Chicken Surgery

  This year has been really bad for us with predators. It seems every time we dispatch one, another shows up. Every time we secure one pen, something finds a way into another. Something is picking off our poultry, and nothing we do seems to stop it. We are not in a place right now to get a livestock guardian animal, but the possibility has been discussed at length. Right now, we believe we are battling a fox who likes to tunnel into the poultry pens and make off with our birds in the night. It even made off with our beloved little Cynthia.

  One morning a few weeks ago, Rialey was keying in on one chicken, a little silver laced wyandotte hen. She seemed to have a number of loose feathers on her chest, but she was running around with the rest of the birds and eating normally so I didn't think much of it. That evening again Rialey pointed out this hen and tried to make it clear to me that she had a problem that needed my attention.

  When I finally got my hands on the girl after she gave me quite the run for my money, I took a good look at her chest. It was bad. Way worse than I expected considering how normal she was acting. Something had ripped away the skin on her neck and chest and part of her crop was torn open. The crop (sometimes called the croop or craw) is a small, muscular sac that connects the esophagus to the rest of the bird's digestive track. It is where chickens store food that is waiting to be digested. I could actually see part of the corn that this hen had for breakfast through the hole in her chest.

Not having it in me to put down such an active, seemingly normal bird, I set her up in a pen inside the poultry house with her own food and water. I was hoping that perhaps she could heal enough to close up the hole and be ok. The next morning we noticed that she had drunk her entire waterer and when we refilled it, she started chugging down the water again. After watching her for a few minutes we realized that while feed seemed to be staying in, all the water this poor hen tried to drink would just dribble out the hole in her neck. Despite this, our girl was still full of life. I mixed up some vitamin water and syringed it directly into her crop then Big Onion held her upright for a while so that the liquid would be absorbed.

That night since the hen was still seemed bright and active we decided it was time to take action. Again we didn't want to put down a bird who was obviously so full of the will to live. We decided the best solution would be to try and close that hole. If they can avoid infection, chickens can heal from a surprising amount of surface tissue damage, but this girl would certainly dehydrate and die if she couldn't keep in the fluids. We did a little research and gathered supplies and prepared to do some at home surgery.

Big Onion wrapped the hen in a towel and settled down on the bathroom floor. I started by cleaning the whole area as best I could of the crusted blood and food then scrubbed it with a surgical solution. There was a lot of excess tissue so first I trimmed away anything that looked like it was already dying. This caused a bit of bleeding, but we applied pressure and she clotted nicely. Since the torn edge of the crop had already started healing, I trimmed away a little bit of tissue to encourage it to close back on itself. Luckily I had some old suture material squirreled away for just such an occasion so I set to work stitching the hole closed with small, close together stitches. Working for the vet, I had some experience assisting with sutures, but this was my first time really trying to close something so big.

Here are a couple pictures before and after the surgery. WARNING: These are pretty graphic!

Through all this, our patient never flinched, moved, or made a sound. In fact at one point she fell asleep. We had to rouse her to make sure she was still with us, but she woke alert and clear eyed. Once the wound was totally closed, I cleaned up the area and trimmed away a bit more of the dead tissue. We gave the girl an antibiotic shot to hopefully stave off infection and brought her back out to her pen. Once back outside she started immediately eating and drinking, and to our delight she did not spring a leak! The final job wasn't pretty, and she was still missing a lot of skin on her neck and chest, but if this girl wanted to fight, we might as well give her a fighting chance.

Chickens can be amazingly resilient creatures so we are keeping our finders crossed for this gal's smooth recovery. We don't often name our poultry, but we decided that our brave patient deserved a name. We decided to call her Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas character with all the stitches. Tis the season and all that.

So far Sally has been healing nicely with no signs of infection setting in. She's eating and drinking and patiently letting us inspect the wound twice a day. We'll probably give her one more shot of antibiotics and keep her contained until that area does a lot more healing.  Hopefully some day in the not too far off future, we'll be putting her back out with the flock to do her chicken-y thing!

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Update: I wrote this post shortly after we did the surgery on Sally but never got around to uploading the pictures or posting it. It's been a couple weeks, and I'm happy to report that Sally is doing wonderfully. As I said above, chickens can sometimes heal from surprising amounts of damage and Sally is certainly proving this to be true. We still have her caged, but we've moved her to a bigger enclosure with perch bars and a good view of her friends outside. The wound is almost completely gone with just one spot of scar tissue still sticking out the hole. We've been reluctant to put the girl back out with the group as chickens will pick at anything out of the ordinary on another bird. Plus it is still ridiculously muddy out there. Right now, Sally's biggest problem is that she's mad at being cooped up for so long. For a chicken who literally had her neck ripped open, this is pretty good problem to have!

Here is a picture of the almost totally healed area. What a difference!

Losing a hen

This morning I had to put down a chicken.

I'd seen this big white rock hen slowing down the last few days. There was just something not right about her. She was moving a little slow. Her backside was a bit dirty. I decided to wait it out. Everyone feels under the weather now and then.

This morning I found her laying on the floor of the pen. She was laying in the hot sun with her beak in the dirt. I thought she was dead, but when I went to collect the body, she blinked. Not dead, but close and probably suffering. I gathered her up and put her in the shade and coolness of the poultry house until I finished caring for everyone else.

When I went back to her, she had not moved. It was obvious what had to be done. I took her out to the corner of the pasture away from the other birds. We went up on the hill in the shade of a couple chinese tallow trees. The dogs stayed nearby, watching. I ended her suffering as quickly as possible.

Once she was gone, I did a quick necropsy in the field to confirm what I had suspected. Another internal layer. When chickens who have been bred for heavy egg production get older, they sometimes stop laying eggs, but instead start building up egg material in their oviducts. It is almost impossible to tell that this is happening until it is too late.

We've seen this a few times with our hens and every time I try to find a cause. Something we can do to prevent this from happening to our other girls, but all I read is that this is just something that happens with older hens.

Many places will replace their laying hens yearly since after the first year a hen's egg production will drop a great deal. Maybe this is something we will eventually have to do. Right now we have some hens out there from over 3 years ago when we first bought the farm. I like to think that the older ladies are living out their retirement here. Maybe that will have to change if this is the way we lose them. At least if we process them ourselves they can become food for people and the dogs.

I put that white rock hen's body out by the creek for the turtles and the possums to have. At least she didn't go to waste completely.

Dog Attack

  It was normal Wednesday for us. Big Onion and I were away from the farm working our "real jobs" when we got a call from the neighbors. They had found a dog, a big white female "chow mix," running along the fence outside the first pasture. She had a small, bloody scratch on her nose, but otherwise seemed normal. The dog was friendly, came over to them when called so they put her in their backyard and called animal control to come and get her. We were a little concerned that there was a dog loose on the property. Big Onion even offered to leave work to make the hour drive home to check on everything then drive back to get me and back home again. I told him not to worry. We'd be heading home in a few hours anyway, and the dog was found outside our fencing. I was sure everything was fine.

  In the meantime, the neighbors went out to lunch. When they came home, they found a second dog, a male, IN the pasture with the poultry. He was "playing with the goats" when they saw him. Again, he was a nice dog who came right to them when they called. They phoned again to let us know what was happening. We finished work and headed home with a little more concern, but the neighbors assured us that there was no blood on the dog and everything seemed fine.

  We arrived home and immediately went out to the pasture to make sure everything was ok. Our dogs, who had been out in the backyard all day, seemed agitated. Looking out over the pasture, we knew right away that everything was not fine. We opened the gate to the pasture and called Rialey to come out with us. She immediately ran to a white mound of feathers about 20 feet from the fence. It was a dead chicken, a white rock hen, just lying there in a pile of feathers. What followed was one of the most horrible experiences I have ever had living here on the farm. We walked around and found body after body of dead and severely injured poultry. Around every turn and in almost every pen there was evidence of the attack that had taken place. We found 7 of our chicken hens dead with varying levels of injury. Not one had had any part of them consumed. We found one of the guineas dead in her pen with her pretty black and white polka dotted feathers just thrown everywhere. Another guinea was altogether missing along with two of our bourbon red turkey hens.

  After we had gathered the bodies of the dead, we started gathering all the injured birds. The neighbors had found our little gosling, who was just barely old enough to be out with the adult birds, huddled in a corner near their fence. When we retrieved her from them, she had a very bad limp and blood on her feathers from a small puncture on her side. There was a little white pekin duck girl who could barely walk. We found 4 more chicken hens who had severe puncture wounds, two of which looked like they had almost been plucked bald. It was then that we realized that Frankie, one of our two wonderful, beloved roosters, wasn't around. We finally found him crouching behind a rabbit pen in the all too familiar pose of an injured bird, wings down, head drooping. We gathered all our injured and placed them gently into a pen.

  Next we checked all our goat ladies from head to toe. Thankfully they seemed to be unharmed. We were so grateful for their spunky attitudes and horned skulls that seemed to have saved them from injury.

  Finally we called the sheep up from the back pastures. They seemed spooked, not as happy to see us and rush us for food as normal. Big Onion noticed that Marcie had some injuries on her backside. We did a head count and came up one short. It was Marcie's daughter, a 5 month old lamb that we name Patty after her beloved and now departed grandmother, Peppermint Patty. Fearing the worst, we headed out to the back pasture to search for the missing lamb. We walked up and down the pasture all the while encouraging Rialey to find the lamb.

  After we'd walked the whole pasture down and back again, Big Onion called out to me from a corner behind the ponds. She was laying there. Long dead and bloated. Probably the victim of that first dog, the female. Rialey ran over and started licking the dead lamb's nose and mouth. She sniffed her from head to two, stopping to point out her various injuries. For me, this was the last straw. I finally broke down. Sitting on the trunk of a small downed tree I bawled for this poor little lamb and her injured mother, for all those dead and dying birds. I cried because I'd left the gate open between the pasture that let that dog get in and kill our birds. I cried because it was all so senseless.

  We've had predation problems before. Foxes and possums and raccoons and hawks have all made meals of our animals over the years. Recently we've lost several birds and have been taking steps to rid our area of these predators who found our pastures a convenient hunting ground, but that's just it. All those animals were just hunting for food. Trying to feed themselves and their young on an easily available, abundant, and slow moving food source. When a predator makes a meal of your animal, you kick yourself for not protecting them better. This. This was different. Not one of our animals had been fed on. Those dogs played with our birds, our sheep. They had a grand old time chasing and catching, shaking and tossing those animals around until they died then moved on to the next.

  It's almost as sad to realize that our dogs had to watch this all happen. With all the chaos and stress of trying to assess the damage, we didn't realize that all three dogs that had been outside that day had had front row seats to the carnage. All three were limping when we finally came back to the house to gather the medical supplies needed to treat the injured. The neighbors still had the male dog in their backyard. They had found him too late for animal control to come out and retrieve. The dog slipped out of their gate and Big Onion watched Barley throw himself at the fence at that dog teeth bared and hackles up in a way that we have never seen that sweet goofus of dog act. No doubt those dogs spent the afternoon doing the same. Trying to protect and defend the animals they think of as their charges. Rialey was shaken and on edge afterward. I took her to work with me the next day and my boss (my vet) confirmed that she had damaged her wrists and elbows the day before trying to get at that dog in her pasture killing her animals.

  We did our best to treat the injured. We cleaned and flushed out deep puncture wounds. We gave penicillin shots and applied ointments and hoped for the best. In the days that followed we were able to put the duck hen back with the group. One of the chickens needed to put down the day after the attack, she was obviously suffering and would not recover. A few days later we found that Frankie's injuries were deeper than we could tell at first. Despite the antibiotics and topical treatments, his wound were infected and not healing. We made the decision to put him down, and I cried for the second time. I knew he had probably sustained those terrible injuries trying to protect his girls just like a good rooster should. He had been our rooster for the past 3 years. He was born here on the farm the son of Fernando, our very first rooster. He was kind and gentle with the ladies and respectful of us and the farm dogs. Those are rare and valued qualities in a rooster, and he will be missed greatly.

  The impacts of that day are still effecting us. All of the birds were off their feed, leaving feed behind in the pens where before they would scarf down every pellet and seed. The ducks and chickens are laying egg with thinner than normal shells. I had many crack while I washed them that first week or two.

  I'm sure things will get back to normal around here eventually. We have a lot of poultry to replace. We've started putting up more fencing to make the property as secure as we possibly can. We are still nervous about letting out the birds when we are not here. The dogs have calmed down and stopped limping. Marcie the sheep has recovered from her injuries. We still have three chickens with wounds and feather loss too great to join the general population. Their recovery will take a long time, and they may never start laying eggs again. Our little gosling still has a limp, but she is holding her own out there with the big birds.

  I've made album of the pictures I took that night and the following days. Be warned that these are photos of dead and injured animals, but if you want to know what a dog attack looks like on poultry and sheep feel free to take a look....Dog Attack Album.

Our Egg Bound Hen

 I had been seeing this little red chicken acting funny for a few days. Her comb looked pale, her feathers mussed, and she had a habit of just sort of hanging out against the walls in the coop instead of going out and foraging with the rest of the flock.

 After noticing this for a little while, I finally got my hands on her and gave her a good exam. She was rather thin, but had no wounds that I could find. What she did have was a rather large, solid mass low in her abdomen. Ah ha! She must be egg bound.

  A chicken will get egg bound when an egg gets stuck in her oviduct. This can happened for a variety of reasons, but often it is because the egg she produced was larger than normal or misshapen. I decided to try the most commonly recommended treatment for egg binding - a good warm, soapy soak.

 I even covered the bath so Ms. Henny could have some privacy...and so I didn't have a panicked, soggy chicken come flying out of the tub and flapping around my bathroom! For some reason, she did not seem to appreciate the spa treatment.

 Once out of the tub, I wrapped her up in a towel and used the blow dryer on low to try and get her as dry as possible. Can't have our egg bound momma getting a chill. Then I tried very carefully to massage that egg out, but it wouldn't budge. You have to very careful doing this. I've read that if the egg breaks, those sharp shards of egg can do some serious damage to the inside of the hen.

Once she was totally dry, we set her up in a pen by herself with a private nest box and hoped for the best.

 The following day, she still hadn't laid an egg. We gave her one more day, but the poor thing was looking so puny and sick that we made the decision to put her out of her misery. We then decided to do a quick autopsy to see if we were right that she was egg bound. It turns out the poor thing was full of this huge yellow mass. After doing a little research, it looks like we had an "internal layer."

From the Merck Manual:
In these hens, partially or fully formed eggs are found in the abdominal cavity. Such eggs reach the cavity by reverse peristalsis of the oviduct. If they have no shell, they are often misshapen because of partial or complete absorption of the contents. Frequently, only empty shell membranes are present. No control or treatment is known. This condition is related to erratic ovulation and defective egg syndrome.

  So the mass I was feeling was technically an egg (really a lot of eggs) but all the soaking in the world would not have helped our hen. Once a chicken starts laying internally, the kindest thing to do is to put them down before they die from infection. Hopefully, if we ever see this again, we will recognize it sooner and take the necessary step to keep our ladies from suffering.

Corgi chickens at large

The "corgi butted" chickens are now running loose with the rest of the flock.

When we finally opened their pen door and let them free, Rialey was very concerned that these chickens were not where they were supposed to be.

She took it upon herself to herd every last one of them back to their pen every time they would try to leave.

  It took some serious convincing on my part for her to stop harassing these poor young ladies and let them free range with the rest of the birds.

  This dog's brains and instinct never cease to amaze me. Somehow she recognizes that these particular chickens are different from all our other chickens and knows exactly where they belong. She will also get upset and alert us if a bird ends up in the wrong pen at the end of the day. 

One pouting English Shepherd. 

  Whenever I have to really get on her about being overzealous in her farm duties, Rialey drops into a down wherever she is and stays there pouting until I call her in. What a goofball.

Chickens and Eggs

  The business side of the farm has been steadily increasing over time. These days a lot of our income comes from selling our wonderful, pastured chicken and duck eggs. People seem to love them. So much, in fact, that we cannot keep up with the demand. It's actually a pretty good problem to have. 

  It's also a difficult problem to solve as it takes about 6 months to grow a chicken from hatching to laying eggs herself. That means we have a 6 month lag between purchasing new layers and actually getting any eggs from those chickens.

  To that end, we have decided to stop our "heritage broiler" experiment for now. The first big group that we got from breeding our white rock hens with a dark cornish rooster were a lot slower growing than we had hoped. The males turned out a pretty decent size and shape, but the females stayed rather small and compact. They were also predominantly black and dark feathered which makes for a very ugly carcass no matter how carefully you pluck the bird.  

  A few weeks ago, we processed all the males for pet food and our own freezers, and we decided to keep the females as egg layers. We had already put about 3 months of feed into the ladies so why not give them another few months to grow out and start laying eggs for us? Both dark cornish and white rocks are known to be good egg layers, though they do tend to stop laying and want to sit on a nest of eggs ("go broody") more than we would like. 

   We were housing these girls in one of the pasture pens when they were younger. I guess despite the fact that we were moving the pen to fresh ground every couple days, the quarters were a bit cramped so the group started picked at each other's tail feathers. Right now the poor things look like some kind of corgi-chickens. Hopefully their tail feathers will grow in after their next molt. At least it makes them easy to distinguish from the other birds! 

Wild and crazy birds

 Lately evening chores have been taking longer than normal. Usually, getting our free ranging flock of chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, and guineas to go in for the night is as simple as grabbing a scoop of feed and calling each group into their pen.

   A few months ago we picked up a group of Brown Leghorns to boost our egg numbers. We had read that these birds are great egg layers. What we didn't know was that they are also wild. Like totally crazy, spaz-birds. They freak out if you approach them in the pens and don't like to get put away at night. They are more prone to take flight than any other birds we have ever had here on the farm. Recently, Big Onion, Rialey, and I got so tired of chasing a few of these crazy girls that that we just left them out overnight. We said if they got eaten then good riddance! Of course they were fine in the morning.

  Finally fed up with all the chicken chasing, Big Onion suggested we gather all the leghorn girls and close them in a pen for a week or two to remind then where they should be spending their nights. These girls are just starting to lay eggs as well, and this period of seclusion will help them learn to lay their eggs in the pen nest boxes instead of all over the farm. I like easter as much as the next gal, but I have little interest in going on an egg hunt every single day. Heck, we recently discovered that a bunch of our older girls had somehow been laying in the middle of a hay net full of hay!

 My first job was to let all the other hens out of the pen that was to be our leghorn's home for the next couple weeks.

 Unfortunately, last night all the chickens ended up mixed up between three separate pens so it took some time to locate all the leghorns amongst the other ladies.

   Once that pen was clear, the next step was catching all these wild birds. I'm not ashamed to say that after a couple of failed attempts at catching them by hand I pulled out my trusty fishing net. I guess my skills have improved since I was trying to net loose bunnies a couple weeks ago because it took surprisingly little time to get all the chickens where I wanted them to be. I paused in the process to take this selfie with a couple of the girls. They were less than thrilled. I still took a couple wings to the face and dings to the dignity in the process, but overall the move was much smoother than I was anticipating.

   Here they are, the crazy chicken crew. It's a shame they are so nuts because they really are pretty birds. I can say that no matter how great they lay, I seriously doubt we will ever invest in this particular breed of chicken again. Hopefully this hiatus will settle them down a bit or at least make it so I don't want to wring necks by the end of chores every night!

Making Chicken Soup

  Back at the beginning of April our local feed store was having a customer appreciation promotion. If you bought a bag of Start and Grow, they gave you 10 baby chicks for free. Since we are such wonderful customers (read that: we give them all our monies every week), the owner let us get two bags of feed and therefore 20 free chicks! Since we were already very well stocked on egg laying hens, we decided to get a batch of "meat birds." These fast growing chickens are bred specifically to turn into little round butterball shaped chickens in a few short weeks. 

  In anticipation of the promotion, the feed store had lots and lots of chickens, and although they are very good about keeping their chicks fed and watered and warm, that many chicks means lots and lots of poops. The little birds I carefully selected and brought home were filthy!

  Let me pause here to talk very quickly about picking out chicks. We have had very good luck with buying poultry from our feed store. They tend to be healthy, and we don't have to worry about paying for or waiting for the chicks to be shipped to us in the mail. (We have had bad experiences with mailed chicks in the past)

  I like to hand pick which chicks come home with me. I look for the chicks who are actively eating or drinking. Looking up out of the box at the world is good too. A sickly chick will generally be hunkered down with one or both eyes shut so I never select a sleeping chick if I can help it. Once I pick out a chick in the brooder, I inspect it closely. Make sure both eyes are open and clean with no crusts around the edges. Check to make sure both feet are normal with the toes all pointing in the right direction (you'd be surprised!). Then I flip the chick over. First I check the umbilical area. Umbilical hernias and infections can happen in chickens believe it or not. Finally, I check the vent (a.k.a. the poop chute) to make sure it is clean and free of any indication of loose stool. Diarrhea in a bird so young and tiny can kill them quick!

Ok, back to the story....

  Since these chicks were going to be brooded outside in the poultry house with a heat lamp, I decided to bathe the chicks. Little chicks are so cute and fluffy for a good reason beyond making us want to love them and squeeze them until they pop! All that fuzzy fluff helps to keep them warm. Crusted down fluff leaves exposed skin for warmth to escape so that meant bath time for the chickies.

  Each chick got rubbed down under warm water in the bathroom sink then I used the hair dryer set on low to get them all dry and extra fluffy. Can't have these little ones catching a chill!

Rialey inspecting my handiwork. 

"It's a chicken."

  Here they are all fluffy clean and ready for their next adventure.

These pictures were taken several weeks ago. Stay tuned for pictures of how these cute little fluff balls are turning into meat monster chickens!

Future egg layers of America

 I had every intention of draping the goats with beads yesterday and taking some fun Mardi Gras pics, but the weather was so gross both the goats and myself preferred to stay indoors. Sorry! Let me at least wish everyone a belated Happy Mardi Gras! 

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 Even through this nasty, cold winter, we have been doing very well with egg sales. We have a wonderful group of customers who are happy to purchase every egg we can produce. With that and the fact that some of our girls out there are looking at their third year of laying in mind, we decided to invest in some new egg laying hens for the future. 

 

  These pretty little gals are brown leghorns. They are supposed to be one of the best egg laying breeds out there with the bonus that they don't tend to interrupt their laying with trying to sit on a nest. They also lay large, white eggs which will add a little variety to our current brown layers.  

 We were lucky to find them at our local feed store and so far they are all healthy and growing like gangbusters. They seem a little more high strung and spooky than most of the chicks that we have raised in the past. Hopefully they will settle down as they age and in a few months we'll be able to add their contributions to our cartons!  

Broody henny - part 3

I has just occurred to me that I never did finish telling the story of our broody hen. (Part 1, Part 2)

  Well, she sat on that nest and sat on that nest, and I was very careful never to leave the door to that pen open again. The blessed day finally arrived, and I found a little yellow head poking out from under her chest! A few hours later, I checked back and found that henny had hatched out three little chicks, two perfectly yellow and one black. All was going well, so I left our hen with her young to do her mothering thing and picked up a bag of chick feed on my feed store run that day. 

  That evening I checked back and to my horror found one of the little yellow chicks dead! It's poor little body was all beat up, and I knew there was no way anything could get into that cage. I did some quick googling and found that some first time hen mothers are so broody and so hell bent on protecting their nests that they attack anything that moves, even their own chicks! The other two chicks were still tucked safely under momma, and they seemed fine. I cleared the poor little chick's body and hoped that henny would figure out this whole mothering thing with the other two. After all  the while point of this experiment was to let nature do it's thing and take the burden of incubating and rearing out of our hands. 

  The following morning, I found the hen sitting up on the pole in her enclosure and the other two chicks laid out in front of the door, dead. They had obviously suffered the same fate as their sibling. With a heavy heart, I cleaned out the cage and left the door open for that dang hen to join the rest of the flock for good.

  So our broody hen experiment was a big, whooping failure. Will we try it again? Probably. The weather has been so cold that none of the hens have even thought about going a family way. We also have an incubator full of chicken and turkey eggs that we plan to brood ourselves without the help of a dumb hen who can tell friend from foe.

Broody henny - part 2

  Our broody hen had been sitting on her nest of eggs for about 2 weeks and all was going well. We had another couple hens go broody in that time, so we tucked another nest box next to the first in hopes of going for a double broody hen-a-thon. Unfortunately, the newer hens had no interest in settin for real. They were too busy stirring up a ruckus and pooping on the already broody hen so after the customary 2-3 days in time out, I decided to let them back out into the general population.

  I came out for morning chores and released all the birds as usual then I opened that cage door so that the other two hens could hop right down and into the pasture with the rest of the flock then went about my business feeding rabbits and gathering goats for milking. What I hadn't counted on was our broody hen taking it into her head to jump out of the cage and stretch her legs!

  I came back to an empty cage and a nest full of rapidly cooling eggs in the chilly morning air. I thought surely broody momma would come back to the cage soon. She'd been so dedicated to that nest, I couldn't see her up and abandoning it at the first sign of daylight. My second thought was, crap, birds are rather stupid. This hen has no clue how to get back IN the cage she just left since I had carried her there in the first place. I had to find her, catch her, and put her back in the cage. Only one problem....

  I had already let out the rest of the flock, and we have a lot of white rock hens. Not to mention, trying to get your hands on one hen out in the open who does not want to get caught is darn near impossible.

  I tucked as much hay as I possibly could over the eggs in the nest to try and keep them warm, and Luna and I set out searching for our girl. First, look for a hen in distress. One who looks upset and lost. One who seems to be searching for her nest. No luck. Every hen I saw was just doing their usual chicken thing scratching and pecking and whatnot.

  Ok, don't panic. How else can we identify her? Well, it's been rainy and muddy the last week or so. Look for a clean chicken, one who looks somehow whiter and doesn't have dirt under nails. So Luna and I tried again, searching for the elusive clean-footed broody hen.

  There! Over by the turkey pens! Look how clean that hen's feet are! She looks like she just left some kind of poultry spa and got a full service foot soak and pedicure! Get her! 

  What followed was a good 10 minutes of Benny Hill style chicken chasing in and out of all the pens and around and around the poultry house with Luna trying her best to herd a wild chicken to me and me trying my best not to crack my head on a roosting pole or run face first into a pen door while running top speed after a previously clean-clawed supposedly broody hen! 

  We finally cornered her in the turkey pen, and I was able to scoop her up, screaming and yelling and flapping all over the place (both the chicken and me!) and tuck her under my arm, but not before taking a wing full on to the face which hurts a lot more than you would imagine. 

   I bustled her back to the cage and triumphantly plopped her right in front of her abandoned nest. She took one look at that nest, let out a loud squawk, flew up to the roosting pole at the top of the cage, and refused to come down.

  Ok, don't panic. Either she's just too upset from the crazy chase and will settle down and back onto her nest or I somehow have the wrong hen, but how could that be?! Her feet were so clean! 

  After five minutes, the hen still hadn't come down and I consoled myself to the fact that those eggs would have to come inside and get put in the incubator if they had any chance of hatching. I opened the pen door, took another wing to the face as the hen hot footed her way back out to the pasture and started to gather the eggs into my shirt. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of white doing something rather odd. 

  It was another white rock hen. She was walking around near the cage and what caught my attention was the way she had her feathers puffed out. She would drop her head and spread her wings if another chicken approached her. I'd only every seen chickens do this then they had little chicks in tow. This was our girl!!

  Broody momma was much easier to catch than the first chicken. I sent Luna around, henny puffed up in defense mode, and I snatched her up from behind. I wasted no time in shoving her in that cage, and she immediately climbed into the nest box, settled down on her eggs and started tucking them under her chest with her beak! Luna and I both breathed a sigh of relief. I resolved then and there to band that broody hen and to never leave that cage door open again! 

  

Broody henny - part 1

  We have one cage in the poultry house that opens out into the pasture. We use to as a time out pen for broody hens. You see we keep chickens, a lot of chickens as eggs layers. We count on those chickens to lay their little oblong balls of goodness just about every day. Every once and a while, some bird brained hen will take it into her head to sit on those eggs to try and hatch them. When that happens, the hen stops laying. Really the hen stops doing just about anything. She will sit on that nest nearly 24-7 with a look of zen-like concentration only getting off to eat, poop, and grab a sip of water once or twice a day. 

  For us, that means no more eggs from that hen and an occupied nest box of which we barely have enough as it is for as is. We honestly wouldn't mind the hens brooding their own eggs especially in light of our last incubator debacle, but our dumb hens can't even figure out in which nest box they decided to go broody in the first place and will often return to the wrong, empty box leaving their previously brooded eggs to cool and die. 

  We tried all kinds of way to snap a broody hen out of setting (including dunking in a bucket of water), but the best way we've found is to put the girls in this cage for a few days to cool their heels and get them back with the egg laying program. 

  One day we got the idea of putting one of the rabbit nest boxes into the cages with a couple fake eggs to see if the hen would continue to brood in a more controlled environment. We went through a few hens who just weren't interested, then finally one white rock took up the challenge and plopped herself into that box. After a couple days, we tucked a handful of eggs under her and let her get to settin...

To be continued....

Broilers and broiling

  On Sunday we processed about half of our red broilers. I have to say, of all the meat birds we have raised, I think the red broilers are my favorite. They aren't in the least aggressive. They grow at a reasonably fast rate without outgrowing their feathers or turning into fat slobs like the cornish crosses tend to, and they were have happy to go out and forage in the pasture. To top it all off, they looked great when processed with a good amount of meat on legs and chest. Unfortunately, these were hatchery birds that we just grew out. As we have mentioned before, our goal is to have a sustainable flock of meat birds that are born and bred here on the farm.
 To that end, on Monday morning, Luna and I decided to sort out the Dark Cornish and White Rocks males that are just starting to reach maturity. Our plan is to keep a rooster from each breed. We hope that crossing that Dark Cornish rooster with White Rock hens will result in fast growing, well muscled birds. We are also keeping a White Rock rooster so that we can make more of the breed in the future.

 Luna and I bravely ventured into that pen filled with about 25 crazy adolescent chickens armed with only an Xpen and a handful of colored zip ties! It was quite a struggle, but eventually we got the few roosters from each breed separated from the hens and the other layers. After that, it was a matter of picking the biggest rooster of each breed with the best temperament. The top two choices got banded, first choice in blue and second in red. Above is our first choice White Rock. For the next two weeks, we will watch these roosters to see who is the calmest, most watchful of his ladies, and who has the crow we can best live with. Let me tell you folks, not all rooster crows are created equal and right now it sounds like a prepubescent boy's choir out there with all those boys figuring out their calls. "Cock-a-doo-do-BLARGH!"

  Here is the number two Dark Cornish. I couldn't find the number one to get a picture because by the time we got finished chasing, sorting, judging, and banding all those birds in that closed pen with its metal roof, I'd nearly given myself, the dog, and half the chickens heat stroke. I banded that last rooster and looked over to see all the birds open-beaked panting with their wings held out, Luna had her tongue nearly dragging the ground, and my head felt like it was going to spin right off my shoulders. Yeah, it's hot out there. Next time I decide to chase chickens, I think I'll get up a little earlier in the morning.

Underwater Chicken Chasing

I hear people say it all the time. "My dog hates getting wet." "My dog won't step in the mud." "My puppy just can't go out when it's raining." Those dogs wouldn't last five minutes around here!

It ain't pretty, and it ain't clean, but that's life around here these days.

On my weekly trip to the feed store today they were talking about the weather. About how it was going to storm and hail, and we might even have some tornadoes. I rushed home to put away the few hundreds of pounds of feed I'd picked up and start doing evening chores a little early.

Sure enough, I'd just gotten started tucking away the silkies and calling in the guineas when the sky opened up. The ducks started running around like fools, and the chickens ran for covered anywhere they could find it which for a lot of them was not a safe place to spend the night.

Thankfully, I'd brought my right-hand dog out to help with chores.

Tonight, with a lot of encouragement from me, Luna finally figured out how to move chickens. It finally clicked for her that she can really herd them if she is careful and slow and doesn't take her eyes off them for a second. One call of "Luna, get that chicken!" and she was off chasing wayward fowl back into their pens with almost no direction from me.

I swear she and I must have personally escorted each individual chicken into its pen. It took us a good 30 minutes to do what is normally a five minute job. Without Luna's help tonight I'd still be out there chasing chickens in the mud!

Rabbit-topia

 The last litter of bunnies is getting bigger by the minute. Our two does, Clover and Zinny, finally have this mothering thing down. We ended up with litters of 8 and 9 from the two girls. Our rabbit tractors (mobile cages) just weren't built with those numbers in mind, so we decided to circle them with a bunch of x-pens and set up what I like to call Rabbit-topia. It's a big open fenced in area where the bunnies can run around and nibble at grass all day. They get tucked safely back into their tractors every night.

 It's so nice to watch the bunnies getting a chance to act like bunnies instead of being confined to a tiny cage with a wire floor for the entirety of their 12 week existence. They run around and bounce and play with each other all day. They are much calmer and more curious about the world around them as well.

  With so many rabbits in one area, the fencing gets moved just about every day. As you can see in this pic, the chickens are very helpful in scratching at any piled up dropping to spread them and help fertilize the pasture.

  The only problem we've run into with this system is the goats. Of course they are curious about this new thing in their field. I've actually gone out more than once to find Josie IN the enclosure. Once she had bent the fencing, and there were escaped bunnies everywhere. I'm sure the neighbors got a chuckle out of watching me round up 10+ bunnies on the loose, but I managed it somehow.

 The most recent time Josie pushed her way into the bunny area, she was so mad that she couldn't get back out that I found her flipping bunnies with her horns. Not trying to hurt them, just venting her frustrations in some bizarro retelling of Little Bunny Foo Foo by scooping each bunny with her horns and tossing it onto it's back.

  Every morning the rabbits get a buffet style breakfast of pellets and alfalfa. From this group, we will probably pick out one more breeder doe, bringing out total to four.

  Right now we are doing some research on keeping our breeding females in a colony style setup on the group that would look similar to the setup above. The only big difference is that does like to dig burrows, so we will have to find a way to keep them from digging into the ground. With the high water table in this area, bunnies born underground would surely drown with the slightest rain.

Until then, we'll keep doing what we can to make sure our bunnies lead a happy life.

The search for the Holy Grail ... of meat chickens

Last year we blogged about an experiment in raising our own meat chickens. The results were good, but not great. Our plans, however, came to halt when our lovely rooster, Fernando, met an untimely end to a predator. I'd like to discuss this some more, and outline some of our plans for the near future.

Monsoon season

The rain just keeps falling around here and more and more of the pasture is surrendered to water and mud.

The chickens are learning to adapt to their new partially aquatic life. I swear one of them is trying to grow gills!

The poor goats HATE getting wet. Josie and Jennie have stayed inside their room for 3 days straight. Here Thea takes advantage of a brief break in the weather to try and devour an entire pine tree.

Here's a picture of the creek from a couple days ago. It had topped its banks once and was threatening to do it again. 

For reference, this is what it normally looks like (though most of the trash and scrap metal have been cleared from the banks since this picture).

Big Onion's new fence has been under water more than once but is still standing, straight and strong. 

 As I've said before, the ducks (and geese) are the only ones really enjoying this crazy weather. The rest of us just feel like we are stuck in a Ray Bradbury story. 

 At some point I got fed up with all the water everywhere and decided to dig myself a drainage pond....with a shovel. I think all the water is going to my head.