Chicken Barns And Baby Mice

Our rare breed chickens reside above one of our smaller barns. Every fall, when my husband cleans the barn below, we open the trap-doors in the floor and scrape out all the old bedding/chicken manure onto the cement below, so it can be hauled away as fertilizer.

Where you have chickens, and grain, you are also guaranteed to have mice and as we cleaned and shoveled, we disturbed several nests. As their shelter was disturbed, the mice would scatter in all directions, fleeing for the cracks and holes along the walls of the chicken coop.

My helper, Renee and I were laughing at the neat arrangement of discarded chicken feathers lining one such nest, when we noticed movement. Inside the destroyed home were about a dozen, tiny pink bodies, squirming around -- baby mice!

"They are so tiny. They can't be more than a few days old," I said.

"Now what will happen to them?" Renee asked. "Their mother ran off into that hole over there." She pointed toward the wall.

Trying not to think about the many times I'd set traps and laid bait to try and rid our barn of these grain-eating pests, I carefully scooped up the babies in my gloved hand, feathers and all. Laying them by the hole, I said, "Watch them. I'll bet their mama is going to come back for them."

Sure enough, a few seconds later, a furry grey head poked out of the hole. She looked at us, trembling, but she ran from the hole, grabbed a baby and vanished back into the wall. She re-appeared, and saved another one of her infants. Within a minute, she had rescued every single baby, relocating them to a new place safe from our clutches.

That mother mouse will never know that this mother saluted her. In the face of grave danger, and extreme fear, she came back for her children and risked her own life to save them.

What's a little grain in the face of such love?