Chickens and The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal

Thank you everyone for the supportive emails and comments.  All of your love has made me a bit bashful, but I’m s-l-o-w-l-y responding to everyone.  Until I get to you - I love you!

Enough gushy stuff!  How about some chickens?

Evil Little Dinosaurs

We bought ten Red-Sex Link chickens from the feed store in April.  They brooded in our sitting room in a giant storage bin with a heat lamp until they were fully feathered, when they graduated to the A-frame coop outside.

Red-Sex Links are a hybrid between (white) Leghorns and (brown) Rhode Island Reds.  They are one of the most common backyard chickens and they are fabulous for first-timers (like me) because the boys (cockerels) are born yellow and feather-in white and the girls (pullets) are born brownish-red and feather-in fully brown.  We bought five of each, cockerels for the freezer and pullets for the eggs.  One pullet didn’t make it, so we’re down to nine chickens.

I'm a boy!

The girls are shy...

Chicken Yard

The coop is a work in progress - and I *still* haven’t painted it!  Currently it’s an open bottomed A-frame with one side hinged to open completely.  Every morning I open the coop and let the chickens roam their little yard.  Every night they troop back to their coop and I close them in, all safe and snug in their little beds.  Every day or so I move the whole kit and caboodle so they always have fresh grass to graze.

When we finally move to our own property - or at least when we get it all fenced - the chickens will be truly free-range. I’d love to let them range the whole yard right now, but our baby bird dog cannot resist anything with feathers.

JackJack and the Chickens

Both the dog and the chickens pretend that the fence is impenetrable.  Of course, it’s just $19.99 garden fence that bends with every breeze…  We’ll be using woven wire on our pasture with a strand of electric on the top (to prevent predators from jumping over) and a strand near the bottom (to prevent our beasties from lounging on or shouldering the wire.  Once we finish that, the chickens will have the run of the whole pasture.

Last night, when I went to shut the chickens in their coop, it was already dark.  And when I say dark, I mean *dark* - pitch black - no ambient light whatsoever.  I grabbed my flashlight, double checked that all chickens were in their coop, and shut the door.  As I was walking back to the house, I heard loud rustling in the reeds near the creek.  The flashlight was too weak to reach all the way across the creek, but I did catch some eye shine.  As I was trying to figure out what the hell it could be, I heard the most unnatural groan followed by strange snuffling.  It was so disconcerting (read “scared the crap out of me”) that I *ran* back to the house, laughing at my own fear, but not slowing down a bit.

This morning when I got up, I finally saw the evil creature that terrorized me last night, and it was not the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal…

Cows are not scary in daylight...

The dogs tried their best to scare the cows out of the wheat field, but eventually their owner came and rounded them up.