Chickens Are Here!

 Our broilers arrived 2 weeks ago! We got 150 this time. They came with 3 extra's, so conveniently 3 arrived dead. So we had 150 even. Since then we have lost 4 more. One acted like it was sick from the time we got him, so no surprise that that one died. The second one we have no idea why it died, the third was killed when a little kid who was visiting fell on it. A fourth one died from unknown causes. Other than that, it's going pretty well raising them!

We did get a chick with what we thought was a broken neck. It couldn't look down. It pretty much always had to look up. This one we didn't think would make it very long because of that, but since its been in the IICU (Izzy's Intensive Care Unit) its been growing as fast as the other chicks! It might make it to 8 weeks like the others!

This is the chick Izzy was taking special care of. He wasn't able to drink by himself for the first couple of days, so Izzy put him in a little cardboard box in the house where she helped him drink every so often. She did a great job! Now he is back to normal and with the other chickens in a pen on the front lawn. He is one of the larger ones too.

We where brooding them in a room behind the barn that the previous owners of the house used for breeding cats. It's also cat proof, so it's a good place to keep chicks. 

"They said no cats allowed in the chickery" 

 Joe and Havi getting ready to load chickens up and put them on the grass.

 This is what they look like now. Its amazing how fast meat chickens put on weight! 

We also got a new set a laying hen chicks yesterday! They are so much prettier than meat chickens! They are also so much more lighter than the meat birds when we first got them. These chicks weigh nothing when you pick them up. They look like little fuzz balls walking around! There are 150 of them, and we have yet to build pens to put them in. That's a pretty good motivator to get them built!!!

Sadly, we lost a guinea hen last week when our dogs attacked it. Our Pyrenees view birds as predators. That's why we got them, so they could keep hawks away from lambs and other animals. Anatolian's don't see birds as predators. I guess one of the guineas flew in the corral with the sheep and couldn't get out fast enough. By the time Ashley and I had found it, it looked like it had been plucked alive. The poor thing was running around with no feathers on and on it's side. So I took it to Mom to see what she wanted to do with it. She said the only thing we could do for it was put it down. So she went and got the knife and the killing bucket and put it out of it's misery. That was kinda a bummer. That was our first one to loose. Hopefully none of the other ones try to fly in there again.