Eggs (week ending 3/26: 44
Eggs (year to date): 521

Caught and dispatched another possum over the weekend, this one smaller than the first. Saturday morning I found one dead chick and one half-eaten chick in the nursery, so the barn cat was locked up and the trap went out with a tin of cat food as a lure.

Maybe that's it. I hope that's it. The chick numbers are down from what I originally got, but I think the battle is over. What I have left are:

Cornish Rocks (meat birds): 8/12
Barred Rocks: 3/6
suspected Buff Orpingtons: 3/6
Easter Eggers: 4/4
Mystery Chick: 1/1

The good news is that by the end of April I'll be getting some from a work colleague. His wife, a fourth grade teacher, hatches chicks every year for her science class, and asked if I could provide some "non-white" eggs to stimulate more interest in the project. So I gave them 30 since I'm not sure that the fertility or hatch rate is going to be. He also offered me the chicks from the white eggs, which are probably White Leghorns. So I'll have some white egg layers and some mutt chicks from my own stock.

Now I'm thinking that instead of building a chicken tractor for my summer project, I should build a broody house. There are some pieces of scrap wood floating around that would be perfect for it. Although common sense tells me that maybe I should build a tractor first, for the experience.

Meantime, my weekend project is going to be putting chicken netting around the tack room. I've got a couple of hens that have decided that this is where they want to roost, and the room was also used by the possums as an entryway into the nursery, so I want to discourage and/or stop both behaviors. I spotted some 72" by 50' chicken wire at Tractor Supply the other day. I'm thinking that should do the trick.

But the predator watch still continues. Now one of the Silkie-Cochin crosses is missing. I'm suspecting a hawk on this one. I think.

Eggs (week ending 5/19): 38
Eggs (year to date): 477

The chicks continue to grow - especially the meat birds, which is what they were bred to do, of course. I lost another Barred Rock chick, but this wasn't a suicide. One of those things that happens, I guess. I don't know if TSC puts any guarantee on chicks like McMurray does (or some of the stores I used to get tropical fish from), but whatever the case, I'm sure it's out of the "warranty" period by now. The fish I bought seemed to know what that period was, and would die the day after. But I digress.

Meantime, something rather bizarre happened this morning. I found a cat's tail in the tack room. No, it wasn't the plant that grows along marshes. It was the tail of a cat and nothing else. When I went in the room this morning, I thought there was something there. I got closer and thought that maybe it was a trick of the light. A little closer, and it looked like the matted fur of something dead. So I picked it up and it turned out to be the tail of what looked like a cat.

Now the paranoid in me would say that there was another cat I didn't know about, and that something did it in and left this behind because, like the neck of a chicken, it's not good for a whole lot (and I don't see a predator boiling this up to make stock... ugh, sorry).

But a swipe with Occam's Razor ("the simplest explanation is the most likely") tells me that this might be the tail of the recently executed four socks cat. And maybe it - and possibly more - was dragged here by the possum and hidden away as a snack. And I just didn't see it until now because the light wasn't right and I'd been in a hurry to get the chickens taken care of so I could get to work.

Odd things that make me doubt: the tail was longer than Cleo's tail, and the four socks cat was the same size or smaller. And that seems like such an odd thing for a possum to do, and it seems like an awful long way for a mammal to drag. Maybe it was a raccoon.

I'm going to get another tin of cat food and set the trap again. Just in case. Just to see what happens.

The interloper this time was a possum. It was found guilty of three counts of chickicide, three counts of depriving my family of future Sunday dinners, and one count of not finishing its supper. The charges of eating hidden eggs were dropped.

It was taken from the farmyard area and summarily executed in my father-in-law's north forty.

Also have a chick suicide to report. Last night as I was leaving the coop, I noticed that one of the Barred Rock chicks had taken the occasion to perch on top of the chick feeder. I told it, "You better get over with the others so you stay warm. Otherwise you'll freeze to death." When I checked on the chicks this morning, it had done exactly that. It was still there on top of the feeder. If its IQ was no better than that (not that I expected it to understand me, but I expected its instincts to lead it to the heat lamp and the other chicks for warmth), then it's better off being out of the gene pool.

Okay, I talk to my animals while I'm out doing my chores. But my daughter talks to them in French.

Eggs (week ending 5/12): 41
Eggs (year to date): 439

Some highlights from the last week or so on the farm:

1) This morning I found a half-eaten chick in the nursery. Something burrowed in from the tack room and found a small place to get through, even though the chicken wire was both against the wall and on the floor. Then I realized that this left me with nine chicks - but I started with 12. I've been so busy lately that I didn't notice the disappearance of two others until the predator got sloppy. Chief suspects: a weasel, a rat, or maybe the other volunteer cat that I spared in last week's purge. Cleo the barn cat locked up, trap set, hole fixed.

2) I've got a couple of hens laying in a secret place in the hay again. I found two broken eggs in this little area today. Time for re-education. In other words, leave them locked up again.

3) I don't know if I mentioned it here, but I was really hoping for spring to get rolling because the chickens were going through 100 pounds of layer feed a month - and I've only got 17 of them. I wrote it off to winter, since they spent a lot of time in the coop instead of ranging. Then, tonight when I was working in the barn, I saw that one of the goats figured out how to stick its head under the goat gate (which they do frequently), and then get its tongue up into the feeder to lap out chicken feed. They also use the tongue technique to empty my wife's bird feeders when they're let out of the barnyard. So I moved the feeder out of goat neck and tongue range. I suppose that I won't really see a difference until next winter, since the temperature is picking up now.

4) I had a Silver Laced Wyandotte Hen starting to get broody last week - the same one that sat unsuccessfully last time. Three days of pulling it out of the nest box took care of the problem. But this made me wonder... the last time this bird got broody is when I was raising the Rosses in the fall. Now I'm raising Cornish Rocks and the bird gets broody again. Is it the season, or is this bird set off by the cheeping of peeps? I don't know.

5) I've decided that chicks are stealth growers. I didn't think the Cornish Rocks were growing very fast because of reasons already discussed. However, when I was in Tractor Supply today, I saw they had some straight run Barred Rocks. They also had some bigger chicks, a mix of straight run breeds that were maybe a week or ten days old, marked down to $.50 each. Some looked like they might grow up to be Buff Orpingtons, and I figured for $3 (minimum is six) I couldn't really go wrong. I ended up getting six of each. When I put then in the nursery, the larger Orpingtons-I-Hope were dwarfed by the size of the meat birds. So I guess everything is progressing as hoped.

6) I may have some Easter Eggers by Saturday.

Well, things do tend to happen all at once, don't they?

Eggs (week ending 3/5): 26
Eggs (year to date) 398

A busy weekend. You've no doubt already read my soapbox about how I took care of the cat problem. It was facilitated when, on a trip to Tractor Supply, I found that they had live traps on sale. For $25 I picked up a trap sized for possums, raccoons, and yes, domestic cats. Inside was another, smaller trap, sized for... I don't know. Chipmunks. Rats. Mice. Voles on steroids.

The local TSC also had chicks in stock, so on Saturday, after the cat problem had been resolved, I went and picked up a dozen Cornish Rocks. They're meat birds, and the plan is to butcher the females at about 8 weeks as fryers and the males at about 12 weeks as roasters. I use the word "about" because I use what I call the "margin of error" method of farming. I figure that God put a margin of error into things when he created nature, otherwise things would simply die out after a while if optimal conditions weren't met. This means that I don't hover neurotically over a brooder, fretting if that day's temperature is 95^o or 96^o Fahrenheit.

What I do is cordon off the back quarter of the coop and use it for a nursery. I don't call it a brooder because people who use actual brooders might gasp in horror if they saw what passes for one on my farm. It's my little nod to political correctness. Anyway, I give the chicks everything they need. Fresh litter, water, plenty of food, and a well-placed heat lamp. There's a wooden barrier to block the draft and four feet of chicken wire to let the rest of the flock see the newbies but not get to them. If they're cold, they huddle together under the lamp, and if not, they space out. They're stupid animals, but they're not that stupid when it comes to their own survival (unlike, say, turkeys). They've got good instincts for self-preservation.

I've raised 27 chicks this way and have lost only one - a mortality rate of just under 4%. But I also take a few common sense precautions. For example, yesterday snow was blowing from the north, which meant it was going right into the coop. So I kept the door closed. Between the heat lamp, the other birds in the coop, and the festering deep litter manure in 3/4 of the coop, the chicks were fine. Ditto today - no snow, but temps in the 20's. Door closed.

This is where the "almost" comes in. These conditions are not the optimal ones that you find written down everywhere for raising chicks. This means that they may not grow as fast if they're using food to stay warm instead of grow - which may add a week or two to the butchering schedule on the other end of things. But on the other hand, I know that if there's a real cold night, I don't have to rush out at 3am to check on chicks because the temperature in the brooder may have dropped a couple of degrees a few days ahead of schedule.

Maybe that's why I like this whole chicken thing so much.

Still, I'm thinking that perhaps I should build a brooder as a summer project. This summer is supposed to be a chicken tractor, with an eye toward using it for meat birds. The thing is, the set-up I have now makes the most efficient use of my coop space. If I have a brooder, where am I going to put it? I'll have to think about that.

So last Saturday, naturally, was spent setting up the nursery. This involved digging out the deep litter from the back quarter of the coop - two wheelbarrows worth - putting down fresh, setting up the draft barrier and fence and setting up the brooder lamp. I also took time to clean out the live trap and hang it up in the tack room - then I cleaned out the tack room. Everything is in order and the chicken world here is spinning in a greased groove. For now, anyway.

The four socks cat was a small juvenile, scared and angry. It had every right to be because it had spent the night in a small trap I'd baited with a cheap tin of cat food the night before. It wasn't happy as I carried the cage out into the field, scrambling back and forth, still looking for a way out of the cage. Then I took a .22 pistol and put it out of its misery.

This is a job I don't like to do. It was a waste of what could have been a perfectly good pet for someone had things turned out differently. But it didn't.

I have had three predator incidents in the year and a half I've been keeping chickens. One was a possum that went away as soon as I changed the way I stored food. The other two were because of domestic animals.

This tells me that 66% of my predator problems - the dogs that my Wyandotte rooster died fighting off when they attacked a hen and the four socks cat who was making a habit of sleeping in a next box in the coop, a threat to my incoming chicks - were domestic animal related. Now you might say that the four socks cat was feral, a stray. It was still felis domesticus - a common house cat.

This tells me that if people took more care with their personal pets, I - and probably most other keepers of livestock, from chickens to cattle - would have a lot less predator problems.

I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir here. Most of the people who come here are interested in keeping chickens, which means they show or are willing to learn some responsibility when it comes to animal care. But just in case there are some strays in the choir...

You're not doing anyone any favors if you don't control the reproductive capacity of your pets. Legitimate breeders I have no problem with - for the most part they control where their animals go and what they do. But pet owners who are non-breeders should bite the bullet, pay the vet, and get their pet spayed or neutered. We always have, and we felt it made for a better pet. And it made us better neighbors, too.

The courtesy goes the other way, too. One of our neighbors have a spirited dog that they keep under control, but there were a couple of occasions when he got away. When my daughter got her goats, I was a little concerned about the dog and what he might do if he had a couple of herd animals to bedevil if he got loose. So my wife and I went over and had a nice chat with the owners.

Here's the secret: we didn't say "Keep your dog tethered, because if he hurts our goats, you're going to have a lawsuit on your hands." We said, "We have goats now, and if they get loose, please let us know because we don't want them to inconvenience you."

We haven't had a problem with the dog since. By telling them we anticipated a potential hazard on our side of the road, they naturally anticipated what might happen on their side. We're both being good neighbors.

So keep these things in mind. You can draw more flies with honey than vinegar. And by being responsible about your pet's reproductive capacities, you can cure a number of ills.

Again, I figure that most of you reading this already keep a careful watch on your animals. Good for you. And forgive my foaming at the mouth here. It's just that I had to shoot a perfectly good cat this weekend and I'm still ticked off about it.

Eggs (week ending 2/19): 37
Eggs (week ending 2/26): 51
Eggs (remainder of February): 11
Eggs in February: 171
Eggs (year to date): 372

The big event on the farm is the return of the three does. Hopefully they're all pregnant. This could be alarming, though - two of the does come from a line that tends to have triplets, and the other one twins. We... that is, my daughter... no, make keep it at we... could have as many as 13 goats by summer.

To my daughter's credit, she's already lining up buyers for the excess. And plans to have at least one meat goat if the numbers allow. That ought to be interesting. Especially since I found a chili recipe using chevon (the nice thing about the French language - it makes even the most unappetizing things sound good - like escargot).

I keep catching the four socks cat in the coop. Last night it was actually sleeping in one of the nest boxes. It doesn't seem to have designs on the bigger chickens, who would obviously stomp the dirt out of the cat if it posed a threat. The problem is, what happens when I partition off part of the coop for the nursery for the chicks I want to order? It keeps the hens and roos out - but the cat could get in and have a great snack.

Well, I have a plan to get rid of the four socks cat. It involves chicken wire, a live trap, one of those small tins of smelly cat food... and a pistol.