Chickens and Ducks Getting Busy

Okay, you have to look carefully. Are you looking? This morning the Pirate came rushing in and said "Hey, there's a clutch of eggs on the rock!" By "the rock," he meant the big rock in the middle of the creek in our backyard. Sure enough, there were about four eggs laying on the rock.


I came out a little later to see the eggs, but I couldn't. They were obscured by a mama duck. Unfortunately while I could see her, my camera could not. Isn't it kind of sad for this duck that of the two of us, I am far more likely to wade into the creek and eat either the duck or her eggs than my camera.


And here is the papa duck, about ten yards up the creek keeping watch, even though it's sort of unlikely that danger is going to come slogging upstream. Well, nobody accused ducks of being smart.

Well, on the chicken side of the fence (I had to turn an entire 180 degrees for these pictures), we have yet another extraneous rooster. He was the "free rare chick" that they include with every batch.

Our guess is that he's a Silver Duckwing Old English Game bird. Check the description - they make him sound like a Jack Russel terrier. And he's totally living up to that description. He's a jaunty little guy - scrappy, even. He's a good deal smaller than the other chickens, but has no problem taking them on, jumping up and puffing out his neck feathers. It's cute now, but "cute" won't last.


And last - here's how to tell the popular girls. Poor Sarah (the white one) and Black Lucy (the other one). As you can see (following the white arrow), most of the feathers have been pecked off poor Black Lucy's head. And on Sarah (follow the red arrow) her comb is scabby. Well, all this says to me is that Cargill goes for personality, not looks.

Good gracious!

Chicken Depression

It's been a month since we separated the boy from the girls, and it looks like everyone's feeling it.

One of our barred rocks has gone broody. What does that mean? It means that she lays her egg a day, and then spends all her time sitting on the nest. It's not like we don't have other nests. In fact, since we blocked the lower boxes, we've had no more of the cornish crosses taking up the preferred laying space for the hens.


Barred Lucy just sits there, all day every day. She knits little three-toed booties, reads parenting magazines, watches daytime television. Unfortunately, we keep taking the eggs. What's worse is that the eggs she's sitting on aren't even fertile anymore.

But it's not like Barred Lucy doesn't have support. She's got her Chick Posse with her. Every time we go into the coop, the Wyandotte Sisters and Big Black Lucy come in from outside, growling and screeching. They want to be sure we know that this is *their* coop and we're not welcome. I've been bitten by one of them. And every time we open the door, the wyandottes make a break for it. These chickens are so socialized they have no fear of us whatsoever. On the plus side, it means that once they've escaped, they don't have the sense to run when we approach making them fabulously easy to catch.


With all this sitting going on, I've done some hatching myself. I've hatched a plan. My plan is that once all the araucanas start laying, I'm going to start breeding araucana chicks. I'm fairly certain that Broody Lucy will sit on anything, even Myra (our name for all the araucanas) eggs, so we'll have someone to tend the nest.


The only thing that remains is making room for the little dears. Part of this will be accomplished by killing off the last of the cornish crosses. We did the first six two weekends ago, and it was much easier than I was thinking it would be. Check it out - can you see how freakishly huge they are? Note the size of the white chickens compared to the barred rock in the foreground. They're a couple of inches taller and weigh a good two to three pounds more than the full-grown chickens, and these are only ten weeks old. Yikes.

How are we going to accomplish this breeding program? Well, we've already decided to put Cargill back into the general population. Right now, he's depressed. Depression in this rooster doesn't look any different, but it sounds terrible. He used to have a loud, strident crow that proclaimed that he was the dominant one. Now, it's more like the impotent, weak cry of an annoyed old man. He really misses company. When we go outside, he follows us the length of his enclosure and I think that the difficulty the Pirate has getting him into his box at night is more a game to keep the Pirate there in the yard than any real reluctance on Cargill's part to go to bed.

Cargill will be introduced back into the population on Sunday. We haven't told him yet. We're going to make it a surprise.

Disappearing Egg Trick

Thanks to good advice from Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, we have been keeping scrupulous chicken records - number of eggs per day, when we've bought feed and other sundries, etc.

In the past week, egg production has dropped by more than half. We've gone from 7-8 eggs per day to 3-4. The Pirate and I went outside and scoured their yard for hidden caches of eggs that might be either hatching or ripening into stinkbombs, but there's nothing. We checked inside the coop, including stripping it to the bare boards yesterday while it was being mucked out.

We thought it might be because the freakishly huge Cornish crosses were using the lowest nesting boxes as napping boxes, but we boarded them up to force the girls into the upper nesting boxes and it's still no good. We went so far as to pick each of the laying hens up and inspecting their vents (the hole the egg comes out) and palpating their abdomens. It was no fun for either us or the chickens, and they all looked normal, if peeved.

I don't know if it's the crowded condition of the coop (eased somewhat by the elimination of the first six of the Cornish crosses), some sickness shared by 4 of the 8 hens, or something else entirely.

I have one more theory. The Pirate showed me an egg he'd cracked yesterday with a blood spot on the yolk, indicating that it was fertile. Now, if you check down an entry or two, you'll see that Cargill has been shut up on his own for nearly a month, but according to the Mississippi State University Extension Service, hens can continue to produce fertile eggs for up to four weeks after the removal of a rooster. But our hens didn't start laying until they became sexually active. Each hen started laying shortly after Cargill started showering her with "affection." I'm wondering if the lack of attention is somehow affecting egg production.

My plan is this: I'm going to keep an eye on the situation until the 18th, when we plan to butcher the last of the Cornish crosses. If egg production hasn't returned to normal after that, I'll re-introduce Cargill to the population. I don't want to do it before then, because he was mounting the Cornish crosses who were unable to fight him off and ended up sustaining some injuries.

We'll see how things go...

I'm the Henry Ford of Chickens

This weekend we butchered another few of the chickens - five roosters and a hen with spraddle leg. Spraddle leg - it's like hip displaysia in birds. The poor thing couldn't walk, and so couldn't eat or drink. She was half the size of the rest of the birds - not just her muscle bulk, but her bone mass as well. It could have been in part because she was female (the males bulk up faster), but her bones seemed so thin and brittle in comparison to the other birds. She spent her last week in a box in the garage where she had easier access to food and water, and where the other chickens couldn't pick on her.

This time, we had the stump at one end of the porch, then the camp stove with the vat of water for scalding. Next to that were two butcher block tables - one for picking and one for cleaning. This time, with three of us, the whole six chickens took under two hours, and I wasn't exhausted this time as I've been in the past. Filthy, yes, but able to go on and sweep the porch and walk of dead leaves and burn them.

I do have to say that these cornish cross chickens are HUGE. Each one was so large that we were unable to fit it into a gallon-sized ziploc bag without cutting off the legs and putting them into a separate bag. The legs alone weighed more than two pounds, and I would estimate that the entire chicken dressed out at more than 6 pounds. We're going to buy another 25 of them, but not until the end of the summer. I'd like to be able to go out for a couple of nice weekends before we go through the whole baby chick process again. We didn't end up going camping at all last summer, and I'd like to be able to do it this summer.