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.