Bucket o' Beetles

I tend to turn everything into a song. It's how my brain works. That said, when I discovered a serious grain beetle infestation in my chicken feed, my brain did this:

I got a bucket, got a bucket full of beetles
eatin' up my grain and being very leetle, oh, no no no
chew what you want but you're never gonna survive
here come the girls and they're gonna eat you a-live, oh, oh oh oh!

Eat them all up, a crunchy treat
They taste so good, for lunch today
Eat them all up, they taste so sweet
Eat them all up, a bug buffet!

 Natasha Bedingfield had a pocket full of sunshine. I just work with what I've got.

Heartbreak

Some farmer I turned out to be, crying like a baby over broken eggs. I candled each egg, all sixteen, just in case she’d gotten it right and there was an embryo inside any one of them. Unfortunately, there weren’t going to be any chicks. I’d been warned, “You’re going to have to break her heart and destroy the nest, and it won’t be pretty.” I get a lot of warnings about my chickens: game breeds are too aggressive, game chickens aren’t smart enough to be mean, you have to clip their flight feathers to keep them tame, never clip their flight feathers or they’ll never trust you, they’ll destroy the garden, they’ll weed the garden, you get used to the way they flap after they’re dead, you never get used to the way they flap after they’re dead, they taste good, they taste terrible… But I wasn’t prepared for the noise my beautiful Sussex made when she discovered all her eggs were gone.

I am a biologist. I know things. Chickens are feathered reptiles that chew their food internally and produce adaptive immune cells in a specialized organ called a bursa. The pulmonary circuit allows double circulation of blood through a four-chambered heart that separates blood that is oxygen-poor from mixing with blood that is oxygen-rich. What I didn’t know was that the sound of that heart breaking is universal. It sounds like loss and despair and horror and disbelief, all at the same time. I don’t think I’ve ever apologized so sincerely in my life.

I really am sorry, Ginny. The nest was built in a bad location and you’d have been eaten by a fox before any of those eggs hatched. It hasn’t been an easy summer, old girl. You watched your clutch mate get torn apart by dogs and all your girlfriends get carried off by hawks or eaten alive by bacteria until you were all alone. Make friends with the pullets – they’re not so bad really; you were young once, too. On the upside, I probably got Hantavirus crawling under the outbuilding to destroy the nest, so at least you’ll get to watch me die of pneumonia.

The universe took revenge on me by putting a nail in my tire on the way to the dump, where I intended to leave the rotten eggs. I had to turn around and put on the spare, mosquitoes gleefully pushing aside the gnats bathing in my sweat to feast on my guilty blood. As a result, the trash is still waiting to go out, and the eggs are producing gas in a hot utility room. Certainly I’ll be haunted by chick spirits and hydrogen sulfide all night. The cockerel in the exclusion pen will crow bright and early, reminding me that I was going to kill him before I felt so bad about myself.

Because while I can look into the face of a desperate college student and tell them, “No, there isn’t any extra credit I can give you to save your grade and your scholarship, you moron,” I can’t bear to look at a chicken that’s lost two weeks of hard work and hope. But I can hope Ginny’s tiny brain forgets all about her troubles by morning, when she finds split cherry tomatoes and bits of popcorn on the lawn. And I can hope that I won’t ever have to hear her heart break again.

Badness

Sometimes it seems like all I ever post is bad news. Of all the OEGB chicks I hatched last summer, most were taken by hawks while I was out of town. This isn't shocking. Hawks have to eat, too. The couple that survived were taken down by a bacterial infection months ago. I can keep them alive for a little while with antibiotics, but they appear to go septic (maybe they're being injured by Hef or eating small bits of metal?). Alas, I lost my last one to another infection this week.  I found her curled up next to the back door, in a little pile of leaves. Bless her heart.

Denise as a Teenager

Denise (foreground) and Her Sisters

Show Bird

Hef won a photo contest on backyardchickens.com! He was selected Best of Breed! He is not surprised.

Game Chickens

As a gift, I received thirteen Old English Game Bantam chicks. As it turns out, these chickens are neither bantams nor are they OEG (at least not pure). They look like mixed breeds: a little OEG, a little American Game, a little Modern Game, a little... Cubalaya? As happens, I have many more roosters than I need, and it seems like someone else discovers how to crow every morning.

Not a Rooster?

I had six "fawn" colored chickens, six "spangled" chickens, and a pure white chicken. The white one is definitely a rooster. A very LOUD rooster. A very loud and moderately insecure rooster.

Can You Find Five Boys?

Four or five of the spangled are boys, and at least two of the fawns are boys. This leaves me with more boys than girls. Ain't that always the way?

Rooster?

I have options - there's a goat sale every other Saturday and there are poultry swapped beforehand. I could take them. I can put a sign up in the feed store offering roosters. I can eat them. This seems the most useful option. They're really only good for stew or soup so I could skin them and not even worry about removing the feathers. Truthfully I dislike this part, I get hesitant and sad, which means I run the risk of hurting the chicken instead of outright killing it. And that makes me more nervous, which makes me even more likely to screw it up. I like to think this makes me NOT a sociopath.

There Are Definitely Two Roosters There

And truthfully, there are some cockerel that would be too hard to kill, like the ones you rescued from the bottom of the coop and nursed back to health only to find out they're boys.

 

Totally a Rooster. Dammit.

Dog Attack

My beautiful Wyandotte, Hermione, was killed today. I came home to find two neighborhood dogs in a pile of feathers. I'll spare you a picture of the carcass, but it's clear she fought for her life but died a horrible, painful death. She might only be a chicken, but she didn't deserve to be torn apart by dogs and finished off by fire ants. I chased off the dogs and followed the trail of feathers to Hermione's body. I was so upset. She suffered because people can't keep their damn dogs on their own property. I don't clip flight feathers on my chickens because I hoped it would give them an advantage against predators. But a laying hen doesn't stand much of a chance against two pit bulls, especially not when they're bored and/or underfed.

Site of the Attack

Trail of Feathers

Lone Feather

Hermione Before the Attack

Things Get Biblical

I was preparing notes on a lecture in my dining room when I heard distressed cackling from the chicken yard. What really captured my attention was the sudden, intense vibration cause by something slamming into the house itself. I briefly wondered if the DirecTV dish had fallen off the roof. When I opened the window I saw that the chickens were in Velociraptor Mode, and they'd surrounded a large rat snake and were driving it away from an injured pullet. The chicken was missing her tail, and the snake had a mouthful of feathers. A very bad situation, indeed!

I flew into a blind rage and screamed at the snake, "MY CHICKENS! MINE MINE MINE! NOT YOUR CHICKENS!" I ran outside, thrashed the offending reptile thoroughly and was in the process of choking it to death before regaining my senses.

Snakes are predatory. They eat live prey. It was unfair of me to punish this snake just for doing what it is supposed to do. Using my training as a person who watches Animal Planet, I placed the snake in a pillowcase and released it 5 miles down the road. When I returned, I found another, LARGER rat snake in the chicken yard. And so went the rest of my weekend. I don't have a rat problem, but I appear to have a rat PREDATOR problem. I thought the snakes would be more interested in eggs. Why they are attacking the chickens is beyond me. They can't possibly swallow one. It begs the question, what have I done to deserve a plague of snakes?

I suppose I can take comfort in the fact that the chickens did exactly what they were supposed to do. Hef sounded the alarm and the girls went ballistic. Hef got several good jabs in before I caught the snake, which is fairly brave for a 1 lb rooster. David Bowie was not so brave. He headed for the other end of the chicken yard, screaming his fool head off. He gets upset easily. It's not an easy life for him, being the number two rooster. Here you can see that the wind has blown the door of the hutch closed and he's taken it personally.

Of course, Hef is unfazed. He and his ladies just kept foraging through the yard normally, stopping by the wading pool for some crunchy waterlogged bugs. I also dropped a fig in the carport, and they tore that up quickly. Ginny gets most of everything, because she is greedy. I don't discourage this behavior. I find it hilarious that when I yell, "Ginny! Gin-Gin-Ginny!" she comes running. She's convinced that if she doesn't get there first, whatever I'm holding will be eaten by someone else and that is totally unacceptable.

Hef doesn't eat much at all, because he's more interested in finding food for the girls than for himself. The exception to that is when he finds yogurt. Hef loves yogurt and does not care to share it.