Chicken Drama

This was a bad week for our little flock.

Thursday morning, Bentley burst into our room shouting, "I think something ate Lucy!  There are feathers everywhere, and we can't find her!"

That will wake you up fast.  Craig and I flew out of bed and to the backyard only to confirm exactly what Bentley had figured out.  Poor Lucy was no more.  We were lucky in that whatever got her didn't leave much mess-- just the feathers.  So I guess it could have been more traumatic for Bentley.  But Bentley and Kendra were still sobbing over their lost pet.  It somehow seemed especially sad because Lucy was the one who always let Kendra pick her up and carry her around.  Kendra referred to her as her "Goldie Girl" and absolutely loved that little chicken.

Craig and I were perplexed as to how it could have even happened.  I'd carefully locked the coop door the night before, and all the feathers were outside the coop, with no evidence of anything digging to get inside.  It was when the kids said that Emma had already been outside that we figured it out: they had never been in the coop at all.  When I'd shut the coop door, I'd shut them out, rather than shutting them in.

It was all my fault.  And I felt terrible.

We had another problem on our hands, though.  Now poor Emma was all alone, and chickens aren't meant to be lone animals.  We needed some new chickens, and fast.  So I spent the entire morning on Craigslist, trying to find some local chickens to purchase, preferably in breeds we liked and could tell that they were hens and not roosters!  I finally found two in Fredericksburg that looked promising, and we determined to pick them up the following night.

Our new birds are another Buff Orpington (which is what Lucy was) and a black sex-link hen (so named because they are bred so that the males and females are different colors, making it easier to tell them apart).   The guy who sold them to us said they were 18 months old and laying, but so far they haven't produced any eggs, so either moving has taken a toll on them, or they're much older than we were led to believe.  That's not a big deal-- we were always more interested in having pets than eggs.  But I will be disappointed in this man's dishonesty if we never see an egg from these hens.  If you can't trust other chicken owners, who can you trust???

Introducing chickens to each other is something of a process.  They need to establish their pecking order, which can occasionally turn violent, so the experts recommend you go about letting them "meet" each other very gradually, letting them see one another before there is any physical contact, and then giving them something distracting (like a head of lettuce) once they're allowed in the same area.  So this required a bit of juggling as we moved various birds between the yard, the coop, and the chicken run, giving them a chance to scope each other out.

Checking each other out through the fence

Emma, for her part, seemed very excited to have some new friends around.  She had taken to wandering up to our sliding glass door and peering in at us forlornly, so it was nice to see her looking happier.

Emma is very intrigued by these new birds

Once we finally let them all be together (with lots of lettuce and some tomato slices to sweeten the deal), the brown one immediately started flapping her wings and acting angry at Emma.  Emma quickly ran right out of the coop, and stayed poking around outside not sure what to do.  Kendra looked like she was going to cry over it, and when I wasn't around, locked Emma back up in the coop by herself to keep her safe.  (She very thoughtfully put some food and water in there for her, though.)  I explained that the chickens were going to have to learn to get along, so that wasn't really going to work, and we let Emma back into the run where the other two were.  (I didn't tell her that I was also feeling very protective of our little Emma and vowing to myself to return these nasty chickens to their previous owner if they weren't going to be nice to my little chick!)

And then something wonderful happened: our new Orpington decided to stand up for Emma!  She stood blocking the brown hen's way, protecting our pretty little Emma from further assault.  Kendra came running to tell me about the miracle.  I think I was as relieved as she was!

So I'm hoping they can all get along just fine now.

And as if that wasn't enough, yesterday Emma laid her first egg!  It was soft and not fully developed-- it takes a few tries before their egg factories work properly.  But it's a start!  And we found another one this morning.  We might finally be getting some eggs out of this endeavor!