Chicken slaughter

I've been putting off reporting this, but I suppose it's time. Our chickens were killed overnight by a predator. All of them.

I went out to the barn Christmas Eve and found 8 dead chickens strewn around the run and inside the barn. One even flew out of the run and got taken over in the field.

They had puncture wounds on their bodies, but they weren't eaten. It looked like they were grabbed on their backs, and whatever it was just held them down and ripped feathers out until they died. Feathers were everywhere, but their skin wasn't terribly torn.

When the hawk killed chickens, it ate the insides. When raccoons killed a chicken, they ripped off the head. This is... something else. We're pretty sure it wasn't wild dogs either, because none of the bodies were eaten or carried away. A cat wouldn't kill 8 birds for fun... maybe one or two.

A have a friend who studied weasels in California, and he's pretty convinced it was a weasel. He says, and google backs this up, weasels are known to kill entire chicken coops for fun. Also, all the eggs were crushed and eaten. He says a weasel would eat the eggs first, then kill the chickens.

So, for those interested in chicken predators, a quick rundown:

Hawks like to eat the crop and intestines.

Raccoons like to rip off the heads and drink the blood. (Ew.)

Dogs will carry off their prey to munch on later, or at least eat some of it.


I'm working on plans to build a coop. I'll be building one in a few weeks. I'm getting an order of baby chicks Feb. 1st... so we'll have eggs again in... 5 months or so. ::Sigh:: The new coop will be tight wire, and we'll make sure they sleep in it at night. The lean-to, even with the barn door shut, isn't tight enough to keep anything but dogs out.

I will update on the baby chick order soon.

Christmas

Merry Christmas from Dia dog and her Christmas presents... a stuffed 'Max' from the Grinch movie, and a huge, nasty knuckle bone.

Roger got me an egg incubator, so we can now hatch our own eggs... even if we can't get a hen to sit on them! I am so excited... I can't wait to see little chickens pop out of eggs!

Christmas

Well, once again, there's not much to report. The chickens are laying about 6 eggs a day. We're going to order 25 more layers to come in February. I'm still deciding which breeds to order... still loving the Australorp, but am a sucker for some of the stranger looking varieties.

We have foster kitties from the shelter right now. They are about 3 years old. They came to the shelter as strays, but they think they were owned together, and may possibly be brothers. They're the same age and both front declawed. Rhett is a black and grey tabby and Ashford is a red tabby. Rhett almost died... he was so skinny you could feel UNDER his ribs, like they were wings. He had horrible sores all over from fleas. He didn't eat for a week and I had to take him to the shelter for them to hook him up to an IV. They gave him B12 injections and iron supplements, and I was forcing baby food in him with a syringe. He also had some kind of virus/infection so bad that the mucus was coming out of his mouth because his nose was so blocked. Very gross.

They have both made dramatic recoveries and are eating, drinking, playing, and being great cats. They're scheduled to go back to the shelter Jan 3rd to go into the colony, where we're hoping they'll adjust nicely while they wait for someone to fall in love with them.




And Merry Christmas from the fam!

Double Yolk

First, let us apologize profusely for not updating in two weeks! The day after Dia got the Cone of Shame we went on a cruise for a Caribbean Thanksgiving. We were there for a week, and now back, we've been pretty unproductive on the homestead.

We did get a 'double yolk' egg. A double yolk is a HUGE egg, with, well, two yolks in it. Thinking about it, we feel really bad for the poor chicken that laid this monster.

Here's a video of our cracking it:



If you are interested in seeing pictures of the cruise, you're welcome to go to our facebook album: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2733315&id=6822433&l=7677ec9205

I will post this one for good measure, because it's one of our favorites, and we never dress up: