Runaway Mom! Somebody grab that chicken!

The Broody Chicken continues to nest.
Once a day she comes out and struts around close to the coop.  She puffs herself up and kind of has herself looking like a dwarfed turkey.

Broody Chicken puffing up.

Broody Chicken

She doesn't stay out long. She grabs dinner, a drink and back in she goes. Yesterday was a beautiful day so she stayed out a little longer.  Just long enough for the other's to pick on her a little bit. Granny chased her and yanked a feather out. PeeWee reprimanded Granny. It was all a circus for a short minute and she retired back to the peace and quiet of the coop and her eggs.

PeeWee & hens in the Kabota

She came out again later and jumped up in the bed of the Kabota. For some reason they love it in there and they usually jump right out if someone gets in.  Well, she didn't and proceeded to take a ride down the road. That was all I needed--for her to get over to the other side of the farm and jump out. She'd never make it back and the eggs wouldn't survive long without her sitting on them.  I headed the driver off at the pass and made her get out, right there on the road and follow me back. Geesh, these babies will be lucky if they make it.  However, the eggs are looking good and she seems to be rolling them like she is supposed to as they are in different positions when I am able to look.  AJ, Belle and Andrew have circled March 2 on the calendar  as our 'due date'.  They will be a batch of mutts but we'll take our chances.  *Oh, please, please, please... (Is there a patron saint for chickens?) let them all be girls, Amen*.

Patiently awaiting a March 2 hatch.

Broody Chicken

Zeke  R.I.P. You and your big, floppy comb

We have a broody chicken. We think she is the same Barred Rock that got broody on us in September. I say, “we think,” because the two Barred Rock's we have look identical with no real distinguishing marks to tell them apart. It's just as well, really. When you name them you seem to get more attached and it's always harder when they meet their end. We had a Barred Rock earlier this year that had an extra long comb that flopped over her head. I named her Zeke. Zeke was extra friendly and our five year old neighbor loved her. Zeke would let her pick her up and handle her and carry her around without the usual fuss that would come with that nonsense. (Picking up chickens usually results in a fair amount of protest from the chicken.) But Zeke, as sweet as she was, was killed in lieu of a punchline. Why did the chicken cross the road? To be run over by a careless driver.

Anyway... back to the broody hen...

Broody Chicken

When she got broody back in the Fall we discouraged her from sitting by stealing her eggs. We didn't want to worry about the babies as winter set in. Now, though, Stan wants her to hatch a few. We have purchased chickens from farmers, from hatcheries (mail order), from the feed stores and we have even incubated our own in a friend's incubator, but never have we let nature take it's course. So, here we are, letting Broody Chicken sit on four eggs. And, in twenty-one days, maybe a few less since she has been sitting for a few days already-- although neither of us is really sure of the exact date-- we should have chicks!
With our luck, they will all be roosters.

Stay tuned.....

In defense of Roosters

Every rooster we have ever owned was an accident. We have never intended to have a rooster on purpose, rather they have just happened to us. In the recent wave of backyard poultry keepers that is sweeping the country you'll find few who own roosters. Especially in the more urban areas. Most people will say they don't want a rooster because they are good for absolutely nothing. They can be mean to the hens, mean to the people who own them, and a rooster in the henhouse will automatically make your hens less likely to want to be handled by you. But, in a yard with no rooster, you are the rooster. I've watched my cousin's hens and my brother-in-law's hens squat for them and allow themselves to be picked up and handled. I lost that privilege when I allowed a rooster to stay. But roosters are true protectors. At least the good ones are. They wake up the flock in the morning (I don't care what you say about the noise, I have yet to find someone that doesn't enjoy hearing it. And it beats a barking dog any day) and they put the flock to bed at night. They warn the flock of danger and dance excitedly, like a proud, new father, when a hen lays an egg. I have never been without a rooster in my yard so I can't say, but I have heard people say their hens seem happier when there is a rooster with them.

When we originally wanted to get chickens, Stan's brother took us to a farmer who had recently purchased several hundred layers and was willing to part with 4 of them for a few bucks each. He was very nice and the whole transaction was an experience. We drove an hour to his farm and there were pigs and chickens and cows and goats running everywhere. He had four pullets already caged up for us and we paid him and I could have sworn I heard him chuckle as we drove out of sight.

We waited patiently for out new pullets to lay our first and very own eggs. One day, as we were still waiting for that first egg, we heard what sounded like a crow and I jumped up and ran out the back door. I was met by my neighbor, who ran out his back door as well. “Did you hear that?” He asked me.

“What? What did you hear?” Not wanting to believe it was what it was, I cross-examined him.

“I believe you have a rooster back there, neighbor,” and he laughed. A hearty laugh.

Over the next few weeks we kept a close eye on them and not only did we have one rooster, we ended up with four. Yup, all four were boys. Who would have thought you couldn't trust a farmer? We re-homed three of them and decided to keep one very pretty gold-laced wyandotte. We found a guy on Craigslist who was selling pullets about ready to lay and after all we had been through and the additional research our mistake forced me to conduct, we went to his farm much more prepared. I felt I knew what to look for and I could spot a cockerel now.

A year or so later that Rooster wore out his welcome by being the meanest, nastiest rooster I have ever come across. He was also the first rooster I'd ever come across. But still to this day I have yet to see one more ornery. He flogged me. He spurred me so deep that the blood actually squirted out of my leg. He chased the grandkids. He flogged the dogs, not really realizing if he had made contact it would have been all over for him. Yet he was too pretty to die. So we found him a home on a farm and he had plenty of girls to tend to there. He lived on that farm (the farmer enduring being flogged almost daily) for several years and even survived a pit bull attack defending his girls, only to die at the hands of his farmer-owner after he spurred a child.

He didn't leave us, though, before we gathered and incubated several eggs so we could have his offspring. He was just so pretty it didn't matter to us they would be mutts. Every hen I had was a different breed. So with the help of a friend, we incubated eleven eggs. Seven survived to hatch and five of those were boys. Not a great ratio. We were able to re-home four and we kept one.

Even as a chick Kernal was a natural leader. That's him on the hat.

Kernal as a cockerel

His name was Kernal. He was a cross between Rooster and our favorite hen, Granny. He was golden yellow at hatch and grew into a beautiful golden/white mix. He had gold lace across a white chest and he was protector of the flock. Kernal was sweet to his girls and only tried to flog me once and I cornered him and it freaked him out so that he never tried it again. A rooster, after a certain age would just as soon die as to be picked up and held.

Kernal moved here to the farm with us from the city. It was here that he met his demise defending the flock for a final time. A coyote had been stealing hens one and two at a time and before we could track him down to stop him, he got Kernal. But Kernal was the only one of the chickens who left such a big feather trail. He fought to the end, that was evident. There were great amounts of feathers strewn from one end of the yard to the edge of the woods.

Kernal

We decided to buy pullets only from the feed store, although this was a little disconcerting given that I knew what the ratio could be of roosters to hens and buying from the feed store and online hatcheries supported the practice of killing the baby roosters right out of the shell. They are sexed immediately after hatching and all the cockerels go into a grinder and they are ground alive. I pushed the images back and we made the purchase--all pullets.  Eh, it's about a 98% guarantee, anyway.

PeeWee

The tiniest of these newest additions was a beautiful little silver laced wyandotte that was so small we named her PeeWee and thought she'd never grow to catch up with the rest.  She was so small, in fact, that we thought she might be a banty that got mixed in with the standards. But she finally started growing. Never really catching up with the rest but growing. And then crowing. Because nothing is a guarantee where Mother Nature is concerned. And I had grown attached to 'her' because of her size so I didn't care that she was a he and good for you, PeeWee. Good for you for surviving that grinder.

PeeWee today

Kids & chickens; it's a Match Made in Heaven

My Mother always used to tell us the story about her Aunt Jo being asked to fetch the eggs from the chicken coop. Aunt Jo was a young girl at the time and had collected eggs many times but apparently never put two and two together and figured out where the eggs came from. When she went into the coop on this day a hen was in the middle of a lay and she got to see the egg pop right out of that chicken's butt.  It freaked her out so badly that by all accounts she never ate another egg in her life.

I like to keep a basket by the front door and whenever a child is visiting it never fails to be the highlight of their day, collecting the eggs for us. There is nothing like seeing those bright faces as they find the brown and blue treasures in the nests and carefully come back with them.

My great-niece Ava collects the eggs for my sister (her Grammie), too.  

Andrew

Our Grandson, Andrew, who spends every other weekend here on the farm with us, has made it his job when he is here and on those weekends no one else is allowed to get them. He checks for eggs sometimes three times a day.  Once, when we had been out of town and missed a day of collecting, Andrew went out on his regular run and came running back in the house screaming for his Dad. "Dad, Dad!! Look, there's nine eggs!" He was used to collecting 3 or 4 a day and his dad said he may as well have won the lottery. That was three months ago and he still talks about it like an angler talks about his finest catch.

Our Great-nephew, Trent. The face says it all
When Andrew isn't here our neighbor sometimes comes down to get them for us.  And sometimes our friends' kids are here and I send them out with the basket. The rookies creep cautiously around the coop just to make sure the chickens aren't too close to them but when they see those eggs in the nest, the worry turns to wonder and excitement. So cool to watch and a great farm lesson for the young ones. Teach them early where their food comes from.

Anabelle

neighbor, Audrey

I figure if Aunt Jo had only ever seen eggs come from a cardboard carton from a shelf in the store instead of her own back yard, maybe she would have experienced the wonder and excitement instead of the disgust. But Andrew, even though collecting eggs is one of his favorite things to do, would agree with Aunt Jo about them being 'gross'. He won't eat them either.

Yay to Spring!

  

     I would love to be able to ease into Spring. You know,  once the weather gradually warms up you start to think about planting the garden and the flower beds. You think, "this week I'll mulch, this week I'll weed, the end of the week I'll seed. It should all be a gradual process. But it never works out that way for me. It seems to all need done at once. As the tulips wilt in the Spring heat almost as soon as they bloom I think that I'm behind already. I haven't tilled the garden, I haven't mulched, I haven't even planned the beds. The chicken coop needs cleaned out, the grass is days past needing it's first cut, although that would be Stan's job. He must be as behind as I am this year. 

Stan got started on the tilling today while I made chicken salad for lunch.  After lunch I trimmed the maple tree and after that I was going to start on the pond landscape, the flower beds and the cleaning of the chicken coop.  While I was trimming the maple, I couldn't help but notice how pretty the blooms were on the cherry and peach trees. So I got my camera and captured a few nice bloom shots.  Stan cut the grass and I finished the maple and moved to the pond. The water looked pretty clear and I was happy to see the water lily stretching itself after the long winter, to reach the surface of the water. 

It was deserving of a a few frames as well...

It's no wonder I can't get any work done. I find the beauty in my own backyard is worthy of stopping to admire and record even before the Spring cleaning is done. 

Stan finished his yard work ahead of me, of course, and proceeded to do one of his favorite things; that of treating the pets.  Another memory in the making... And I am never going to get anything done at this pace.  I grabbed a handful of peanuts and tried to feed the chickens and they wouldn't come near me today. I think they smell chicken salad.

Back yard life. It beats the alternative.

My pond is a great source of enjoyment for me. It is also a great source of aggravation and hard work and frustration, which makes it a work in progress at all times. I rearrange the falls, add spitters, take spitters out, add this plant, remove that plant, and generally stay dissatisfied with the water in general. But the fish thrive.  The plants also thrive. And for a place that causes me so much aggravation and hard work, it is simultaneously  the most peaceful place to sit and meditate, pray and tune into nature.  The dogs love to drink from it, and so do the chickens, the birds and whatever wildlife wanders through in

the night that I don't even know about.  The sparrows rely on the spitters. They love to sit on the frog's nose and drink from the stream that flows from it.  If it stops running, for whatever reason, the sparrows line up on the fence and give me hell until I get it going again.
     The pond is a place I love to just sit and ponder a number of things. My place in the universe... my vocation. What am I meant to do?  I have created a hermitage in my home and yard and I ENJOY it. I've often wondered if I'm depressed, but I enjoy my world and everything in it.  Recently, a friend of mine said he thinks that we have "lost our collective minds" as a society.  In my opinion, he is so very right.  And my home and yard is my escape from the crazy world.  People have become crazed with fear of the unknown and the unwillingness to accept change. Their fear causes them to turn a blind eye to the second most important of God's requirements of us. That we love one another.  That we love our neighbor, our brother, our fellow man.  The single most important commandment after loving God above all others is being tossed out of a lot of people's spiritual curriculum these days.  Foremost among them, the ones who claim loudly and proudly their Christian affiliation with the Most High.  It pains me. Literally.  I sit and think about the turmoil in this country over a Muslim Community Center being built 600 ft. away from ground zero, and wonder how in the world it could cause so much anxiety among people who call themselves Christians.  The hypocrisy alone is enough to choke on, yet they don't see it.  They cry that, "they don't worship the same God we do!" "My God is not called 'Allah'!"
    I got news for you.... your God--and mine, too for that matter-- IS called Allah. It is an Arabic word for God. If you are in an Arab country and you are a Christian, and your only language is Arabic, then you are praying to Allah. If you are in Mexico, and you are a Christian (which you probably are), and your only language is Spanish, you are praying to Dios.  If you are French and you are Christian and your only language is French, you are praying to Dieu.  Do you see a pattern here? It's all the same 'Big Guy'.
     So, I sit by the Serenity Pond to try and absorb some serenity while the whole world goes to pieces around me.  And the animals, oblivious to the ignorance of humanity, enjoy it with me, and it makes me feel better.

     And then Addie will bring me back to a more immediate reality, mercifully enough. She knows not to get in the pond. She has her own swimming pool, for cryin' out loud. Yet, she takes the occasional dip to cool off. I realized early on that I couldn't yell at her to get out or it would cause twice the lateral damage. So I just look at her and she looks back at me and I calmly ask her to please remove herself from the pond, and she does. (After all, I named it the "Serenity Pond" for a reason.)  And I really hate to deny her that little enjoyment, anyway, but it sure does make a mess of things in the water and plants.  But then, chaos always returns to order, so I guess it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
Swim, Addie, swim.

The Rooster and the Hawk

Having chickens has been both a rewarding and a learning experience. When I was a kid my favorite cartoons were the Warner Brothers Classics. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and let us not forget Foghorn Leghorn. I loved those cartoons. But it wasn't until I was 45 and had a back yard full of chickens that I realized that whoever wrote the scripts and stories for those Foghorn Leghorn cartoons had to have owned chickens at some time.
Our rooster, whose name is Kernal, is a lot like Foghorn. He dances around the girls, pleading with them for attention while they do the "not now" dance away from him and he gives up and moves on to the next. Foghorn was always at war with the yard dog. Ours aren't at war, per se, as our dogs have been trained to leave the chickens alone and so they really don't do much more than trail behind them, waiting for them to drop treats. Oh yeah, they love chicken poop. But Kernal hasn't been told they are not at war.   Because the dogs don't terrorize the chickens I think it gives Kernal a false sense of superiority. He eyeballs them when they get close and rubbernecks them all the way by while they don't pay him a bit of mind.

Stan feeds the chickens and the dogs wait their turn patiently.

  But Kernal is so protective of his flock. One day I could hear him crowing rather excessively. He was still pretty young, so I thought, "wow, he's going to be a vocal one."  But he kept on and kept on, so I went out.  Again, we're urban chicken owners and I think the city frowns on people owning them, so I don't like to draw any unnecessary attention to our yard.  He came running towards me when I walked out the back door. I walked around the yard and he kept circling me and crowning. Something was not right, and I was just figuring it out, much to his dismay.  I did a head count on the hens and sure enough, one was missing. A young one too, which was disturbing.  We had been seeing a hawk fly over at least once a day but I didn't see any feathers laying anywhere.  A hawk would leave a pile of feathers, more than likely. Or at least a few.  I looked in all the hiding places they have around the yard and could find no sign of her.  Stan went out in the back alley to look around and he found a white boxer running frantically around a parked car. He looked under the car and there she was. The boxer would have had her had Kernal not alerted us to her disappearance. Stan ran the boxer off and managed to get the hen back in the yard.
     If a bird of prey flies over the house (or an occasional plane and he gets excited), Kernal will make a sound deep in his throat (or gizzard?) and every hen in the yard will freeze and look up from whatever they are doing. If he does it again they are likely to take cover. I learned from one of the chicken sites I follow that this is an arial call. Our old rooster, "Roo," used to make an arial call when I threw the tennis ball for Addie. But he was never too bright.
     Another day, I answered the constant crowing, did the hen count and found one was missing.  And, since he was dancing a lot around the garage, I opened the garage door and there was Granny, our oldest and favorite hen.  She had gotten locked in the garage when I was in there earlier in the day. They always follow me into the garage. I don't know if it's because they know that's where the grub is kept or they are just nosy.  I think they are just nosy.
     One of the things our rooster does that Stan and I love to watch is when he calls his hens to dinner.  We used to bring them morsels from the house on occasion and we'd give it to them indiscriminately. Now, we give the food to him and he calls them in to eat it. He dances and chortles and they come running like there is no tomorrow.  We can walk outside with the most delicious things for him and he still will take it, put it on the ground, and call them to eat it. He does take care of his girls, beyond a doubt.

     Last winter we had a pretty long stretch where we had snow covered ground and the chickens don't like to get in the snow much so they'll stay in their pen and only venture out rarely.  I was sitting at my desk doing some work on the computer. My desk has a broad view of the back yard and I was deep into a piece I was writing when Kernal started his crowing.  After the 4th or 5th crow I looked out the window and scanned the yard. Looked like they were all right there in the pen and close to it, yet he continued to crow.  One hen was outside the pen pecking at some scratch I had thrown out earlier.  Again, I looked around the yard and happened to spot a striped tail in my peach tree. At first, I thought it was a raccoon, but I immediately realized that this striped tail was connected to a hawk.  Or a Falcon. A very young one, but he was eying my hen who was oblivious to any of it. After all, Kernal wasn't sounding off with his arial call, he was just crowing incessantly.  I jumped up from my desk and called into the living room to Stan, "HAWK," and grabbed my camera.

Look closely in the tree, just below and to the right of the
owl decoy, there sits the hawk.  You can see my hen
in the lower left corner outside the pen. Kernal was in the door
to the pen.

 I took the first couple of shots from my window and then I thought I'd better shoo him away. I'm sure he was hungry enough to take a feeble shot at my hen, but all he would probably get done would be to maim her or maybe even kill her but he would  not have been been able to carry her off.  So I headed out the back door, knowing he would fly when he saw me so I started shooting.  And he did.  As soon as he saw me walk toward the pen he flew. I don't know how long he had been sitting in the tree, taunting Kernal, wondering if he could take dinner home from this particular greasy spoon, and I don't know if he had been building up the nerve to try it. But when he did fly, everything happened very quickly. He swooped down toward the hen, Kernal let out his arial call. The hen, hearing the call and possibly now seeing the hawk coming straight at her, beat feet back toward the pen and Kernal.... Oh, our brave, brave rooster, Kernal.  Well, Kernal charged.  Then and there, he put his life on the line for his hen. He charged straight at that hawk, hackles up and ready for battle. I watched as he laid his life on the line for the sole purpose of the continuation of his species. Sacrificing himself to save the ones who reproduce.  The hawk (thankfully) thought better of things at the last moment and up over the fence he flew and disappeared.

He still comes by to visit the bird feeders and unfortunately I have seen him feast on the occasional dove, which are more his size. I think he stops just because he knows he can aggravate Kernal.  He hasn't yet tried another hit on any of my chickens but when I hear the constant crowing you can bet I go check to see what's the matter.