I've decided to continue my tradition of small-scale agriculture by purchasing a few select chickens via a mail-order catalogue.

Actually, I ordered about 25 of the little boogers, from two different breeds that I have no prior experience with. Nothing like a little bit of the new to make one feel like a real risk taker, is there?

Well, this time I ordered Silver-Laced Wyandottes and Black Australorps. If you can't pronounce those, don't be concerned. I really don't know how to say them, either.

According to my handy-dandy chicken catalogue, the Australorps are prodigious egg layers, with one on record having laid 364 eggs in one year. That's like a chicken world record. They have shiny black plumage and grow to a good size — up to eight pounds for the roosters. The book also says that they are not affected by cold weather very much., which is another bonus. But, most important of all, they lay brown eggs.

The Wyandottes are also brown egg layers with dark plumage tipped with white, hence the name "silver laced." They will sit on their eggs and seem to be a good compliment to the others.

I got my order in for the little fellows around 6:30 a.m. Monday. I found out when the post office called to let me know that I had a box there that was cheeping. When I got them home, I put them in my homemade incubator, which consists of two sheets of bathroom paneling bent into a circle and joined together with screws. I designed it so that I could build it with very little material in a very short time. You see, the real story began the night before. I didn't start getting prepared for my arrivals until about 9 p.m. It was one of those things where I remembered and said, "Oh yeah, I have chickens coming tomorrow." With my design, which was made out of necessity with what materials I could beg, borrow or steal at 9 p.m., I found that I could adjust the size of my enclosure by moving the two pieces closer together or vice versa. According to my information, the birds need .6 feet each to live in, which equates to about 1,800 square inches for the birds that arrived in good health. Four didn't make the trip and one died soon after, but the company had sent two extra chicks and a bonus ‘mystery chick.' It is supposed to be some rare breed that they offer, but you only get one (as a bonus) and you don't know what sex it is.

As for my plans, I finally came up with a formula. I tried to remember my geometry lessons, which should have taught me how to get the area of a circle, but I had a bit of trouble. I opted to go with A=*R2 for the area of the circle. The little * sign equals 3.14. However, I still needed to figure out how much room they needed, so I multiplied the number of birds by .6 and then that by 144, for inches per square foot. I also had to figure the radius, which is half the circle. I measured the widest point of my circle and divided by two.

That's was when I realized I had made a grievous error. I should have made a square box. Sure, it would have been a little more manual labor, but this was getting to be one of those mathematical nightmares I could remember from high school calculus, which I made it through with what my instructor called a ‘fortunate' passing grade. (I always wondered about that, since fortunate starts with an "F"). As for my current situation, I never knew that chickens were so complicated. With a brain the size of a chick pea, you wouldn't think they could need so much higher mathematical calculations. The new formula, which still remains a theory until proven by further study, is Coby=?2.

So, after filling in a few blanks (mostly blank stares), I asked for help. Thank goodness I had someone on hand who could recite that Pythagorean theory stuff. Of course, that has to do with triangles, which I also don't like to work on. Just give me a ruler and call me square. Squares are easier for me to understand. All the sides are the same and you can get all the information you need just by knowing the measurement of one side, provided you built everything right. Of course, even they usually end up being parallelograms with me. Don't feel bad if you don't know what that means. I had to look it up in the dictionary once before when I built a building and didn't measure my corners properly.

Then I talked to a friend, who said he would take 11 chickens and I figured on a mortality rate of about 15 percent. Given all of the above figuring, I came up with a circle of a workable size — about 36 inches across. If I wasn't right, at least I did my best. I felt pretty good about the whole thing, especially since I didn't get the thing finished until about 10:30 p.m. or so.

The directions also said the birds need constant temperatures of 90 to 95 degrees and my thermometer only reads in Celsius. If they had only told us in school that small-scale farmers should be mathematical geniuses, I would have paid more attention.

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