The last 5 years I have craved to raise and have my own chickens. This last spring I picked up 6 chickens and 2 ducks from a local hatchery in late June. My husband built me a beautiful coop for our brood. We house chickens and ducks in the same coop. We started to have some of the members of our flock crow. We decided we were going to cull our roosters (except for one) and keep our hens. Soon enough 2 of our birds started to crow while one was suspiciously a rooster (always the bigest from the second week, with large feet and comb) I started to get a little nervous about the number of hens we would end up with so I found two hens on craigslist. Well, Murphy's law is an interesting phenomenon: our neighbor we use to get our eggs from had a cougar tear apart their flock and only had one surviving hen, they brought over their hen for us. Then our other neighbor had an incident with a raccoon and that night they brought over two hens (two were lost in the incident). All of a sudden our coop has filled up. We are for certain we have two roosters (from the original flock), one maybe (we also think they laid an egg, and they have never crowed), and two for sure hens (from our original flock). Then a total of 5 foster hens. It recently snowed a feet here, and our original flock is roughly around the age where they can lay. We occasionally find random unrecognizable eggs and try to figure out where they belong. It has been two weeks since we picked up our first foster hens, so I think that in the next few weeks we will learn more. It does get dark here at 4pm (we use artificial light), and we get about 1 egg a day with our random assortment. Not to mention while all this is going on we have our two ducks, one of them is a drakelet and the other one is ducklet. They all seem to get along really well in the coop, but next summer we may build a new coop for the ducks and expand the duck family, as for chickens, I have a feeling they eventually just come to us.
We live in Washington State in the exact center of the mountains. We have crazy wildlife that surrounds us. Our coop has heat and a lock down in which we let our chickens free range and we lock them up at night.
We live in Washington State in the exact center of the mountains. We have crazy wildlife that surrounds us. Our coop has heat and a lock down in which we let our chickens free range and we lock them up at night.
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from Alabama. Glad you joined us.
