Things you don’t know until you have a homestead: it’s amazing what a relief it is to move young poultry out of the upstairs bathroom and into the barn. They’re not exactly smelly, but the odor from their food is kind of odd, they kick shavings around, and they take up space. And the bathroom is an awfully private room to have to share, even if they are just chicks. This is the fourth (ish?) time we’ve had young poultry brooding in the upstairs bathroom, and it will likely have been the last; we’ll have to come up with a way to do it in the barn from here on out. The fun simply wears off too quickly having them in the house.

These 6 little chickens are part of our plan to transition over to all chickens in the poultry yard. Laying ducks were fun, and we may have laying ducks again one day. For now, we need to be doing fewer things better rather than many things so-so. So, we have 2 new Rhode Island Reds, 2 Barred Rocks, and 2 Ameraucanas. These will replace some of our birds that we have lost due to predators. We’ve cut predator losses by making sure everyone is locked in the coop by a certain time at night. This program was working pretty well, and then we lost more in the middle of the day. And THEN we discovered that a neighbor’s beagle had been on the loose. Not cool. We don’t have any hard evidence here, but we haven’t lost any more birds since they’ve done a better job of locking her up. I think my suspicions here are well justified.

It feels terrible to loose an animal to predation. I’m somewhat assuaged being in some of the online farming groups and hearing about how common it is to have birds grabbed, in that it makes me realize that it happens to the best of us. Still, I feel much better now that most of that’s behind us.

Anyway, now that we’ve got the predation thing figured out, I anticipate that these little hens will put us in a good spot for eggs. We were going to hold off until Spring to get replacement layers, but then I saw an advertisement at Country Max for Fall Chicks. And instantly it made sense: it takes a hen approximately 5 months to go from a chick to a layer, and most hens cease (or at least decrease) laying during the winter so they can use their energy to keep warm rather than make eggs. If you start raising chicks in the fall, you get two periods of barrenness out of the way all at once.

Now that we’ve been at this for a solid two years, I think I might just be able to say that we’re getting the hang of it!