Poultry Progress Report

In my mojo-less blogging hiatus, a few things happened with the chickens. Last week I alluded to the grim demise of Betty and the loss of a mystery chick but I thought I ought to give a status report for the people who might, for whatever reason, be curious about what remains of the three chickens we started out with: Betty, Boo and Abby.

We began letting the chickens roam freely all day between the woods and our garden. Like girls at the mall, they explored in chatty unison and fluttered squawking into the cedar boughs when the boys chased through the yard weilding light sabers and baseball bats. We don’t have a particularly bad problem with marauders invading our yard (just little boys) so it seemed perfectly natural to allow the chickens to peck here and there, nitrifying our soil and plucking up beetles.

But we returned one morning to find Betty slain at the edge of the yard, and we figured it was a pedestrian accident (although the chickens had never strayed close to the road before). We were all very bummed, well duh, so we drove immediately across town to the feed store so we could patch up the broken hearts in the backseats and get three new chicks: a Cuckoo Maran, another Auracana and a Golden Laced Wyandotte.

When we returned with our peeping little box of chicks, Abby and Boo weren’t in the yard to greet us, as they usually do. When Damon searched the perimeter for the missing pullets, we found Boo at the end of a trail of brown feathers, lying much like Betty had on the side of the road. We had been wrong: it was either the work of a dog or a cat, who had carried the hens to the edge of our lot before losing interest or appetite (which helped us rule out a hungry coyote).

A few days later, in the brooder, the Wyandotte chick was just lying there, heaving with both eyes closed. Damnit! To explain my swearing, I briefed Ford so he could part with his chick. Heartbreaking! Boxes of kleenex! Help! Parenting sucks!

The crux of the chick tragedy, as it turned out, lay not in the infection but with the senseless way I fumbled rehydrating the poor thing: trying to administer a few drops of water into her beak with a syringe, and watching with confusion as she lifted her wing, then raised her head, opened her eyes at me, and collapsed. I drowned her.

So we survived with a lump in our throats through another few days, shellshocked and expecting more grim findings whenever we checked on the chickens. Within a few days, my brother folded his plans to raise two chicks of his own in his backyard in south Austin. An HOA dispute. So he arrived with two new Araucana chicks and a coop. We painted it mustard yellow and started laughing at how ridiculous it was that we now had eight chickens, about how funny it is that you can never go buy one chick at the general store: you must by in multiples, think like a farmer. Always account for random plucking.

One morning I carried the now-heavy box of growing, agile chicks back outside from the garage brooder (where we keep them, at night). I smuggled the alpha chick into the coop first, only to watch her fly immediately back out the coop door and into the bushes, where she began a screaming that arced across the lawn behind me and towards the woods. Eyes following ears, I watched a tabby cat steal away with the screaming chick in her mouth, weaving quickly into the shadows. I picked up a branch and hollered after the cat, ramming it with the blunt end of the stick and dislodging the chick, who immediately ran for cover under the canoe.

Good news! With some boo-boo bubbles (a great thing to have on hand) she healed beautifully within about a week. We now call her Thelma. She is no longer alpha. She is no longer pecking Abby in the eyeballs and challenging her every move.

Moving along. This is Louise, the cuckoo Maran. She is a lovely little chick who will hopefully survive to lay chocolate-brown eggs.

This is Lucy. She is the cover girl of the Auraucana bunch, which is to say, rest rest are all Araucanas. They will all lay blue-green eggs in March or April, if they survive.

There are others: two identical chicks we call Pepper and Curry. There’s a large and dark brown chick who quickly became alpha in Thelma’s stead, and her name is Mona. And last is the runt, who is always whiny and always feels an ounce lighter than the rest, and her name is Whiney. In case you wanted to know all of this.

They really like sliced tomatoes:

Our new system of protection is humane but a disappointment: we are keeping them mostly in their coops, where they get plenty of fresh air and sunshine, but not a lot of scratching dirt and certainly not a lot of freedom. But they are safe from dogs and cats and coyotes and hawks. And we do occasioanlly let them all run about, when we’re doing yardwork and the like. And only on special days do we allow Abby to play with the chicks (you’re really not supposed to do this, because the little ones can get picked on, but Abby is surprisingly sweet in her disposition and alltogether outnumbered).