Long day

I'm exhausted.

I spent the day doing something that has been needed to be done since the dogs tore up the chicken coop.

When I originally built the coop it was supposed to be temporary, as it was built mostly from scrap wood and packing crates. The condition it was in after the dogs, was bad.

I started this morning around 8:00. I started by tearing down the old coop.


Until there was nothing there but scrap.

I finished framing in the coop and then started working on the run. The heat today was oppressive. The heat index hovered near 100, and the humidity was high.

Thankfully, I was in the shade, but by 4:00 or so, my muscles were cramping and I had completely run out of energy. But I had to finish.

I still need to clean up the site, but by the end - I didn't have any energy left.

The coop was done. I've got some detail work to finish, but it is habitable now.


The babies were transferred into the new digs, and the bigger chickens will go in tomorrow.

All in all, it was a hard days work, but I'm feeling good about the product.

Predation

I had a long chat with a neighbor the other day. He is the proud owner of some new chickens and a few geese. He's been trying to get a personal orchard started and recently built a little green house. I enjoyed talking with him.

One of the major point of our discussions was predation - especially by raccoons. It is fairly easy to keep raccoons out of the chickens, just bury the wire a little way under the ground and they stop digging.

Also, raccoons only dig right at the base of a vertical surface. I build a shallow moat of quick-crete around the perimeter of my chicken run and that stops the digging.

Other ideas can be found on the web, including barbed wire, electric wire, and something called a "floppy fence".

But the very next morning, I found that someone had been probing my defenses. Even though my run is fairly secure, there is one area that worries me (since the dogs pulled apart the cage). I still leave out my raccoon trap.

It continues to work.

The Dog; or the Wine Man Cometh

The chickens were strangely silent.

It was early morning, 6:40, the time I normally go out to feed them and water them before work. I headed out towards the coop. I had a small flock of 7 chickens, mostly brown mixed breeds. And I have a great rooster. He is large and bold and struts like he owns the place.

But he was strangely silent this morning.

I wandered back to the coop, only to be met at the gate by the biggest black lab I'd ever seen his head up, saliva drooling from one corner of his mouth, and his tail waving furiously. At his heels was a smaller pit bull mix, a dead chicken in his mouth.

I yelled. The pit bull dropped the chicken and looked up at me like he was waiting for his treat.

I pushed past the lab and the coop was in ruins. The wire had been yanked free of the post in one corner and the door had literally been pulled off the hinges. Feathers carpeted the ground in and around the coop.

There were bodies tucked here and there.

The dogs just looked at me. I wanted to be angry. I wanted to scream, but.... But. The dogs just smiled up at me.

I grabbed their collars and pulled them into the yard, tying them up with a jump rope. The owners number was on the collar and I called on my cell phone. He lived across town and was frantic for his dogs.

I went back and surveyed the damage.

Three chicken carcasses limp in the dirt. There was no blood, so I assume they were shaken (not stirred) I fished them out and tossed them in the freezer for the hawks. The other bodies were missing. I had no idea how long the dogs had been harrying the chickens, so their bodies could be anywhere.

I heard the crunch of tires as the owner pulled up. It turned out he was a cyclist friend of mine. We ride together from time to time. His dogs had escaped the fence sometime last night and found their way across town in the darkness.

My friend was devastated that his dogs did this to my birds. "Can I replace the chickens? Can I pay you?"

How much is a flock of pet chickens worth?

I had chicks in the incubator - The flock would survive this, but it would be a while before it would be giving me eggs again.

I let him know that my wife and I prefer white wines - not too dry.

It was time for work, and as I pulled out of the driveway, I heard a cluck-clucking coming from the woods behind my neighbors house.

Two chickens survived. I found them wandering around the coop when I got home from work.

The rooster sauntered out of the woods later.

I patched up the coop. It wasn't pretty to begin with, and I was thinking of rebuilding - this has just advanced my time line.

The chicks are growing quickly.

And today - the wine man cometh. Two well chosen bottles.

It's going to be okay.

Missing chickens

I went out to the chicken coop the other day and half of my babies were missing. There were feathers scattered around, and the babies were gone. I checked around and there was a spot that the roof could just get peeled back. It wouldn't work to let in any decent sized animal, nor could a full grown chicken get through their, but apparently, the hole was big enough that a coon could get its hand in and pull out a chick.

I set the trap the next day under the little coop where I keep the babies. The coon came back. he found his first way foiled, but he was still able to get a claw in through he wire and rip the leg off another baby.

I found it lying dead in the bottom of the coop, missing a leg.

But the coon got caught.


Did I mention that raccoons are the devil?