Chickens and Unschooling

Fluffy Butt was dumped into our yard about 4.5 years ago. I thought it was longer than that, but I found the LiveJournal post that dates it for me.

Unfortunately, Fluffy Butt has been slowing down lately. A few months ago he stopped sleeping on the high roost in his house. I wasn't too worried about it at first, as he still found an elevated area to sleep on each night. That was, until a few days ago, when I caught the ducks beating him up.

I hoped it was an isolated incident, but last night, they started it up again. Time to move the ducks in with the other chickens at night, and give the old man some peace.

We've been here nearly 13 years. We've had to protect against owls, hawks, neighbor dogs, and an unknown predator. Today coyotes became a factor. Our neighbor's entire chicken flock, save one, was wiped out this morning, between 9 and 10 in the am. Way later in the day than one would expect coyotes to be hunting.

Through random luck I hadn't let my birds out of their houses yet.

Our dog has been given free run of every yard, and the birds, much to their displeasure, are still in their houses.

I have no idea how this is going to shake out.

I am full of dread.

Boy got an interview at the local hardware store, but didn't get hired.

I like my chicken soup, especially when I add dumplings.

My new rooster is so pretty (I'll try to get a good picture of him in the near future and post it on Twitter). I hope he keeps his sweet personality.

The rooster I got from a former neighbor has learned the trick of getting out of his yard, so I always have to make sure to carry a shovel or some other weapon around with me when I go into our main yard.

Since informing them he is leaving, the boy's current employment situation has improved dramatically. He has even been scheduled for two Sunday morning busser shifts.

Smoke Alarm is doing splendidly.

Yesterday, we had a new baby hatch. It looks like the Sapphire Blue might be it's mother.

We're leaning towards naming it Cloud with some word in front, such as, Ash, Dust, or Storm. S suggested, since Smoke Alarm has two names, the new one should have two as well.

Here's a link to a picture of the both of them.

So far Flufkin has successfully hatched one live chick. This leaves her sitting on five eggs.

The new chick has survived a little over 24 hours, so I am cautiously optimistic about it's chances for survival.

Working name right now, Smoke Alarm, due to it's loud high pitched cheeps.

Spring means an overabundance of eggs 'round here. The geese only lay for about four months of the year. As it so happens, though, this coincides with the lengthening of the days and mildly warmer weather that leads to more regular laying by the hens.

By no means is raising birds to get eggs cost effective. Just considering feed prices and predation, I'm sure our per dozen cost is astronomical.

I like having birds for their own sake, though. So eggs are a happy bonus and can be counted in my human* food budget as basically free. As a result, having scrambled eggs each morning has become routine for me. A good use of our resources, and tasty.**

One of our younger chickens, Sapphire, lays eggs of a distinctive enough brown that I can tell hers from the older brown egg layers. As she is younger, sometimes she still lays double yolk eggs. She managed to push out this massive egg the other day. Poor dear, if she had a choice about it, I wouldn't have blamed her if she gave up the whole laying thing all together after that.

As per usual, I can't seem to get Imgur to upload my photos anymore, so if you want to see what I'm talking about click on the links above to see my Twitter posts on the subject.


*We have such a large number of animals to buy feed for that we have a separate animal food budget from our human food budget.

**My kids and I have basically become egg snobs over the years. I expect without fresh eggs I would never eat scrambled or fried eggs again.

I should have posted this nearly a month ago. Our broody hen successfully hatched three chicks, of the two we brought inside, one survived.

Flufkin, the Ameraucana/Silkie, born September 11th.



She's bigger than that, now, obviously.

I've read somewhere that the average homeowner doesn't stay in the home longer than five years. Funny thing averages. We've been here 11 years. Our three closest neighbors were here before we moved in and until last Friday they were all still here.

Unfortunately, for us, our favorite ones moved to be closer to the grandbaby. We had both a love of fruit trees and birds in common with one member of the couple. As it turns out, he had three Araucanas left of what had once been a very expansive flock. Since he couldn't find anyone else to take them, I now have three new Araucanas. Due to one of them being a rooster, I've set them up in Mocha and Peanut's yard, away from our other flock of chickens. They seem to have settled in well, and I finally have a use for the elevated nesting boxes a different neighborhood gave us over a year ago after she decided to be done raising guineas. Well, once I flipped it upside down.





Mocha and Peanut insisted on photo bombing my pictures of the new birds.

I found Flop, C's Rhode Island Red, dead this morning. She was roosting last night and hadn't been acting noticeably off lately, so this came as a very bad surprise. She was still in the protected enclosure area, and intact, so I don't think it was predators. Best guess is the heat got to her. She was our oldest chicken; the last from the batch before the current one.



She will have a funeral later, once it's a little less hot out.

I can't believe we are already more than 6 weeks into this whole mess. My nervous energy productivity has shifted into resigned to the new normal laziness. None the less, I still managed to unload three bales of hay and 10 bags of feed before S needed the truck to get to work this morning. I also dewormed the horses and scrubbed out and refilled their waters and most of the bird waters.

Now: I'm watching reruns of Quantum Leap while the cat cuddles with my legs, Hubby is participating in a virtual filk from an Ontario Convention, S is playing Minecraft with some of her homeschool buddies, and C is playing TF2.

Time to walk Pete.