Chickens...

We have a small flock of laying chickens that my wife got from a local elementary school. A friend that she occasionally rides horses with is a school teacher and had purchased fertile eggs and hatched them for her classroom. Since we had chickens 3 summers ago, she asked if we would like to take some of the chicks and we decided now would be a great time to start the flock again.


Back in 2005 I decided I wanted to take control of where at least a small amount of my food came from. I started small vegetable garden and we bought 7 hens that we housed in a chicken tractor setup that I built from an old shipping crate, PVC piping and lots of chicken wire. It turned out to be a lot of work to move the setup around the yard about every other day. I liked doing the work, but all of the excitement and attention that it generated in the neighborhood exhausted my social batteries and made me feel a bit out of place. The neighboring children couldn't get enough when the tractor was on our front lawn, but the parents and older people thought we were weird people.

I kept it going for the first year and then parked the birds in the backyard for the winter which is where they ended up staying in the summer of 2006.
I wanted to keep them on pasture but encountered a few problems that made it easier to keep them in one spot. First, the PVC pen broke under the weight of snow and I didn't want to spend more $$$ buying the specialized fittings. Next, the tractor's tires had deflated and I had a hard time getting them to inflate again. And finally, the neighbors wouldn't stop with the commentary, which got my wife looking at me sideways.


You can see the coop jacked up for some tire repair in the picture.

The summer of 2006 is when the predators started their attacks. First, a hawk killed two birds while I was at work on separate occasions. I had no idea what killed the first bird when I got home from work. There was just a dead chicken with bits missing here and there. I thought it got sick and the other cannibalized it. I've read about this happening. It wasn't until our neighbor saw the second chicken attacked and killed by the hawk that I figured out what happened to the first one.
Next came the fox. That happened because I began free ranging the birds and would close them in around sundown. Well a few times I wouldn't get to their coop until dark and that's when foxes hunt! We lost another two that way.
And the final predator was the fisher cat. There was no stopping that thing! It climbed the fence, ripped a whole in the netting and grabbed the birds one at a time. All this happened at night over the course of several nights. I didn't know this was going on until I noticed I was down to 3 birds from 6!
At this same time my daughter was being born in the hospital and I gave up on chickens until now!

Here are two short videos of the current chickens: