on our team who had already walked away from that club. If Seamus chooses to shoot for scholastics later in the year, it’ll be at the competing club. They’ve been trying to recruit him for years anyway, as his 4-H leader is a part of the coaching team. And I was pushing for us to become members of this club, but that’s completely off the table now. They may need our help, but they aren’t going to get it.

All of this nonsense and strife was vindicated when the boys shot their first league shoot on Sunday. They had an absolute ball. They may not be the best team out there yet, but they sure seem to have the biggest cheering section. You can see the light bulbs going off over their heads when they suddenly understand something and start pulverizing targets. To see them figure things out is so satisfying, and they’re having so much fun. These boys are going to be a good team, and learn a lot, and enjoy themselves, and that’s the point of the whole sport.