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.
2 comments:
My, goodness you suffered a lot of casualties! We have chicken hawks out circling all the time. I guess I know now not to leave them unattended in the garden for even a minute!
Oh my gosh, I LOVE your coop! It looks like osmeting from a fancy crate and barrel homesteading catalog! :)
You are living my dream--I am SO jealous that you have chickens! If you haven't read "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver, try picking up a copy. it is a page-turner of a book that also teaches raising chickens. It is the book that made me want to raise chickens because she does such a good job of teaching how! :)
The other day I was reading about how 80 percent of the antibiotics bought in America are fed to feedlot animals (to keep them alive because feedlots are so full of disease) so the average chicken breast in stores has more anitibiotics in it than a human would consume in their entire lifetime. That makes me want to eat home-raised chicken! I'd happily roll up my sleeves to help "process" your roosters in order to keep family dinners healthier, so you just keep at it! :)
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