Our first predator

The neighbors had a dog on their property for a few days and it didn't take long for it to find it's way onto our property.  Johnathon saw it chasing our chickens a few times and every time he would take the dog back to the neighbor's barn, it would come back to our house.

I finally tied the dog up so it couldn't go after the birds and text the neighbor to tell him to come get the dog and to keep it off our property.  He apologized and said he would keep it locked up.  It wasn't his dog, but it had already attacked his puppy.

The next evening when we got home it was later than usual and I was going to park the car at the top of the driveway aiming my headlights at the chicken coop so I could go close it up for the night.  I got about 10 feet from where I was going to park when I slammed on the breaks - there on the ground was a pile of feathers.

I jumped out of the car with the boys and we found saw two other huge piles of feathers in the yard.  The feathers were all white in two areas (our Leghorn rooster) and long black and white speckled feathers in the initial pile we found (Clyde, the rooster that Johnathon has taught to eat from his hand.)

We raced into the goat pen and looked into the coop.  The birds were huddled inside and we couldn't count them because they were all crammed in one corner.  We saw the two roosters, and we saw blood, but my first priority was to see who was missing since those we could see were alive.  It took several minutes and several attempts at counting the birds before they were all accounted for.

We got a flashlight and did our best to be gentle while inspecting the birds.  Both boys had ALL of their tail feathers ripped out.  Rooster (that's what I call him still) has the worst injuries.  I can't tell exactly how bad things were because he was in too much pain but he is missing a LOT of feathers and there was blood in several areas.

What we pieced together was that the boys were protecting the girls from the dog and they were running from the attacking dog.

I went over to yell at the neighbors, the owner of the dog was actually there but suddenly said he "gave the dog away" as soon as he knew his dog has hurt my birds.  One of the guys at the barn promised to keep the dog locked up, but the next day it was on our property again.  I tied it up and called animal control, they picked it up a few hours later.

After the attack - his entire rear is nearly bald

Before the attack (and before he fattened up)

And I thought goats were dumb...

Sand for the chickens

I came across a blog written by a "chicken chick" in which she talked about using sand in chicken coops instead of pine shavings.  She went through the pros and the cons of both and then also talked about how chickens need to eat parts of the sand for grit, which is necessary in their digestive systems.

Cleaning a coop with sand sounded like cleaning a kitty litter box, which was far easier and cleaner than what I'd been doing to clean the pine shavings.  I decided to make the switch.

It was bad timing on my part because sand bags are sold out at every store I went to or called because of Hurricane Sandy.  I posted on Craigslist that I was looking for some once people were done with them from the storm.  A few days went by and I found someone who was giving them away on Craigslist and luckily he waited until I was able to get off work to get them.

It was a long drive home with about 700 pounds of sand weighing the back of my SUV down and it was a heavy load hauling them up the little hill to the chicken coop and chicken run... But things looked better immediately and the guinea ran over and started rolling in the sand as soon as I walked away.

Birds need "dust baths" to clean themselves.  They roll in the dirt or sand and then shake it off and any bugs that might be on them will come off too.  That's exactly what they were doing.  Several of the chickens also ran over and started picking at the sand and eating the parts they wanted.

She actually wanted IN the coop with the guinea!

It just LOOKS cleaner already.

Odd angle, the best I could do - those eggs are from the last 24 hours :)

And now we just wait for her to lay our first egg in the sand :)

Hurricanes

I suppose we experienced our first hurricane yesterday.  We're pretty far in from the shore so we didn't experience too much of what hit the coast but there were a few hours when the winds were pretty crazy.

Twice we ran outside in the storm to attempt to give the animals a little more shelter.

The first time we wrapped a tarp around the back of the chicken run and leaned a piece of plywood up against the box in the run in the hopes that the guinea would go under it and then have the wind blocked from three sides.

We also dragged a folding table and another piece of plywood over to the goats and dragged their houses closer together so that we could give a little shelter outside of their houses so they could stand up.

The second time we ran out to force the rooster and one of the chickens into the coop and to close the door and then to put a red heat lamp out for the guinea since they were all drenched.

From the looks of things this morning, the guinea didn't take advantage of the shelter...

The goats were dry and I'm sure warmer than those darn birds.  Carrie even looks fluffy this morning.

 I opened the coop for the chickens to come out since it's only very light rain today and I plugged the heat lamp back in (I'd unplugged it around midnight so it wouldn't start a fire while I was sleeping.)

I'm looking to see what stores are open today so that we can go get some higher protein feed and some sand to help absorb some of that nasty water/mud.

We have more chickens!

Our boys needed more females around (5-8 girls per roosters) and I wanted to have more eggs laid each week so I've been looking into getting more chickens.

I finally found a lady selling five brown chickens for a decent price about twenty minutes away from us.  So we picked them up last week.  They were kept separate from our flock for three days, and then they were allowed in the coop and chicken run with them, but not out to free range.

This morning I went out and caught, pet, and talked to each one, before carrying it out of the chicken run and letting it go to free range with our flock.  They are much friendlier and more calm than our original birds and they seem pretty happy to be out and about today.

Molting

Our champion chicken is molting... her feathers are falling off and they will regrow.  I have never heard of this before so I had to look it up (and asked the vet to confirm the diagnosis when she was out for the goats).  Apparently birds will do this about once a year where they shed their feathers and then need to regrow them.  It takes a lot of energy and so they will stop laying eggs during this time and it can take up to 4 months to regrow their feathers.

She looks pretty gross and I feel bad for her, but I guess this is just part of life.  Bird life.

Goat stealing and pneumonia

We will probably never find out why the neighbors keep taking our animals, but it happen again. 

Johnathon came home one day and all three goats were missing.  He knew something was wrong because they don't leave the yard even if they get out of their pen so he went next door and found them.

They were locked in a pen that is about 20 feet by 15 feet, with 30 other goats.  He was hysterical because those goats are for meat and can be killed at any time and because the male goats were mounting our three girls.  He knows better than to call me when I'm at work but I heard something while I was teaching and checked my phone - two missed calls and seven texts from him.  I called back thinking he was dying and he told me what the problem was.

He managed to get them out of the pen and dragged and carried them back home to the pen. 

Over the next few days we built their pen higher and stronger to keep them in.

But within 24 hours the goats were all showing signs of illness.  Jenny was having coughing fits that lasted 30 seconds at a time.  Carrie had green snot and a cough and Kelly was also starting to cough.

My google searching said they had pneumonia.  Yet another illness that is deadly with goats. 

Other than having a vet come out or me having to inject them with antibiotics, my only choice was oral injections of some medicine I could get at the feed store.

Every day for five days I had to go catch the goats and force the syringe into their mouth.  Each day they got smarter and catching them became nearly impossible because they remembered all of my tricks so I was only able to get the medicine into Jenny and Kelly for three days.

Even with Carrie getting the medicine for five days, she wasn't showing signs of improvement so I finally had to call the vet.  They came out and diagnosed an upper respiratory infection in each of them and had to give each of them a shot.  I've never heard the goats scream the way they did when they got those shots, it was horrible to hear.  The vet said that the medicine does burn when it goes in but that they should only need one shot and they will be cleared up in a week.

The next day each of them had a HUGE (I'm talking baseball size - not exaggerating  where they'd gotten the shot, but I haven't heard very much coughing and they are are already eating better.  We spent an hour building the fence higher and now there is only one 10 foot section that is four feet tall, the rest is about 5.5 feet tall.

They're back

A couple days after we got the 5 guinea back (the second time) from the neighbors, I decided to try to let a couple birds out during the day.  They constantly try to stay together so I was hoping that the ones we let out wouldn't go far and I could let them back in at night. 

A few hours later they weren't anywhere to be seen.

A couple hours after that Johnathon came in saying there were FIVE birds outside the run.  Sure enough, the three "free" birds had disappeared and somehow found the 2 birds that had been missing for over a week. 

We got them all back in and we have had 7 guinea in the run ever since.

We have started letting some of them out each day.  I've found that as long as one bird is in the chicken run, the others will come back to the cage at night.

I only wish that I could tell which birds are let out each day so I can be sure they all get a chance.

We don't want to get weeeet!

The goats have been getting out of their pen again...

The other day it was raining lightly when we got home... the goats were out, but by golly they didn't want to get wet!  Good thing our canopy was out...

The Guinea update

So after 4 months the guinea disappeared one day.  They just weren't at the coop that night.  I told Johnathon to find them the next day after school, he looked and couldn't find them.  That night I received a couple texts from the neighbor saying the birds were by the road and he was trying to herd them back to safety.  He offered to catch them until I came, I said no and went out to look for them.  We looked for 40 minutes in the dark but never saw or heard any of them.

A few days went by where we were looking everywhere for the birds.  Then I asked a friend of mine that was going to the barn to see if our birds were there.  Sure enough the neighbors had caged the birds and never told us.  We went over that day during a big rain storm and got them back.  They'd been in a 10 x 10 dog kennel with about 40 chickens.

We put them in our kennel and closed the top so they couldn't fly out.

A few hours later we saw a couple eggs on the ground.  They're laying eggs now.

Two days later, they were gone again.  Somehow they had gotten out of the roof.

We hoped they'd come home that night, but like before, the neighbor caught them and caged them that same day and we only found out when Johnathon went snooping around.

A few days later JOhnathon went over and got them back.  There were only 5 there, 2 are missing.

He put them back in our kennel and we sealed off the roof so they can't get out.

It's been about 2 weeks now and we still don't know what happen to the 2 missing birds.  The ones we have are laying eggs but not as often so we think the two that went missing were females.  They're still trapped in the coop because I'm worried if we let them out they'll go near the neighbor's barn again and he will cage them up.