Adventures of a chicken mom and furry psychopathic serial killers -

Last week we got the call that our last 3 chicks were ready for pick up. Earlier than we had expected! And this led to a number of fun issues for us to figure our way through.

The past month, we have been working hard on our coop. In the milking section of the old dairy barn, we found a flap door that seemed perfect for opening up and letting chickens run in and out of an essentially secure enclosure. But the room is a rather expansive space and we didn’t exactly want the chickens running around the entire area, nor did we want to check every nook and crevice for potential predator problems. Not yet at least.

So we set out to make a coop inside the barn that was secure against the predators of the world.

Our first thought was to enclose a section in chicken wire. It draped itself nicely around the area, was affordable, and after all, it’s called CHICKEN wire, therefore it is obviously meant for chickens.

Boy was I wrong. Apparently, according to the world of chicken books, chicken wire is only good for keeping chickens IN an area. Not for keeping predators OUT. Preditors are VICIOUS to chickens! The horror stories I read would keep you up at night. Animals chewing through the wire, raccoons actually figuring out how to unlatch locks, digging under, climbing over, little furry serial killers stopping at nothing to grab their next victim. Animals who find their way in but can’t figure out how to get out with a big ol’ chicken, so they bite the HEADS off of them and leave their decapitated bodies behind to be found by unsuspecting chicken moms the next morning.

And then there are the weasels. Have you seen a picture of a weasel? They are ADORABLE! with their sweet little smiley faces, you just want to snuggle the thing. But do not be fooled by that face. That smile hides behind it a creature of pure EVIL. Because weasels kill chickens just to kill. And they do so in vast numbers, leaving behind a chicken murder scene that is not for the faint of heart. And they only need a hole bigger than 1/2 an inch to do their murderous deeds.

I’m going to say that again for those in the back. 1/2 an inch!

So we took one look at our chickenwire coop and it’s flimsy 1 inch wiring and said “well crud”. And we did a total and complete redo of our coop. First, we purchased several rolls of 1/2 inch hardware cloth. This stuff is expensive but effective. Thick wiring with holes just a 1/2 inch thick. Not only did we cover the entire coop with it, we did so OVER the chicken wire. Then we screwed down boards along the bottoms so the wiring couldn’t be lifted, followed by hand wiring each piece of hardware cloth together so no one could slip in between, creating essentially a fortress, triple secured against the adorable little psychopathic murderers out in the natural world.

But as we kept looking at our coop, the more little holes we spotted. The ceiling and rafters created 1 foot sections along the top of the coop. We boarded each one up. There was a large section of broken cement, we cemented over it. A crack under the door, we added wood to. A gap showing? Slap a board on it . And in the end we had one jenky looking coop, reminiscent of a college kid duck taping their car together, but we felt 75.89% certain was secure. I’m not confident in anything enough yet to go any higher than that, but there were no areas, in our knowledge, that we didn’t try to cover in some way. And we had run out of time.

The older chickens, by now, were about 7 weeks old which is about teenage age (we are fairly certain at least one is a rooster, one is a hen, and one is still at the unknown gender fluid age). Not fully feathered yet, but mostly so, they were at an age where they could spend more time in their coop in order to get familiar with it and closely supervised time outside in the chicken run. Which is good, because, due to their size and the size of the brooder box, not only were they screaming all levels of hate at us for keeping them in the little box, they were too big to be put in with the new little guys without causing them harm. This caused all sorts of logistical problems, because we only had one box.

During the day the teenage chick monkeys get to run around their coop like the wild adolescents they are. But they still have to go back in that dreaded box at night. I try to explain to them that it’s for their own good, but they are having none of it. And each night we chase little chickens around a coop that is far too big for them until one of us outsmarts the other. As far as speed goes, the chickens win hands down so success involves intelligence and strategy (which really shouldn’t be hard since we are competing against a brain the size of a small marble but chickens have that dang natural survival instinct going for them which just isn’t fair). Eventually though we win out and carry the birds, vociferously screaming profanities at us, back into the house. But hey, they survived a week of coop time so we are calling this a success!

The poor new babies, however, ended up in a cardboard box for the time being (second child syndrome and all). Which is only a temporary solution because, well, chickens are messy. And you mix water, poop, and heat in a cardboard box and you have a perfect little compost carrier that will literally disintegrate.

But that said, let’s talk about the little fluffbutts. If you remember, I was surprised when the first group came to us at 3-4 weeks. Turns out, I would be even more surprised when my new batch came to us at 3-4 DAYS. But oh. my. gosh. the cuteness. They were fuzzy. they were fluffy. they all three fit in my friggin’ HAND! You see them and your voice goes up an octave. I feel sorry for the chickens we got at the awkward tween stage of life. They were shortchanged the overpowering adoration a fluffy little chick gets.

Calvin was super excited to get his goth chick finally. His little Cemani chick is so tiny and sweet. They are a rare chicken that are entirely black with black beaks and combs and feathers but it might look like a moody 90’s teen throwback but it has no problems coming up to us and snuggling in our hand.

The legbar is the biggest of the group (brown one). And if any baby chick screamed rooster, this would be it. Bigger, bossier, braver, and definite leader tendencies over the others. Odd thing is, this is the one chicken we could order as female. So maybe it’s just a strong spoken hen? The Calamity Jane of birds. Or something went astray in the sexing process. Only time will tell.

Our little white Serama though is the princess of the group. Because dang it, small things are painfully cute and you have this natural tendency to spoil them rotten. This breed of the smallest in the world. She is actually the oldest of the group at about 1-2 weeks, I’d say (like I have any clue what I am talking about) But she has more feathers and is as small as the 3 day olds. As they grow, she is getting even smaller in comparison and it’s friggin’ adorable. I know I’m going to want to put a chicken diaper on her (because, yes this is a thing) and carry her with me in a bag or something wherever I go. The poor thing has no idea the smothering it’s going to get in life. But sweetie, from one small fry to another, it just can’t be helped.

They are small though. So much so that I’m pretty paranoid to lift them higher than an inch from the ground. I blame childhood trauma for this. I remember all too well, my 6th grade science teacher and her menagerie of ferrets and mice. (and at this point my Cheldelin classmates and teachers reading this probably know exactly where this story is going). In hindsight, I actually wonder if the mice were raised solely for feeding the ferrets, but I may never know. All I know is those mice would breed like, well, mice. And us 6th graders would oooh and ahh over the precious little things and would hold them in our hands. And, well, as kids do, someone would drop a poor baby mouse. Now, this probably happened only occasionally, but in my memory it was every god dang time and I wonder why we were continuously allowed to handle these fragile beings (probably because their sole purpose in life was to be a fast food meal). But down they would go and they would land and kind of twitch as they lay there on the ground. At that point, my teacher would casually pick up the creature and end it’s suffering. She did not, however, feed it to the ferrets. Maybe she thought that too traumatic for us, like we weren’t already desensitized by twitching, half dead baby mice. Instead she would take it next door, where lived “Percy” the boa constructor. And that little baby mouse would become his “not so fast” food. Needless to say, if the kids pick the baby chicks up a little too high, all I have to say is “don’t make me tell you about the baby mice again!” as any good mother, raising her children by terrifying them into obedience would, and they immediately get them to safer ground.

So, I’m glad we started with the older chickens because we had no clue what we were doing and it’s good to start with things you can’t kill if they jump off your hand. I feel we were more prepared for little guys this time (despite the fact that they are essentially homeless and live in a cardboard box)

And with that, I will end this on another baby bird happy note, as yesterday I found that the nest of eggs I uncovered in my forsythia hatched and little wrinkly babies were curled up in there. I was able to take a quick, albeit terrible, photo and show them to Tyler and Donovan (Calvin was taking final) and then mama came back and was very angry at us for checking out her babies and made sure we knew good and well she was having none of it. So we apologized, congratulated her on hatching eggs without them getting eaten, and ran the heck out of there.