Do you count your chickens before bed?

[Matzwd]

Iv'e "lost" one that was sitting on my shoulder.
I understand.

I've done this before with a human child that was on my hip. He was just staring at my frantic face as I was in a frenzy looking everywhere. I had made it through every room and was pivoting at the end of the hallway when I spotted him there, on his usual perch that was my hip.

 

[ajackalope]

I count them during the day when they are foraging and when I bring them in for the night. My husband doesn't and he had to go out a 3 in the morning when he was coming back from the bathroom and saw my Lavender Orpington hen sitting on the fence under the motion activated light.

 

[ajackalope]

We currently have 14 and are looking to get more chicks. I dont know when I would stop counting. I once yelled at my dog to get out of my way so that I could open the door and go out and look for him. I think I got outside before I realized it.

 

[Cluckminster Fuller]

I didn't used to, and now I only have 5--but that's because after our guard dog died the raccoons slaughtered many, many fine hens. So I still make sure the 5 are there, and soon I will get more again. We are still "relocating" raccoons and seeing if we can be ready for a new dog.

 

[LWhomestead1]

How many of you count your chickens when you put them up at night? How many chickens would it take for you to give up counting?

I do and hang with them a few

 

[Velma Mae]

How many of you count your chickens when you put them up at night? How many chickens would it take for you to give up counting?

I have 10 and always count them at night. They expect that routine now. They are a little spoiled.

 

[Velma Mae]

I was talking about how many hens you would have before you gave up, like if you had 50 or more hens in one pen.

I think my limit is 10.

 

[CatMom2]

Oh yes, I count every sweet girl every night. Right now I have 13 and I count by color and if one isn’t there, I get worried. Usually one is on a roost directly behind another and problem solved. We have had 3-4 hens that just disappeared without a trace - no doubt a predator where we live in the NorCal Sierra Mountains. They are allowed to free range but they stay fairly close to our houses. We lost a large black hen about 3 months ago & we never found any signs of her. I never plan to have more hens than the number of eggs a couple of friends and family can consume. 13 hens is good. 20 was too many.

 

[birdlady11]

My 22 girls have range over about one fenced acre that includes both dense vegetation and open areas. They put themselves to bed in the coop every night and I always do a head count before closing the coop to ensure that everybody is accounted for. I check numbers for several reasons - 1)Some of my girls are VERY old so I want to make sure they were able to make it back in safely before I close the doors. 2) If one of them got stuck or injured somewhere I would need to go look for them and bring them home. 3) If one of my girls decided to go broody in a hiding place somewhere in pen I would need to find them and bring them in because she wouldn't last the night due to predators. And finally 4) If one of the girls is taken by a predator, I need to find the carcass to determine what kind of predator it was to determine a course of action to try to prevent the loss in the future.

 

[Finnie]

I have 56 adults (chickens, ducks, geese) and 102 chicks and juveniles. I don’t count the chicks in the brooders and grow out areas. If no one’s dead, I assume they are all there. I do count all the adults in various coops, which have 10 or less.

But in my main coop, which has 20-30 adults and almost that many juveniles that have graduated from the brooder, it’s too hard to put eyes on each one at night. Most of them sleep in clumps. I do glance around and make sure my favorites are accounted for. Sometimes that means I have to push some apart so I can look between and under them. It’s too hard to count all of them that way. I figure if there’s no sign of trouble and no one is still wandering around outside when it’s time to close up, then they’re probably all in there.

Well today I’m wishing that I had counted the main coop last night.
I lost a crele penedesenca pullet to something. I know I did a cursory glance around at lockup to check for stragglers, but it was kind of dark, so if she had been hunkered down in the weeds, I would have still missed her.

And actually, it’s possible a hawk or something came during the course of the morning. Because the feathers, and hunks of skin and feathers, that I found were very obvious, and I didn’t notice them when I opened things up this morning.

So even though it will be impossible to count multiple piles of half grown chicks all over the place, I will be doing a more thorough check of the bushes and weeds outside the coop at lock up time now.