Fluffy Butt Acres: Stories of our flock

[Dona Worry]

Love your stories! Keep the fluffy butts coming!

 

[drumstick diva]

Wow - she has the J Lo of Chickens butt.

 

[BY Bob]

Love your stories! Keep the fluffy butts coming!

Thanks, I certainly will.

 

[BY Bob]

Wow - she has the J Lo of Chickens butt.

Maybe I should teach her to dance! She could be Hattie from the Block!

 

[BY Bob]

This morning has been absolutely crazy. 4 chickens could not make more noise. Thank the lord things did not really get fired up until 8:00 am. I have diagnosed the situation to the fact that Patsy is finally going to lay an egg after taking a break since she started molting in late September.

Patsy and Lilly have always called to each other when they can't see each other. Very loudly. Well they were doing that while Patsy was on the nest, Lilly was calling to her. Patsy was in Hattie's nesting box and Hattie needed to lay as well. So Hattie was running in and out of the coop yelling. Jabber did not know what to do. He was running from Lilly to Hattie to inside the coop while stopping every so often to crow. It was absolute chaos.

It was so bad that at one point, Patsy came running out of the coop bawking as loud as she could as she ran all around the yard to the backdoor, stopped to yell at me, and then bawked her way back to the coop. Everything finally settled when Patsy switched nesting boxes and Hattie was able to go into hers. Here they are all settled with Jabber keeping track.

 

[Doc7]

I thought I would go ahead and continue my story today.

Having settled in with my flock of 4 the first thing I knew was that I needed bigger living quarters. The crate was too small for more than 2 or 3 birds. My dad agreed to donate me and old shed that we had. I then ran actual chicken wire (who knew it was not for chickens!) up through the woods stapled to trees to provide a run for them. You can actually see the wire on the left side of the photo I posted with the last entry in this story. This proved to be a disaster. The chickens would be in for a few days and then my Mom would be yelling, "Those birds are on the porch again messing it up!". Little did she know what my dad had in mind and how the mess would get exponentially larger.

How were the chickens breaking out? They were not going under or over, they were going through! I started finding where the chicken wire had come unwound. I would wind it back together and assume it was a manufatured flaw I had missed. After the flock had gotten out a few times i decided to watch and see how they were doing it. I did not put the two things together until i watched Brownie break out. I watched in amazement as she put her head through the wire and then began pushing for all her might against it. Eventually where the hexagons joined would unwind until she had a hole big enough for her to push her body through. Then it was freedom for all! The whole flock was out. At that point we gave up on the run and they were free range birds.

That first spring Speck went broody. We swapped the eggs out for golf balls but she didn't care. This was just what my Dad was waiting for. One Saturday he showed up with a box of peeps. Everytime I tell this story the number of peeps raises. I think the lst time I said there were 50!) As near as I can accuartely figure it was 10-12. That night we stuffed them under Speck and in the morning she was the proud momma of a large flock of chicks. My Dad told me I could keep any hens but they were mine (and Speck's) to raise. Unknown to me at the time, they were all roosters and for eating purposes. They were not broilers but rather some large white roosters. My dad called them White Rocks.

This went on every year for almost 10 years. A quick estimate has Speck raising about 100 to 120 eating roosters for us. Of course a flock of 16 is a lot more work than a flock of 4. After a while I came to very much dislike the summers when the flock expanded. My mom hated the large flock of chickens as they dug up her gardens pooped all over her porch. Speck was so proud to be a mom and even when they were nearly full grown she would lead her flock of boys through the yard. Her tiny black and white body 1/2 their size.

When I left for college the core group of 4 had been reduced to 3 with only the loss of Lucky. My dad would eventually return the 3 of them to the farmer who had originally provided Speck and Rooster Cogburn to me. Speck would live to be 18 years old. What an amazing hen she was. She showed me what a great companion and pet a chicken could be.

However, the extra work associated with raising the eating roosters had soured me on raising chickens and that was the opinion I had when my wife saw the chicks at Tractor Supply one day..............

Speck lived longer than the current Guinness world record holding chicken!!!

 

[BY Bob]

Speck lived longer than the current Guinness world record holding chicken!!!

I've been talking to my dad about that. That's our estimate based upon how old she supposedly was when the farmer gave her to us. I do know that she lived 13 years after I met her. I'm not so sure the farmer is accurate. He did love telling that story about how old she lived.

 

[BY Bob]

It's about to get bitter cold this week and I am going to be out of town on business. Therefore I spent Sunday afternoon making some subtle coop improvements so my dear wife will not have to do much to keep them safe.

I clean and added a bunch of straw to the cup itself to give them something warm to sit in should they desire. I also added 2 flock blocks, a big and a small, so they would something to do should they choose to stay inside. I enjoyed the porch in an old clear shower curtain a while ago. They love drinking themselves there.

I just checked on them and Patsy is enjoying one of the flock blocks, just the little one though. Ignoring the big block. She is pecking away.

 

[BY Bob]

It was so cold nobody left the coop today.

I thought they would all huddle together tonight but they still broke into 2s with a pair at each end of the roost. Air Temp was 1° when I took this photo.

 

[BY Bob]

-4° with -11° wind chill. Why get out of bed?