Years Later

Years later. It looks like my last post was April 2017. Since then, all those chickens have grown up. Some have left us due to illness and predators. Lots of learning. Lots of new chickens. Lots of eggs, LOTS of eggs.

Our chicken run has expanded. We peaked at around 42 chickens, but are back down to 21, plus the chicks we have. Most losses were because of raccoons. Our reaction to that, along with things to deter the trash pandas, is geese. We have 3 lovely geese so far doing a great job on alerting and being scary.

Some major losses made us rethink the whole chicken keeping experience - the 2 favorite chickens, Eleven (one of the bantams in a previous post) and Breanne of Tarth (a Jersey Giant) were both snatched up by the raccoon. Those couple days were really hard. Negan was also taken from us too soon - but his death was not unexpected (to me anyway - apparently I failed to warn hubs). He had a respiratory infection a year or so back, early on in his life. He always had the dark comb going on, some days better than others, and his crow never came back. He was a sweet, sweet rooster, nothing like his father Sauron. We do have a number of his offspring, a couple that look just like Negan, so my goal is to keep both of them around.

So, 21 adult chickens, 3 geese, 9 turkeys, and 50 meat birds we'll process in the next few weeks. Along with a bunch of new pullets growing into their own.

I'll tell more stories in the future, but for now, this brief update.

d'Artagnan drying off a bit after exiting the pool