Replenishing The Flock

My baby chicks came in this morning.  A nice lady from the Dayton Post Office called and told me they were there.  She said I could come pick them up or they would ship them to the local post office overnight.  Dayton's only a 20 minute drive, so I went down there.  I didn't know where to go to get in the building, so I was standing on this shipping dock looking clueless, and a guy drove by on a tow motor, stopped, and asked if I was there to pick up my chickens.  I said yes, he gave me directions, and commented that everybody who showed up there on a Sunday was there for chickens.  When I got to the ladies with the boxes of chicks, they told me they had a bunch there.  Guessing from the number of boxes I saw, there were at least 300 or 400 chicks there.  They told me some had tried to make an escape and they'd had to corral them.  They quizzed me a little about chickens, and then checked them out when I cracked the box lid.  The lady who called walked me out and gave me directions back to the highway.  She did mention that since the Postal Service is consolidating the sorting facilities, next time I'd have to go to Columbus to pick up the box.  Anyway, most of the time, I think of letters and boxes when I think of the Postal Service, I tend to forget about animals:

Though trimming the number of post offices in the U.S. might save the Postal Service money, the loss could be felt in other ways.

Tom Gamble has been a mail carrier 24 years. He works a route in Youngstown, Ohio. Gamble is also the president of the state's Association of Rural Letter Carriers.

Gamble says the loss of post offices in rural communities would have a devastating effect there.

"There are a lot of people in the rural community that rely heavily on the post office," Gamble says, "we carry feed, livestock, seed — a lot of things that the rural community depends on."

Gamble has delivered everything from baby chickens to rabbits and even crickets to rural customers. He says for some folks in rural communities the postal carrier might be the only person they see for weeks.

"There are countless stories of carriers that have been looking out for some of their older customers and saved the lives of customers because their mail started to build up the mailbox," he says. "We kind of keep an eye on the neighborhoods."

I got the birds home and settled into temporary quarters.  I'll post a few pictures later.