On Saturday my dear sweet husband went on a Craigslist binge.
This means he had something in mind he wanted to buy and started looking at ads and making calls. He is very good at the whole Craigslist thing, buying as well as selling. So he usually is able to find what he is looking for in a very short amount of time.
This time he was on the hunt for anything that lays eggs.
He is a man who loves useful things and despises non-useful things, like hens who are not laying.
This is not to say they will always be useless, as they will eventually start laying (sometime this summer). But we have had them since the beginning of March and apparently he is feeling anxious.
And thinks we should be getting eggs. NOW.
Well on his way to finding chickens he came across an ad for heritage Spanish Black turkey chicks.
And decided to buy some.
He also came across ads for 17 free hens (they were apparently ravaging their owners garden) and 50 hens and a coop for like $200 and 3 hens for $15.
He called on all of them. (Can you imagine if he got the 50?! We already have 10 and a rooster. That’s a lot of chickens. What would we do with them all?!)
Thankfully he only got ahold of the person with the 3 hens and arranged to pick them up the next day, but decided to go get the turkeys right away.
I was heading over to a friend’s house to help her clean the house they were moving out of so I got the kids ready to go on a turkey purchasing adventure with Dad.
So Jeremiah and the kids headed off into the sunset, I took off and went cleaning for the rest of the evening.
Fast forward to the next morning. The turkey chicks are in the brooder (a.k.a. a kiddie pool with a heat lamp) in the garage, I of course had to stop and check them out on my way to care for all the animals. Cuteness noted.
I head outside and let the birds out of the coop and then get my goats out and I milk Lillie and then I’m milking Penny and I notice large, bright red combs on these two birds. Our chickens don’t have combs or waddles and they certainly aren’t bright red so I knew he had somehow acquired more chickens while I was out and decided to just put them right in with our other chickens – gah!
“Well, hopefully they are healthy,” I thought to myself.
There was a 3rd new chicken sitting in the coop (she couldn’t find the door).
My word.
So we now have 14 chickens,11 ducks, 3 turkeys and 9 goats.
How did this happen?
Oh goats breed like rabbits and my husband is obsessed with buying poultry.
Good thing we eat a tons of eggs and I bake a lot.
So now to the exciting part of the story.
Oh no, I’m not done.
We let our chickens free range the place and have never had a problem with them wandering off – they have tried to wander in to the house and the garage but they pretty much stay close around what we refer to as the Poultry Palace.
That means the chicken coop.
Well these new ladies don’t consider this home at this point so they kept wandering to places we don’t want them wandering. Like across the road, to the neighbors house, etc. So last night Jeremiah and a couple other guys we had over for dinner spent about 30 minutes trying to catch them.
I was smoking ribs so I didn’t watch but I am sure it would have been quite the show. Well they caught the girls and put them in the goat shed on a shelf thinking they could just live in there for a while.
Sounds good. Whatever. Ribs. Yes. Forget the stupid chickens.
Well this morning, I went to get the goats out of the shed to milk them, opened the door to discover the baby goats had conquered the divider between them and their mommies, but they still had full udders so I knew I needed to milk quick before the stinks nursed and took all the milk. In my haste to grab the goats, the chickens escaped.
I figured it would be ok since they were still in the corral.
Wrong.
Right as I finished milking, they flew over the fence.
Gah!
Sweet Juliette was out with me and she tried to get them but terrified laying hens are very quick and they got away from her quite easily.
So I put the goats away and went to go find the chickens. It took me a while to locate them but since they have those bright red combs I found them eventually. They were right by a rather large thicket of bushes by our neighbors fence with the creek right below them. As soon as they saw me they ran into the thicket.
I tried to skirt around them but they were too quick.
Suddenly $15 didn’t sound worth trying to track down a couple chickens through the rain and thorns.
I went inside and put the milk away.
But being bested by a couple of stinking chickens didn’t sit well with me, so I sat by the window with the binoculars and chatted on the phone to my sister, Rachel.
They never came out.
At that point it was time for Scarlett’s nap so I put her down and could no longer stand it. I was determined to get the chickens back.
And I had a plan.
I called the neighbor and left a message letting her know I was going to be on her property, put on a rain jacket and tall rubber boots, grabbed an old broom and went in for battle.
The plan was I would skirt around to the other side of the thicket and go in behind them and hopefully flush them out onto our property and then eventually into the garage. I had the garage door opener in case I was actually successful I figured I could shut them in and them catch them in there.
So I went around most of the thicket with my broom and then headed in.
I moved slowly and silently through the brush, carefully watching for those bright red combs as I went. Creeping stealthily along, I suddenly spotted them.
They knew I was there. Their heads were up, they were watching me.
I stayed still as I tried to decide which direction to move to get them where I wanted them to go. It looked as though they were trapped on a sort of small island in front of me.
I decided to try moving forward just a step to see what they would do.
They jumped up into a bush that was between them and the water.
“Ha!” I thought, “I’ve got you trapped!” so I moved forward another step. I didn’t want to go to fast and scare them enough that they would try to run past me.
Then I noticed there was only two chickens. I couldn’t find the third one, so I guessed she must have already gotten eaten by something. Well at least I had the two.
I moved forward another step and that was all the chickens could take. One them leaped into the creek.
“Seriously?” I thought to myself. I really did not think THAT would happen. Then I was just hoping she wouldn’t drown, but she actually SWAM.ACROSS. Have you ever seen a chicken SWIM?
It was amazing.
The second one followed suit.
Hmph. How did I get outsmarted by a couple of chickens?
Then I had to maneuver in such a way as to keep them moving towards our house or the poultry palace. Either way so long as I could see them I was happy.
They made a move towards the creek and some thick bushes again and I tried to thwart their chicken-y plans by dropping down by the creek myself and flushing them back up.
But then I thought they might run back to the thicket so I jogged back up the incline. They were no where to be found.
I went back down and still couldn’t find them. So I went back up and spotted them.
Bobbing their wretched little red combs up the hill to the poultry palace. Gah! I ran after the snots this time.
I was just praying they would go into the corral so I could close the gate and hopefully convince them to hop into the palace and slam the door shut but of course they had other plans and went into the thicket next to the corral. So I had skirt around below them and went through the location of my oldest child’s ‘fort’. They saw me coming and started pecking their way back towards the gate. So I moved slowly again. They went right past the gate – so close! So I went around again and low and behold, they went in!
I booked it to the gate and slammed it shut. Knowing it was only a partial victory since I still had to somehow catch them.
I opened the big door of the coop hoping to make it more enticing and some of the other chickens went in and were pecking at the food in there which peeked the interest of the new girls. Slowly and unsurely they pecked their way over and hopped in! Again I booked it as fast I could in muck boots and slammed the door shut but the small door was still open and I went to slam it and one them escaped just as I got it shut.
Blast.
But at least I had the one. I went in and got her and carried her oven to the goat shed and low and behold, the third chicken was in there!
Hee hee! That meant I had two of them! Eeek!
The last one was the wily one and took me a while longer to convince to go into the palace so I could catch her and she flew out of the pen at one point, requiring me to go through a whole other ordeal of getting her back into the pen and then into the palace. But eventually she did go in and once I caught her I pet her for a bit and handled her very gently in the hopes she will figured out I am really not mean.
So after all that I have my silly chickens and they had better be good layers to make all that worth it.
I’m going to go bake a cake now.
- Huckleberry Plum Pie - January 1, 2017
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