Tclloyd0812
I have been obsessed with chickens, ducks, geese and pigeons since childhood. Now one of my recent obsessions are emus. In fact, I'm obsessed with ALL birds! I love talking about birds, looking at birds, and raising birds!
When I was younger, I never really got to have chickens. It was mainly ducks and geese as we lived on the lake. When I got older, we finally had our own chickens and I quickly became obsessed. As I grew up, got married, and moved out of my home state of Texas to the "Natural State" of Arkansas, I was finally able to get my own flock!
At first we had 30 chickens, 10 ducks, turkeys, and of course goats. Everything was going well until I decided to introduce 5 new grown laying hens I rescued from a local mennonite egg farm. We quarantined the new hens for a few weeks, nothing seemed wrong besides 2 of them just laying around, and I thought it was because of the fact that they had been used to being crammed in one small area. As we finally introduced them to our original flock, the weather got chilly and now the 5 hens that seemed fine to begin with began having watery eyes, raspy breathing, and one of them was not able to walk and ended up dropping dead. I was scared because I knew my others would be sick. But it was too late to separate. All of my originals had been infected already. One by one they got sick, we treated, some died. The others that remained were not going to have a full, healthy life. I knew from the symptoms they had contracted mycoplasma, a horrible respiratory infection as well as possible Mareks. I know that once a chicken has MG, they will have it for the rest of their life, and nothing will treat it 100%. You also have to close your flock, not selling chicks, or introducing any new members. This brought us to making the sad decision of culling the entire flock as well as our ducks and turkeys. After medical examination, the flock indeed had MG as well as Mareks.
After cleaning our coop out entirely, multiple times, as well as airing it out for 6 weeks, we finally decided to hatch out some silkie chicks and raise the breeds we had wanted to raise originally with our last flock. Now, we have a beautiful flock full of show chickens, breeding flock, and just plain old pets. We do eat our eggs, and occasionally raise meat birds, but this flock is special, and there will be no more grown chickens introduced. Health and happiness is our number one priority for our flock, and we try our best to maintain what we now have.
We now have about 100 chickens, 9 different breeds, as well as 2 livestock guardian dogs, a weenie dog, Luna and Neville our DNA sexed emus, pigeons, ducks, Toulose geese, quail, pheasants, and sheep. I always have my incubator running, and next breeding season will be our first year selling purebred chicks. We look forward to adding to our family in the future.
It was a long road to where we are now, but we definitely aren't finish here. We are so thankful for our birds and treat them like family.
When I was younger, I never really got to have chickens. It was mainly ducks and geese as we lived on the lake. When I got older, we finally had our own chickens and I quickly became obsessed. As I grew up, got married, and moved out of my home state of Texas to the "Natural State" of Arkansas, I was finally able to get my own flock!
At first we had 30 chickens, 10 ducks, turkeys, and of course goats. Everything was going well until I decided to introduce 5 new grown laying hens I rescued from a local mennonite egg farm. We quarantined the new hens for a few weeks, nothing seemed wrong besides 2 of them just laying around, and I thought it was because of the fact that they had been used to being crammed in one small area. As we finally introduced them to our original flock, the weather got chilly and now the 5 hens that seemed fine to begin with began having watery eyes, raspy breathing, and one of them was not able to walk and ended up dropping dead. I was scared because I knew my others would be sick. But it was too late to separate. All of my originals had been infected already. One by one they got sick, we treated, some died. The others that remained were not going to have a full, healthy life. I knew from the symptoms they had contracted mycoplasma, a horrible respiratory infection as well as possible Mareks. I know that once a chicken has MG, they will have it for the rest of their life, and nothing will treat it 100%. You also have to close your flock, not selling chicks, or introducing any new members. This brought us to making the sad decision of culling the entire flock as well as our ducks and turkeys. After medical examination, the flock indeed had MG as well as Mareks.
After cleaning our coop out entirely, multiple times, as well as airing it out for 6 weeks, we finally decided to hatch out some silkie chicks and raise the breeds we had wanted to raise originally with our last flock. Now, we have a beautiful flock full of show chickens, breeding flock, and just plain old pets. We do eat our eggs, and occasionally raise meat birds, but this flock is special, and there will be no more grown chickens introduced. Health and happiness is our number one priority for our flock, and we try our best to maintain what we now have.
We now have about 100 chickens, 9 different breeds, as well as 2 livestock guardian dogs, a weenie dog, Luna and Neville our DNA sexed emus, pigeons, ducks, Toulose geese, quail, pheasants, and sheep. I always have my incubator running, and next breeding season will be our first year selling purebred chicks. We look forward to adding to our family in the future.
It was a long road to where we are now, but we definitely aren't finish here. We are so thankful for our birds and treat them like family.
- Birthday
- November 7
- Location
- Ozark Mountain Foothills of Arkansas
- Real Name
- Cassidy
- Gender
- Female
- Why do you want to join our community?
- I'm obsessed with everything CHICKENS!
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