And Then There Were Two

If you've been keeping up with our adventures in raising chickens, I have some bad news. Starting out with five chicks, we're now down to two. Of the five, one turned out to be a rooster. Vero had predicted Pasty's gender very early on and on Memorial Day he confirmed it with a prepubescent crow, which then got louder and more frequent as he gained confidence. The neighbors we spoke with directly didn't mind it but we had heard that some others were a bit unhappy about him. So executing the plan we had in case of a rooster, I killed him and we ate him. The killing went okay but the butchering was the hard part. We had to make various cuts and pull out innards and be careful of the bile, all from a basic description in a book. In the middle I decided to look up a video on YouTube, which of course should have been the plan from the start. Just like that, a guy in the woods was on the iPhone screen showing us the whole process. The most important lesson: make sure you have a very sharp knife.

So that makes four. The remaining hens were all expected to start laying soon but Vero and I had a vacation planned. We had a friend look in on them and let them out occasionally but this past Friday we got a call from him. There had been an attack. At first it seemed that it had been raccoons because he had accidentally left the run open overnight. But as it turned out it was the neighbor's dog, which means it happened the day before during the day. Only one chicken appeared unscathed; another was missing tail feathers and had blood in the tail area but seemed okay; another was found in the carriage house with wounds and a possible broken leg; and the last was found deep in the far corner of the carriage house, dead from a head wound.

All of this was relayed to us by our friends. We had them lock up the first two and then put the third in a separate cage with food and water in case the wounds were recoverable. We arrived yesterday morning and I inspected the one in the cage. It wasn't good; she couldn't walk and the wound on her back was deep and there were worms in it. She had to be put down. While Vero went to another room, I apologized to the chicken and dislocated her neck. She was the most beautiful of the four and I think the first layer. Our friend found three blue eggs in the nesting boxes and those only come from the Araucanas. The other Araucana survived and we haven't seen any more eggs.

So goes life on the urban farm. The chicken experience seems to be a strange dichotomy; they're not quite pets but close enough that their death is a little harder to take. For now we'll let the two survivors be but will probably start the process again with new chicks soon.