flock its
i am up to 3 chicken coops and around 60 chickens now. methinks that makes 3 flocks, buttttttaaaa. . . i be thinking, not knowing. fact is, the "six chicks for daddy's birthday" gave me my first exposure to chicken care in december, 2013. the "chicks" were fully grown pullets, but close enough for a city joke. the resentment of taking care of daddy's chicks didn't abate until spring, 2014 when those cute, little chicken babies started showing up in the feed store while i was shopping with my almost 2 year old grandson. pet store employees have colorful names for this scenario and we deserve every one of those names, both better and meaner.
chickens have short life spans. 2 to 4 years. the oldest known living chicken died at 6 years old and she was a medical miricle sponsored by a doting couple who used the chicken in their magic act. 8 years is not enough experience to know how to measure a flock, but 8 years equals ALLOT of chickens. even when the birds die of natural causes, i still squirm like a city kid at the thought of skinning and eating my babies. i have slit the throats of seven of those birds and? ? ? still squirming like a city kid as i watch the oldest of my birds approach their third birthdays. should i put candles on a cake for them while i hang them by their feet and slit their throats? is it more humane to let the flocks peck them to death when the illnesses of old age arrive? still squirming like a city kid. . . nature can be cruel.
at present, i am measuring flocks by where they choose to roost. the chickens mix freely during the day, but tend to roost in the same spot every night. who did YOU sleep with last night? that line, too, can be crossed, but the reigning flock WILL pick on the new bird in the flock. guaranteed. the chicken pecking order changes continually, but the chickens take that pecking order very seriously, most especially the roosters. right now i have four roosters for three coops. one of the coops is far enough from the other two that the one rooster in that roost isnae much affected by the three roosters in the two coops which sit side by side. he is, however, celebrating his second birthday by getting cranky and territorial in the extreme. he has even attacked me. the children are terrified of him and he revels in their fear. my city kid squirm is getting less squirmy with each skirmish.
the oldest rooster in the front coops is also celebrating his third birthday. hatchday? he is a cute little feather legged bantam whose easy going approach to life allows wisdom to settle like a cloak over his age. the other two roosters are not yet a year old and at least three times his size. both of the young roosters defer to him out of some force far greater than brawn. i'm not counting on that deference lasting forever. the size difference will matter greatly in a full-scale cock fight.
the two young roosters grew up together, roosting amicably together until a few weeks ago. the two front coops are far enough from the new house that i donae get to watch them while i tend the human babies, but i see evidence of the manly power struggle every morning and every night when i tend their coops. the americuana rooster -a truly beautiful rooster i call, "pretty boy"-- has succeeded in ousting the gentler and less attractive maran rooster, but 2/3 of the hens followed him into the other coop. the hens still roosting with him are equally beautiful americuanas and some of the meaner hens on the property. pretty boy has gained the turf, but alienated his followers. this morning i left the coop containing pretty boy and his mean girls closed to give the birds from the currently over-crowded old coop free reign as they range. no, this is not cruel to the pretty birds. by poultry industry standards, their coop is a luxury accomodation. the seven birds of the pretty bird brigade could easily live their entire lives there. the enclosure makes them easier to look at. as fashion folks used to say in the depression era, "it's the cat's meow. . ."
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so if you were to title this as a movie would it be "Meet the Flockers?"
:-)
it's really cool all you've done with them...Do you guys sell the eggs? and the poultry?
how 'bout, "just flock it all?"
:-)!!
butt fresh eggs $5 a dozen. i'm still composting more of them than i sell.
i'm still squirming like a city kid at the idea of selling my babies as meat. $5,000 a pound. you do your own catching and processing.
i took a chicken processing course a few years back. i asked the profie if she knew how to get the all-natural chickens to grow their styrofoam and cellophane. she told me to check back next semester.
haha. that's so funny!
"bloodhead" is a fringe player in all three flocks. she was hatched in the back coop and moved to the newest of the front coops as a pullet. a month or so ago, fa found her beneath her car, sick and barely able to walk. she moved her to the new coop for safekeeping. through my city kid discomfort, i thought she was dead when i went to check on her. with feelings somewhere between grief for my pet and germaphobia, i went for a shovel to remove the corpse from the coop. the hen was sick, but quite lively when i returned with the shovel.
i never saw it practiced, but i was pretty much raised with the axiom that, being such short-lived critters, chickens do not heal well, nor do the flocks tolerate sick flock members. it is more humane to kill a sick or injured chicken than attempt to nurse them. my squirming city kid is far more fluent in civil disobedience than killing pets. this particular born were of the first hatched right here on the farm. i sequestered the hen in the still mostly empty room that used to be baby sis's room while i grappled with the yaddahs of the blahs. i wasn't ready to rush the bird to a veterinarian ER to buy pet insurance, but i haven't established a comfortable chicken processing routine yet, either. i mostly ignored the bird while i picked at the psycho snot knots.
she recovered in a week or so and quickly began protesting the isolation and unnatural environment. the two front coops are far enough from the house that it is extremely difficult for me to monitor them while caring for the children. i set her outside to forage near the porch. the flock in the back coop objected mightily enough to dub her, "bloodhead" with their ostracizing pecks. within a short time, her head was bloodied by natural order. i moved her back to the isolation chamber. even with the wounded head, that wasnae an acceptable solution. ditto on the other side of the door. indoor chickens are odiferous, to put it mildly. i patched up an old rabbit hutch from the big barn to set up on the back porch. it served, but it set up a political scandal in the back flock, starting with the mandate that healthy chickens are not permitted on the porch. the immigrant gets to LIVE there!?!?!? protest in progress. . ,
last week she found her way back to the front coops. alas, pretty boy and the mean girls had taken over her old coop. all but 3 of the prettiest hens had taken refuge in the old coop. the overcrowding was unbearable, but still better than taking orders from pretty birds. bloodhead tried her old roost on the first night back, but moved to the refugee camp the second night. so far, the scabs of her head wounds remain intact and healing, but i let pretty boy and the mean girls out of their coop this morning. prayers in progress that her head will remain unbloodied. just praying. . . pretty birds are even meaner that pretty pussies.
i amnae quite certain how, but the 2 year old rooster in the back coop hurt his foot a week or three ago. it isnae getting better and i donae like him well enough to perform the heroic efforts i performed for bloodhead. he has been attacking human passersby and those fighting spurs willnae kill a human, but they leave a nasty gash in the epidermis when he throws his sucker punches. i have been carrying a stick around him for a goodly while now while i continue squirming like a city kid over the thought of serving him for dinner or even euthanizing him and wasting the meat in a proper burial. RIP big boy. yes, "big boy" is his name.
"what's for dinner, hon?"
hubs and i are currently eggshell waltzing. there is a high probability of misinterpretation if i answer, "we're having big boy for dinner."
is it good news that he isnae any longer capable of throwing a sucker punch with those formidable fighting spurs? his hurt foot is painful to look at with swelling so pronounced that even my near-sighted vision can see it from a covidic social distance. i strongly suspect there is oozing infection within that swelling, but only suspecting. i'm okay with leaving on that blurry mask of ignorance. a chicken social distance is even more sacred than a covidic social distance. be still my punny tongue. . .
i donae like big boy enough to go through the trouble of nursing him, but his misery is growing more profound by the day. meanwhile, i have 3 roosters in the 2 front coops. the oldest of those 3 roosters is a bantam rooster who is even older than big boy, but he is such a sweet and loveable rooster that i am tempted to let him return to being the pet which helped 4 year old big sis process the loss and trauma of early 2020. these days big sis is preoccupied with the important business of kindergarten, etc., but she is still quite attached to "ginger" and he is near to letting her approach him when we open the coops in the morning and in the evening. new marks on his crown and wattles lead me to believe that he is near to losing the respect the younger roosters gave him during their early rooster development. roosters will be roosters.
big boy is still hopping along. it's been at least two days since i've heard him crow, but he still made it into the roost last night but didn't have the energy to object when i moved the more gentle of the 2 young roosters in front (stripey) to the back coop after the flocks had achieved their nightly stupor. that wasnae a great surprise. even in the best of health, that nightly stupor is quite profound for chickens.
all was still calm when i opened the coops this morning. stripey was disoriented by the new location, but seemed interested in learning. alas, that interest evaporated like spit on a hot rock when he followed my pull cart and recognized his old coops on the other side of the house and big barn. chickens will covet a hostile familiarity over a change of any nature.
well flock it all! ! !
I hope that big boy gets better!
big boy is a bit more than 2 years old. that is quite old in rooster years.
i'm not sure healing is likely and i'm still squirming like a city kid over all the available options. for now, i'm taking the letting nature run its course option. the infection in that foot makes me wonder if the meat is already tainted, even before i get my non-USDA approved city skills onto the processing block.
yesterday morning i kept stripey in the coop for extra time, when i finally did let him out of the coop around mid-morning, i thought maybe he was going to stick around. that looked possible for about as long as it took him to find his way around to the front of the house where he could see his old scratching ground and feel the call of his loyalty to his old flock. he hesitated a short while, then was off at a dead run.
i moved him again last night for the third time. we see what grows.
and brooding season is upon us. . .
the first of the newly hatched chicks all fell to predator attacks, etc., while the roosters continued their antics to compete with one another. this is only my second natural brooding season and i remain greatly bewildered by the changes brooding has on the flock dynamics. all i am certain of so far is that flock hatched/brooded chicks sure are different from the machine hatched/human raised chicks i've known so far.
i believe it was 9 chicks which hatched and died in the older of the two coops in front while stripey and pretty boy fought for dominance and the hens scattered randomly to stay out of their way as they fought with each other. while that drama was playing out, the most maternal of the hens began brooding eggs in the new coop. when the first of the new chicks hatched about 3 or 4 weeks ago, i impulsively closed up the coop to protect the baby. i have since decided that impulse was one of the better ideas i've had in a while. as of this morning, there were 22 babies hopping safely around "the brood house."
there were 8 hens in the brood house when that impulse first hit. there are only four nesting boxes. three of those boxes were occupied by brooding hens and 5 hens were fighting over the last nesting box. 2 of that 5 abandoned the brood house and rejoined the flock within the first few days. i was puzzled over the dynamics over the 3 hens in the one box but decided to just let it be while i went off to enjoy the 2 week foster family road trip.
all 3 hens were still sharing the same box when i returned and crushing all the babies they hatched in their disputes with one another. fa had pulled several chick corpses from the bottom of their box before my return. the box was filled with ants feasting on the corpses. the hens were attacking in unison as i attempted to clean the 6 ant infested corpses from the box. i chased all three of them from the coop in a fit of frustrated temper. i have since taken to calling those hens, "the 3 stooges" as they have frantically attempted to regain access to the brooding house, creating holes in the predator guards as they scratch at the ground at the base of the coop. the rest of the flock has maintained proper social distances from their antics. even the roosters who seem to have adapted to sharing a single roost. the 3 stooges moved like a single mob unit during the first days of their eviction, feathers uniformly fluffed in attack formation. they seem to be regaining their individuality, their feathers are calmer and the flock is closing the social distance. by my guestimation, the hens inside the brood house are no longer fertile. i find myself wishing one or four of the fertile could join the process. just wishing. . . we see what grows.