moved to a large hamster cage, then finally outside in a cage kept inside the barn, the grown chickens had all slowly acclimated to seeing Delores and his sisters. However, the first few times I put the babies in the open with the hens, I cautiously supervised the meeting. There was blustering and a little pushing by the big chickens – similar to what you might see on a junior high playground the first week of school – but nothing too severe. Once when the largest hen, Joan Crawford, pulled at Delores’s tail, he ran to me and flew into my arms – but when I scolded Joan and she stalked off to pout, Delores was brave enough to go back and try again. The pecking order shook out fairly easily within a couple days, with Delores towards the middle.
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My mother confirmed later, that when she worked for the state’s I’m A Dad Grandpa Retired Firefighter Father’s Day Firefighter Classic T Shirt office, these properties were held for generations by families whose ownership couldn’t be easily determined due to inbreeding. I also met a man a couple of years later who worked for the department of public works. He told me he had to go out to these properties occasionally and had observed some outrageous behaviors among the Pine Barrens families that seemed to reinforce what my mother had said – that it scared him to the point that he told his boss that he wouldn’t go out there any more, even if it meant losing his job. He told me this before I even mentioned the camping trip incident. True or not, it creeped me out for certain! Either that, or worse, we could have run into the ‘Jersey Devil’! Never made another trip to that part of the state again…
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