Spring is a dangerous time for chickens. Predators awaken from their winter sleep. Many have litters of hungry kits to feed. Where do they go to get their fill? My house, apparently!
We lost 9 hens to a fox in one day. It wasn’t readily apparent what was causing their demise. We initially thought it was a hawk.
I went grocery shopping with the kids that morning and when we returned, my husband came outside to help unload the groceries from the car. “Where’d that come from?” he asked, nodding at a pile of feathers on the driveway. “Was that there when you left?” “No…” we looked around but saw no chickens. He went around the back of the house and found a few more piles. Then he saw a few chickens in the woods, all spread out. George the Rooster was out, there as well, clucking around and DH looked up to see one of our Hamburg chickens way up high in a pine tree; another of our chickens was far back in the woods, but he didn’t go and get them since he figured they would find their way back since George was calling for them.
He went and counted the remaining chickens and only got to 19: 16 hens and 3 roosters. In shock, I immediately said I would go into the woods with the kids and walk around to see if I could find anymore. Off we went and the results were not good: several more piles of feathers, but no chickens.
“I think it’s a hawk,” I told my husband when I returned. His face set with determination and immediately set out to pen the rest of the chickens and pull their pasture pen up to their winter coop to temporarily protect them until our lightweight summer coop is finished. He added netting to the top of it to keep any hawks out. The chickens slowly came to roost and we stayed outside waiting for our dominant rooster, Blackie, and dominant hen to come in. They were walking through the trees to the side of our house, showing now hurry to go into the coop. “I’ll go get those two morons and put them in the coop,” DH decided and walked over to them. As soon as he got to them, Blackie put up a bit of a fuss and DH yelled out “She’s bleeding! The hen is badly wounded.” He managed to pick her up, while fighting off Blackie and brought her over to me. It’s the strangest thing to look at a living creature and see…chicken. As in, edible chicken meat. It was a pretty big gash and she was quite bloody, but we were pleased to see that at least one of our roosters was doing his job and protected one of our hens from her attacker. We put her into our hospital coop, otherwise known as our upstairs bathroom, to give her some time to heal.
The next morning, we kept our chickens in the pen and DH went to work and I set about life as usual. cleaning up the kitchen after breakfast and I looked out the window and saw a fox run right up to the pen. A gasp escaped my throat and I yelled to Alpha, “A FOX! A fox was eating our chickens.” The fox heard this and immediately turned tail. Alpha ran to the chair and he and his friend both looked out to see it disappear.
Alpha then ran into the living room and grabbed the Schleich animal figurines DH bought him for Christmas. In short order, a model fox was attacking a small group of chicks. I grabbed the rooster and said, “here, have the rooster do his job and protect the chickens. He needs to chase the fox away!”
Unfortunately, the fox attacks caused some pretty severe stress on our flock. They say a good ratio of roosters to hens is somewhere between 9 to 15 hens per rooster. Our ratio was pretty decent before the fox attack (26 hens to 3 roosters), but after the attacks it was rotten. Adding to our problems was the fact it was spring and Rupert (second in command) was constantly challenging Blackie for the top spot. Thus far, Black had managed to fend off the attacks and maintain supremacy. This all changed for the worse after the fox attacks.
To put it bluntly, Blackie lost his campaign for re-election as top rooster. Both Rupert and George ganged up on him. His beautiful plummage feathers (he is the black rooster in the picture at the top of the blog) were basically torn out and you could see his butt. The other roosters would no longer let him into the coop at night and we constantly hear squawking and fighting whenever he tried to come in, at least until it was properly dark. As befitting a dethroned rooster, he ceased doing his romancing dance to court hens and went the George route: chasing them down and raping them. Usually he never even made it to the hen but would be chased off by George.
We knew we were going to have to slaughter some more roosters eventually. Blackie, being the aggressive dominate rooster was number one on our list and George was number 2. The constant fighting solidified our decision and until the weekend came, we decided to just separate out the roosters. As a lark, I put Rupert and George in the pasture pens from last year. Interestingly enough, Blackie became absolutely obsessed with the run George was in and kept trying to attack George from the outside. He showed no interest in Rupert’s run, just George’s.
The day before we slaughtered him, we kept him in a pen by himself and brought him inside while the kids were taking a bath so they would be out of the way. We have a homemade killing cone in the basement from when we dispatched our two bastard Fayoumi roosters and I stayed upstairs awaiting the agitated thrashing from the rooster being slaughtered, which I remembered from the Fayoumis. But there was no noise. As soon as we turned him upside down, complete silence. I yelled down into the basement, “Are you killing him yet?” “Yes, but it’s like he’s asleep, no noise, nothing, he’s just laying there.” Silently, he bled out and DH removed his head.
After a few hours spent with my hand up his butt trying to scrape out the last bit of lung, Blackie ended up in the crockpot and then in the freezer, where he remains today. My husband can’t wait to eat it and as far as I’m concerned, he can have all of him.
For me, Blackie is the first meaningful chicken we’ve killed. He was the first rooster to wake us up crowing a few weeks after we got him. He was the boss from early own, the acknowledged head of our original five chickens. I never felt worse than I did slaughtering him after he was so horribly disposed before his death.
But things are more peaceful with the flock now. George is going to be the next to go and we’re debating getting rid of Rupert as he is being a complete dick and keeps trying to attack everyone from inside the chicken run. He tried to get Beta once as she walked by it and she gave him a look that very clearly asked, “WTF is your problem?” But I would like to keep at least one rooster. I love seeing them do their mating dance for the hens and making their boc-boc-boc sounds to tell them they’ve found something good for them to eat. Rupert always makes sure to pick off bits of food to share with his hens, especially with his favorite, the Cochin.
Lastly, our formerly dominant hen made a full recovery and is back with the flock. Aside from losing her top spot in the pecking order, she is completely reintegrated into the flock.
German, Finnish and Chickens 