Well….. it was about this time 2 weeks ago I let the flock out for their regular everyday wander around the yard, eat bugs, peck and scratch, coo and cockadoodledoo.
Our flock free ranges and they enjoy every moment. They give us beautiful dark yellow/orange yoked eggs and they are happy.
For the past two weeks the roosters 🐓 have been fighting. It’s part of establishing their pecking order…. there were a couple bloody days but little ferocious roadrunner was back in the leading. Now it was getting serious and I was considering exactly who of the three boys was gonna stay and who was going into the stew pot….
Well I didn’t have to decide, or cull, or clean……
It’s was on Saturday 2 weeks around 3:30pm when we heard the first squabble…. I looked out everyone was wandering around in the rain….. everything looked good….. I went down to the greenroom to plant seeds and Rusty came down and said he heard a big commotion and that I need to go out… there are white feathers on the side of the house.
Well I went out I looked everywhere…. no chickens….. ugh!
There was areas of feathers but I didn’t see black feathers or the dark rusty brown feathers of big red.
I went back to the house looking for hubby help. We searched for and hour, not one bird in sight…. but what we did see was not promising…… canine tracks….. to be more specific coyote tracks…. well at this point I was gob smacked and in huge disbelief.
We haven’t had issues with coyotes for a couple years. I knew there was no hope….. it started to pour rain so we headed back to the house….. I left the coop door open hoping that maybe by chance if any chickens made it they would come back.
Around 6:30pm I went out to look and to my huge surprise a brown laying hen came back but she was injured…. loose feathers, blood and a droopy wing. My heart sank….. for the next 30-45 mins both Rusty and I walked the perimeter of the farm playing rooster crows on our cell phones…. out of the corner of my eye I could see my barred rock hen running with great fear towards the coop.
So I had two frightened chickens and one of them….. well it was debatable if it would make it through the night…. I locked them up and prayed that God would heal up my injured hen and asked if any others were around they would come back in the morning.
Well sweetpea made it through the night and momma did too…..I now have to hens….and well that isn’t good for scrambled eggs and baking.
I went through the stash of eggs I had been getting and took the best ones I wanted and set them aside but now I had another issue I have an incubator that wasn’t working properly…..
Now this is an awesome part of the story. My good friend Fran has a hubby who is a retired engineer and loves to fix stuff. Well I asked and he took on the challenge. Within a couple days the Cadillac of incubators was working perfectly. So absolutely a big huge big shout out to Rusty, Fran’s hubby who worked a miracle for me.
I have 14 eggs in the incubator they have been in there 6 days and I can see the embryos in 10 of them. Out of the last 4, I can’t see through the thick colored shell of 3 and one I am pretty sure was not fertilized.
The chart below shows the stages of the chick embryos we are at day 5/6.
So there is hope once again. Funny thing I tried putting a few eggs in the nesting box because momma is usually broody in the spring but I think because of the trauma of almost being killed, she won’t sit on the eggs.
I am hopeful in about 2 more weeks when the eggs hatch and I put them in the coop with the two hens they take over and become mommas to the babies. Time will tell.
Amazing really how farm life changes so quickly.
So it’s 50/50 males to females and then there is a percentage of chicks that don’t make it through the hatching process… I can’t remember how many didn’t make it the last time. But if I get 5 or 6 hens I will be happy and time will tell what kind of rooster we will get. I loved red because he was a gentle giant Rhode Island. It will be interesting to see what colour of egg shells we get too.
These eggs are from a hatchout a couple years ago…..
Muddy Boots, Old Houses and The Farm 