Herding Chickens

So... the chickens.... They are 18 weeks old now. Most of them have beautiful feathers. I am a little disappointed at how similar the Sicilian Buttercup, the Golden Penciled Hamburg, and the Golden Campine look though. Other than the nuanced differences in tail angle and body shape, they mostly just have necks of slightly different colors at this point. 

I say that "most" have beautiful feathers because there is an oddball, an "ugly duckling," if you will. She seems to suffer from a genetic mutation or from being ill-tended while in the egg (not turned enough or a period without the proper warmth.) Her partial molts, that all pullets go through, have been slow and ugly, with large bare patches of bright pink skin showing. She has not been fully feathered since they began. The feathers she does have are partially frizzled, and some stick out at weird angles. 

At first I worried about some chicken disease or malnutrition, but I have made certain that she is well fed and that she is not being henpecked. And none of the other birds have presented with any oddities. She is primarily white, with a few black flecks, and very long legs. She has a double comb like a red cap, which I ordered, but which is not white. The only primarily white hen that I ordered was a Lakenvelder. Lakenvelders have a white body with a black head/neck, black tail, and a black wing band. I clearly have one of those. So I can't even identify what breed she is out of the list that I ordered! She resembles none of them so far, and the roosters complicate identification too.

Yes, you read that right. I have not one, but TWO roosters- out of an order of 15 HENS. One of them seems to be a Silver Leghorn. The other might be a Rose Comb Brown Leg. (It's a bit hard to tell because they don't have all of their adult feathers yet, and because roosters are marked differently than hens.) 

The Rose Comb/"red rooster" crowed from pretty early on. We thought perhaps it was the phenomenon wherein the dominant female, due to lack of a male, takes on the role of boss and protector and tries to crow. "She" didn't have spurs. But then "she" got saddle and hackle feathers, and the rooster like squawks became definite crows. Sigh. 

Eventually, I noticed that another "hen" seemed to be getting saddle and hackle feathers too! But I never heard or saw it crow and it didn't have spurs either. So I clung to the hope that I was just seeing fancy feathering that were misleading. Nope. 

The chicken with the red comb is the Silver Leghorn/"white" rooster.
The blurry hen in the lower left is the Lakenvelder. 

One day the rooster crowed incessantly. I thought perhaps there was a predator bothering the chickens and went out to investigate. What was really going down (or should I say, "up") was that the suspected white rooster had flown up to the 6 foot tall fence post, and started crowing. He was taunting the "red rooster," who is not as agile of a flier or who is a natural home-body. (He always hangs around the hoop house/chicken run. It was a war of sorts. Ever since then, 5 of the hens have seemed to be in the white/Silver Leghorn's harem; he and his flock fly over the fence each day and worry me by often wandering into the edge of the woods during their scratching and foraging.

Speaking of the woods, I've had a couple of fun times with the chickens and the woods. Once, the goat got fed up with the chickens. In the morning when there is heavy dew or when it is rainy or when they are bored, they like to go and scratch in the bedding of her stall. She does not like this, especially now that there are two noisy males. She sometimes charges at them, chases them around, etc. Well that day I had not walked her to the back pasture. So she got annoyed, managed to kick the chain latch loose on the gate, and herd all the chickens out and into the woods. Fully satisfied and full of defiance she came to the house, stood right out front, and stared into the windows until one of the kids noticed her. 

I went out to close her back up, and she followed me eagerly to her stall without any shenanigans. It was only after she was safely closed up again that I realized that it was too quiet and still. I realized that I didn't hear or see even a SINGLE chicken anywhere! Then I noted that the Lily was covered in burrs and weed seeds and was soaked. So she didn't kick open the gate and just mosey up to the house because she was looking for companionship or because of boredom. She had been out gallivanting through the "bluebell pasture" or the woods. 

I went in, settled children, changed clothes, and went in search of the flock. By then, the misty morning had turned into a rainy midday. So in the damp chill I beat through the undergrowth of the woods with a stick, stopping every now and then to listen. Finally, I heard the red rooster make a weak and feeble crow. (This was before the white one revealed himself.) There were my bedraggled chickens, huddled under some multiflora roses. It was the first and only time that I have been happy about owning a rooster. With his help, I herded them back to their pasture and into the hoop house/run, and didn't lose any. Have you ever tried herding chickens in the woods? Phew. 

And just this morning, I was upstairs reading aloud to my 5 and 7 year olds when my 10 year old came in, asking what that crazy noise was. I paused and heard an unusual, loud, and steady squawking. Sighing, I put a kid on temporary toddler duty, booted up, and went to investigate. Upon exiting my house, it was clear that the noise came from the woods. I walked over and before entering, a hawk flew off through the trees and a hen came scurrying out of the undergrowth, and made a beeline for the chicken pen. I chased all the chickens under cover. (They free-range, as I have not clipped pin feathers, and they are exceedingly good flyers.) I observed the hen that had escaped for a while, and she showed no visible signs of injury. Luckily it was Attila the Hen, who is the largest of them all. I'll have to do a closer inspection tonight after the children are in bed, but she has been perching and scratching normally so far today.

I'm lucky that the chickens are good flyers though. Yesterday we had an incident that could have been ugly. When showing my mother-in-law the chickens and their set-up, my 5 year old let the pop door fall on the hoop house. So when my husband went out to close the coop, only a few birds were inside. They could not get through the hoop house/run to get into the attached chicken coop. Some chickens were roosting on the stack of square bales in the pole barn, and some were roosting on the top of the hoop house/run. The white rooster was pacing about. 

After much difficulty, which included a flashlight, ladder, and a broom, chasing hens in the twilight, and carrying struggling squawkers to the run, we thought they were all inside. The white rooster flew to the barn roof for a while, but we managed to get him down. I counted the milling, disoriented poultry in the coop over and over again, usually coming up one short. But after a time, I gave up, assumed they were all in, and went back to the usual duties. 

This morning when I went to let them out of the coop for the day, the Egyptian Fayoumis was pacing along the pasture fence- on the outside. So I WAS one short. Luckily she had found a safe perch, and had made it through the night. It's a good thing too, because coming in last night I heard an owl hooting in the woods. 

As you can see, by just the example of these few adventures, chicken ownership has been eventful this far.

Close-up Vulture

One day, recently, my son called out to me from the living room, "There's some sort of hawk or something thrashing in the bushes!" I feared that a hawk, hunting for a small bird, had entangled itself in the deer netting that had been draped over the bushes by the previous owners of our home. I sighed. 

When I took a look, I knew right away that it wasn't a hawk. I couldn't see much of the bird at first, just a wing flapping up now and then, but it was a BIG wing. After some minutes, it became obvious that we were looking at a turkey vulture. We still didn't know if it was caught in the netting or not, but it was thrashing about wildly in the bushes. 

Just when I was wondering whether or not to go out to it to see if it was stuck, and wondering if I'd need to call a wildlife specialist, the vulture moved. It became apparent that it was eating something. I snapped a few pictures, and must have disturbed it when  my lens bumped the glass of the window, because it flew to a nearby branch. I took a few more pictures while it moved about the branch preening. 

Later, after tending the livestock, I caught a whiff of something terrible. It came from the bushes that generated such movement and excitement earlier in the day. Gingerly, and unable to ignore my morbid curiosity, I walked closer and took a look.  What I saw was the carcass of a giant black snake, about as big around as my wrist. Yuck. To my knowledge the snake is still in said bush. I am not going to extract the smelly, torn, and mangled thing. Those bushes are slated to be removed anyway. So the snake can wait. We just won't hang out down wind of it!

A few days later, two vultures showed up on the same branch that the first had occupied. They never returned to the bush. Perhaps some other varmint had already eaten it. Perhaps our presence at the nearby window deterred them. 

We often see these birds from a distance soaring and scavenging. I love to see them riding thermals. But up close, their nostrils and ugly heads are far from beautiful! Here are links to a previous posts of mine about these giant birds, in case you're interested: http://livingwaterhobbyfarm.blogspot.com/2013/08/vultures.html  http://livingwaterhobbyfarm.blogspot.com/2014/03/fish-and-vultures.html