Monica and Kyle's Backyard Flock

[harvestmoonica]

Hi!

We have posted a few times in the "Hen or Roo" threads and we wanted to make our own story post!

We are newly weds as of May 2025 and new home owners as of April 2025. We started our flock in June 2025 and have overall been loving every moment of it!

I am a nurse practitioner and Kyle is a technician. I'm working 2 jobs to try to pay all of my terrible debt as quickly as possible so special thanks to Kyle for taking care of the home and our babies!

We live with our two dogs, Lucy is my Pomsky, and Ricky is Kyle's Alaskan Klee Kai. Kyle's tortoise shell cat is Kiki, she's mostly here for the good vibes and keeps to herself but is a cool cat.

Our Ricky is extremely protective of the flock, he loves interacting with them and just being around them in general. I'll attach a couple cute pictures of Ricky and Buttercup, he just adores them.

Lucy, on the other hand, is a menace. We keep her attached to a short run in our fenced in backyard when the flock is free roaming. I am devastated to say that Lucy had killed a sapphire gem chick of ours when we were first starting out. I had a very hard time with it. Not just the loss of my adorable baby chick, but that my perfect dog had done such a thing. I've spend a lot of time reminding myself that she's a dog, their instincts tell them to do this, she probably thought the chick was a toy, etc. But it was really hard for me and still is sometimes. She is a fantastic dog and truly the love of my life, but it was heartbreaking when it happened. I think especially as a new flock owner. Special thanks to Kyle for burying Blue Jay in a special place while I cried my eyes out at home. (Kyle is extremely wonderful to me, I'm so blessed)

We started with a single coop that we found online and built ourselves, followed by another, much nicer coop, that we attached to the first. Since then, and with all the additions to our flock, we've converted our shed into a coop and it turned out quite nicely for a couple of newbies (thanks to my dad for assistance with the big power tools). We purchased a large run with an upright door for us to walk into that we'll attach to the shed and scrap the old run pieces that are there temporarily. We'll share pictures of the finished product!

We live in a city where we are not allowed to have any roosters. We're suspicious of a couple of our flock right now, but we have a couple of friends who said they'd be more than happy to add a rooster or two to their flocks if needed.

Our neighbors directly on each side are wonderful and are very excited for eggs! One of them is a couple with two little girls who love watching the chickens run around the yard and are always sticking their hands through the fence and politely asking to hold a "baby chicken". Very cute!

Our other neighbor gave us a gift card to tractor supply to buy feed after we insisted that he didn't need to pay us for eggs once they start laying!

Kyle and I don't have any kids yet, but everyone says that once you do have kids, they will be all you'll talk about - I feel like all Kyle and I do all day is talk about chickens!

We have loved the support and kindness we have experienced here and will share some of our favorite pictures of our gang so far!

Thanks so much for sticking through if you've made it to the end of this!

 

[WingItRanch]

What a beautiful family! Thank you for sharing.

The personality of an individual dog definitely plays into it but I also think breed is something to consider. Small dogs were often bred to hunt varmint on ships... they have a high prey drive. My parents have an Australian Shepherd and a Maltese-Poodle mix. The MaltiPoo was super chill but they were shocked when it hunted and killed a duckling. The Aussie basically ignores all small animals.