Barnyard Redecorating

We've added a few things to the upper chicken yard - made it a little more homey. Now that the weather is getting a little warmer (and only a little) and there's daylight 12 hours a day (almost), it behooves us to make outside as attractive as possible.


The first thing was a trough feeder. For whatever reason, chicken scratch out of a trough is a delicacy, whereas chicken scratch off the ground is nasty. There's a rolling bar on the top of the trough that keeps the chickens from perching on top and pooping in the food.


Yesterday, the waterer was entirely frozen over. I couldn't pry the top off and ended up pouring hot water over it to melt the ice. Today, I took TWO pots of hot water. The chickens gathered around it like yuppies at a Starbucks.


And here's Cargill. Part of our redecorating effort was getting rid of the rooster population. We thought we'd done all of them, but I'm beginning to have my doubts. Look at Cargill - he's got a long mane and big, obvious sickle feathers in his tail. Another feature of roosters is saddle feathers - feathers just in front of the tail feathers that go from the spine, draping down either side near the tail.


Take a look at the tails here - on the brown one in the foreground, the orange-ish feathers near the tail are long and hang down. Saddle feathers. He also has a more developed comb and wattles, more like Cargill.


We should have butchered him with the other roosters, but it was hard to see at the time that he was a rooster. Maybe I just wanted him to be her. Mostly, I wanted to have some araucana hens so that we could have blue eggs, which we are now not going to get until October. I'm bummed about that, but oh well. We'll be eating brown eggs until then, I guess.

In the meantime, I've made a decision. We're keeping him. Because I have obviously failed at chicken sex ed, he gets clemency. His name is Arthur.