I really need to post an update on our chicken adventure. So much has happened since the beginning of March when we brought 12 chickens home and I will be the first to admit that we still don't know what we're doing. Mike built this amazing coop complete with roof doors that you can lift to retrieve eggs. Of the 12 original chickens, 1 died the first week, 7 were roosters and 4 were hens. Of those hens, two got caught by the neighbor dog and died. It was traumatic, especially for me, because our hen Chewbacca lived for a day after the attack and then died. I decided we needed to replace the two hens so we bought two more week old hens in June, Katara and Zorro. Zorro was caught by a hawk in the first week when I left them in the garden for a few minutes. So we replaced Zorro with Twenty bucks and so far our 4 hens have survived and one of our oldest, Skittish, is laying a lovely brown egg every day. The last hen is totally black with a greenish sheen. She's always kind of been the
"ugly duckling" but we love Darth Vader anyway.
As for the roosters, having 7 roosters was not fun. They started to get mean and too much testosterone (do roosters have that hormone?) in one pen. We convinced the boys it was time to kill some roosters so we killed 4 of them. It was harder than we thought, even for my emotionless, hunter-man husband. They had become pets. Sorry, no pictures of that.
But we survived and it seemed better, but really one rooster is more than enough. Two of them were mean and they would travel in packs like bullies and corner the little ones. Really, there just wasn't even hens to keep 3 roosters happy. Last week, on two different days, the two roosters we were going to get rid of disappeared amidst squawking. We realized that we really do live in the sticks with plenty of predators; a black bear has been sighted, coyotes, bobcat, cougar, raccoons. We followed the trail and couldn't figure out what had been so sneaky. 
Maybe we should have just got a dog.
