vituperation

Did the silkie hatch?
We didn’t have a silkie egg; we have a silkie chick from Dog Days, which is doing just fine.

Have you had to add more nesting boxes to the new coop?
Nope, there are 12 in the big coop and 4 in the small one. They actually only use about 10 of the boxes so far. The answer to the next question may explain why some boxes aren’t used.

Do the chickens just use the boxes when they are laying eggs or broody and just hang out on the roosts the rest of the time?
Generally, yes. Some of the youngsters (and Charlie, who can’t roost because of her malformed feet) spend the night in nestboxes (and they poop in there, which is gross), but the vast majority use the roost. There’s nothing as cute as seeing a hen with a bunch of babies lined up next to her on the roost.

Will the turkey(s) share the same coop with the chickens?
The turkeys will most likely have a different coop, but we may raise some meat chickens with them. That’s not set in stone, though. You’re not supposed to raise chickens and turkeys together because chickens can carry a disease (blackhead) deadly to turkeys, but my understanding is that the likelihood of that being a problem in a clean, homestead-like coop is pretty slim.

How’s your wonky foot and arm holding up?
Mostly good. My elbow still hurts a little when I do something like hammering or using the heavy 18V screwdriver, and my right heel has started hurting again just the tiniest bit, but other than that all is well.

I’m starting to think the Amish chickens are defective. They seem to be growing slower than other chicks we’ve had, without nearly the same amount of frenetic energy. They’re active, of course, just not as active as we’ve seen in the past.

And they’re dying.

First, the chick I helped hatch last week had to be put down. I expected that, but it still sucked to do it (as it always does). It just wasn’t improving, stumbling around the incubator unable to stand. Then, on Monday, one drowned in the waterer. This one may have been my fault; I took the marbles out of the water that morning because they make cleaning the waterer a HUGE ass-pain. I put the marbles back in after that, and we didn’t lose any more to drowning.

However, we’ve lost two to something else. They just…run down, for lack of a better phrase. I see them eating and drinking, but they just get weaker and weaker until I find them dead in the shavings. I don’t feed those to the pigs because I’m not sure what’s going on, whether there’s a disease thing happening or not.

Out of eighteen original hatches, there are fourteen left. I hope the dying is about done — even though I just found the most recent dead one this morning — because it’s getting old.

The eight chicks left (Miss Mama got one) from Dog Days are doing well: very active, growing nicely, and not having any problems except for a tendency on the part of the Ameraucana to get poop balls caught in its down.

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for chickens here at Crooked Acres. We lost a teen female to unknown causes. I think someone tried to sex her up and killed her; she died in the middle of the afternoon with her head kind of twisted under her at an odd angle. Then, Miss Mama got one of the Rhode Island Red chicks and ate it all except for the gizzard, a wing, and a leg. The four chicks I mentioned above died.

And there’s the one I hate the most of all: When I was cutting the grass on Thursday, I hit a rock with the mower. It slung out the side and snapped the leg of our only cuckoo maran, which we received as a “free rare chick” with our McMurray order back in March. I had no choice but to chase her down — her leg was swinging freely, but she could really move on the one good one — and put her down.

Of all the chickens in the yard, I managed to kill the only one that we only had one of.

To answer what you’re wondering: Yes, yesterday. Chicken enchiladas.

And now, pictures of a couple of girls from this morning.