We're down to only one chicken :-(

We have some visitors from out of town.  When they got here a few days ago we cooped our chickens up because they have two big dogs.  Along the way someone let the chickens out and the dogs left them alone, so for some reason we didn't feel an urgency to keep them cooped up.  Until this afternoon. One of the visiting dogs killed Toek, my Barred Rock chicken.  I'm really sad.

I'm not sure what to do now.  We have only one chicken left and as social birds, one alone is not ideal.  We haven't planned to replace any of the girls, but an opportunity came up this past week that we may go for.  Watch this space . . . .

Does your pet make you breakfast?

You can find that saying on T-shirts and such with the implication that chickens lay eggs for you, so they "make you breakfast."  Today I decided to let my pets and my solar protection make my breakfast.

 That beautiful purple egg is actually light brown.  Doesn't it look pretty in purple though?

The grapefruit tree was probably planted when the house was new over forty years ago.  It shades most of the bedrooms from the hot southern sun--our passive solar protector.

Poor chickens!

It was 103F today and wearing feathers is not usually recommended this time of year, unless you're a chicken.  Excuse the water-spotted window.  The kids come in and out from the pool and it gets to be a mess.

This sweet chicken is Pumpkin.  She belongs to Elizabeth and she lays speckled medium-brown eggs.

I never thought I'd be buying anything in a store with this kind of display on the counter . . . .

The tiny girls needed some food so I stopped in and got a 50 pound bag of feed for them.  Really, I never thought I'd shop in this sort of place.

(I have no idea what the burlap secret is for the stock tank.)

A little something for the feathered girls?

Bill says the little girls aren't coming in the house, even with these on.

LOL.

If you leave chickens out . . .

. . . you'd better go looking for eggs!

This morning when I opened the coop to feed the girls two of them hopped out and went straight to the flower bed to scratch around.  They were NOT interested in going back into the coop, and I didn't want to chase them, so I let them stay out while I ran errands this morning.

When I got back they cluck, cluck, clucked around my ankles and followed me back to the coop and hopped right back in.

This nest was near the coop.  I don't think you can see, but they made it into a bowl shape before laying their eggs.

A homey Saturday

Today was a homemaking kind of Saturday.  First thing this morning I went to Market On The Move which is the food co-op where for $10 you can have up to about 60 pounds of produce that would have been taken from the inspection station at the US-Mexican border to the dump because it was not picked up on time. 

I got:

tomatoes
English cucumbers
yellow summer squash
little sweet bell peppers

Doesn't sound like much, but from the tomatoes I got:

30 jars of diced tomatoes.  They were all pints except the last one which was a half-pint.  I was out of tomato pints (still have a few quarts) and was having to use store-bought ones. (!!!)

David stopped by around lunch time, then he and Bill went to a gun show.  It was David's first and he was quite intrigued, Bill said.

A little later Alicia dropped in and we chatted while I finished up the canning.  She suddenly had a hankering to pet and hold a chicken, so I sent her out with a container of scraps to entice them.  They're very friendly.

You can see the towels drying in the sun behind her.  I got a couple of loads of laundry done too.

 

In the evening, a cook-out with David and Alicia and all of us.

 

It was a good day.

Funny chickens

I should look up that phrase--"funny chickens."  I think I've titled about four posts with that!

The chickens haven't been out of their coop for a few days so I let them out this evening.  One of the first places they headed was to the blooming rose bush.  My being there distracted them from their operations, so this is the best I could get:

(Nice assortment of "stuff" in the picture, isn't there?  LOL)

Those three little girls love, love, love to eat rose petals.  They stand around the rose bush and s-t-r-e-t-c-h their necks up to grab a rose in their beaks.  If that doesn't work, they make vertical leaps to try to grab a tasty treat.  We watched them from the kitchen and laughed and laughed at them!

One of the down sides of having chickens

The little girls like to eat!  I let them out often so they can eat as many bugs as they can find.  I like that they get good (free) protein AND it reduces the bug population in the yard.  Oh, and they leave nice little bits of fertilizer here and there as well. ;-)

However, commercial feed is the mainstay of their diet.  I buy a 50 pound bag about once every two months.  Luckily the feed store is very close to my house, so it is not a big deal.

In addition, a woman I know likes to buy my chickens' eggs and I often have enough egg money to pay for their food.  I think that's what farm wives have been doing for centuries, isn't it?

Warm water in the microwave oven

Why, WHY would I be heating a bucket of water in the microwave oven?

It's to give my poor chickens some drinkable water! They have two water dispensers and both are frozen. I figured if I was going to take new water out to them, I could at least heat it up a little.

They were highly suspicious of this strange container that didn't have food scraps in it.  All three danced around it looking at it for a minute or two before one of them finally put her beak in to see what it was.

This used to be a common sight . . .

Yes, an egg from every chicken today. It has been at least six months since that has happened because Spot stopped laying long before she died. Even with the three girls we have now, we haven't had three eggs from them since sometime late last summer. Toek has not been laying and the others have been laying slowly. Charlotte tends to lay eggs with very thin shells, so I often find evidence of her eggs, but nothing to bring in to the house. Today was three nice eggs with good shells, different enough from one another that I know each chicken was represented there.

Chicken pictures

I haven't posted chicken pictures in awhile.  This is a Plymouth Barred Rock and her name is Charlotte.  WHEN she feels like laying eggs, she lays brownish pink eggs with thin shells.  I'm hoping now that her molt is almost over she'll start laying again.

In memory of Spot

Our beautiful Ameracauna chicken died today.  She was the sweetest of our four chickens and everyone's favorite. 

She had been doing poorly for weeks, and sometime in the early hours today the other chickens wounded her head.  We put her in her own container with food and water and kept her warm, hoping for the best.  She died this afternoon.  ~sob~

Poor Toek is molting!

My chicken is molting for the second time.  Her feathers are all over the coop area!

This picture has a little patch of sunshine on her back, but you can compare the two tails and see Toek doesn't have much of hers left!

The beautiful gold bird is Spot.  She is the one whose health we have been worried about.  She looks big in this picture, but her tail is about half the length and volume it should be, and she weighs practically nothing under all those pretty feathers.

I don't know how these chickens turned into pets instead of little egg factories. :-/

Chicken washing

Spot does not feel good.  She is weak and isn't eating well.  She needed a bath and Eizabeth decided to take care of the task.  I would have done it differently, but I appreciated that Elizabeth saw a need and took care of it.

Even after wrapping Spot up in a towel to dry her, she was really heavy with wet feathers.  No camera caught it but she enjoyed a nice blow-drying with a warm dryer.  Well, as much as a sick, wet chicken can enjoy anything.

This was actually last Saturday and she spent the next day in a plastic tub in the house and then on the back porch being coddled.  I wonder if being the lowest chicken in the pecking order is causing stress that has led to her being ill?  We did not think she would be alive a week later, but she is hanging in there.

Happy birthday, Bill!

Dh got up early today and went hunting.  When he came home he grilled up the burgers and we had a good BBQ picnic lunch here at the house.  In the evening he brought several friends home with him after the men's meeting (LDS Church General Conference this weekend--the guys have a men-only session on Saturday night) and we had huge banana splits AND birthday cake.  It was great!

What do you notice about the Barred Rock (black and white) chicken?

Does this picture help?

Does she look mad as a wet hen?  We were outside eating our burgers when we heard a squawking from the pool.  We ran over and this chicken was in the water!  She swam along the side of the pool but couldn't get out, so dh reached in and grabbed her.

We usually (like 99.8% of the time) have our pool covered with a safety net, but it was off because the girls went swimming earlier and we hadn't gotten it back on yet.  To be honest, I never thought of it as keeping chickens out of the pool, only children.  I think she leaned in wanting to get a drink and went all the way in.

Poor Toek was pretty indignant.

The new resident checks out the old

My niece Carolyn came to stay for awhile and brought her cats.  One of them doesn't come out from under the bed, but the other loves the yard.

 

Two of our little ladies with their beaks in the air.

 

 Let's go over here instead.

 WHAT are those two very strange things???

 Ten seconds after I took the picture above, Curio the cat was slinking away backward, then he turned tail and ran back to the porch.  He is mostly blind and was not about to stay around to figure out what those feathered creatures were!

 

The hens were out all day and there were no eggs in the nest, so I went looking.  I started at the wrong end of the "flower" bed, but eventually I came to this:

Poor Spot!

Spot seems to be back to laying eggs.  Happy day!  This is her third in four days, so no complaining from me.  However, this is a chicken who lays ENORMOUS eggs!  No wonder she decided to take a {much earned} break!

The brown egg is a rather average-sized egg, probably a size "Large" in commercial production.

All I can say is, "Ouch!"



Funny Spot

Caroline's chicken is Spot.  Spot has laid only about five eggs this year.  She molted in Jan/Feb, then laid about three eggs, then stopped.  Two other times (including yesterday) she has laid a single egg.  Good thing for her that she is a pet, not potential dinner.

The red wagon was out on the patio with a blanket in it for pulling grandchildren around.  Spot thought it looked like a nice nesting place and spent quite a bit of time rearranging the blanket to suit her taste.  If only she would put that energy toward making more eggs!

Bounty from our yard

Well, not a huge bounty, but it's stuff I love--citrus and eggs!  Our small orange tree had about 40 oranges on it this year and they are sweet, sweet, sweet.  Our grapefruit had at least 400 grapefruits on it and we've eaten maybe 75.  Our little tangerine tree that we planted 18 months ago looks like we'll get the promised first harvest this winter.

We are getting 2-3 eggs most days.  Our Easter Egger isn't laying much, but is preferring to sit on the eggs.  No rooster, so it's not going to do much good.  I looked online to get some ideas on how to stop that broody behavior, but I don't have the rabbit hutch to put her and her food and water in.  That's supposed to stop it within just a day or two.  No eggs, no nest, no comfort--stop hoping for baby chicks!