The circular decision

We’ve gone completely in circles on the decision to move the chickens and/or to trim their flight feathers.  We eventually decided to re-home them to the “Big Girls” coop by the house instead of moving them to the pasture by the goats.  I was worried about the amount of variety (or lack there of) they’d get foraging in the fenced area and we started running out of time and motivation for dealing with the fence and getting it secured.  This has also been a quite remarkable summer in that we’ve come this far with no losses to predators especially considering we’ve seen a coyote on the property several times.

The “new girls” are now nearly indistinguishable from the “big girls” and have begun laying in the last week or so.  They’ve started out laying peewees which was a first for us as last year’s girls started out strongly from the beginning.  We are waiting for them to grow a bit and size and for a few more to start laying.  Right now our highest daily count was six eggs, but it won’t be long before they’re producing 9-10 eggs a day.

We are having some challenges with some of the girls hiding eggs.  We’ve found several wayward nests and destroyed them, but when we let the girls out early in the morning (as we typically do on work days) we consistently find about half the number of eggs in the nesting boxes as we do on days where we don’t let them out until noon.  I’m hoping with the weather turning they’ll give up this habit since we haven’t yet located the new hidden nests.

Our re-homing was 93% successful after a few days.  We managed to get two of the three “tree chickens” to home to the coop, even the Araucana named Lady that we thought we’d never get to home to the coop (she was our first “tree chicken”).  One of the other Araucanas is still flying in to one of the evergreens out front and is very sketchy.  We’ve gotten her in the coop once but she went right back to the tree after being kept inside for two days.  We’ll have to work on her again at some point, but it’s been challenging.  We find her roosting on the window box of the chicken coop each morning waiting to be let in for food and water, but at that point the girls inside are bursting out.  Maybe this weekend we’ll try to catch her in the coop again, but we’ll see.  She’s pretty safe in the tree as she’s easily 15-20 feet up in the branches, but I do worry about her laying a mess under the tree and succumbing to some nasty weather this winter.