I reluctantly agree with you. It's the dry rather than the temperature that seems to be the problem for all. The chicken aren't used to it and while I was used to it when living in Catalonia I wasn't sad to leave it and a couple of years on, I wonder how I coped with it at all.
Regarding the cockerels, I'm going to.... Wait and see what they really are first. I'm absolutely horrendous at guessing. Wrong every time. Then I'll take it one day at a time and see how the dynamics play out. Im getting a second coop and another satellite roosting area ready. There's also a family of gringos (people from the US) who are now permanently renting our guesthouse (a good distance outside this groups ranging area) and they want chickens, so I could potentially relocate some and still get to take care of them.Are you thinking to keep all 3 cockerels ? Would you be getting more hens, in this case ?
5 out of Léa's 6 chicks had wattles at three weeks and a few days. I was sure we had 5/6 cockerels.
However they are now six weeks and I'm really not so sure for three of them. Their wattles haven't grown, they don't have attitudes like the two that were definitely early cockerels, and there is no difference in feathering yet.
My partner who's an optimist says we have four pullets, I think at best we have two.
We will not be keeping any of the males.
About dogs and chickens : I heard an rather unpleasant story yesterday. I wrote elsewhere about one of my neighbor's dog, a collie, who was over last week at my place with her, and chased broody hen Merle to eat the old and unfertile egg she was sitting on. The neighbour said although their dogs eat eggs, they never touch the chickens.
She had been giving me some hope on my roosters situation, because she also has two, and they had finally decided to coexist peacefully after two years of constant fighting. Yesterday I asked news of her roosters. She was very upset and said another of her dog, a small mutt poodle / terrier, had just killed and eaten the dominant smaller rooster while she was away. According to her, there had been no problem for almost three years between her dogs and her chickens. I'm not a dog person so not sure if it's possible that a dog would just suddenly decide to eat a chicken out of the blue...but hers dogs are definitely not coming over at my place anymore.
I consider that Léa's chicks free range because they are still small enough to cross all of our fences. However I think they actually range on approximately 2.5 acres (which is more than our smaller adult chickens who can also free range) and they spend most of their time in three or four places.
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Ya gotta shake 'em up good, first ... ummm ... the bugs, not the birdies ...Thank you! I've also done the thing where I poured out a jar of beetles in front of the chickens, only to watch them instantly take flight and return to the fruit trees
I can't stand the heat, not a fan of long hours of sunshine (I lived in Arizona for a number of years..) My husband, the born Englishman, wants a refund on his trip to America ticket every time it rains. When it rains here (South Carolina), during the summer, it just makes it humid and worse the next day, but for the time that it is raining, it is nice.
Here it’s not warm at all for July. We had 20 C max today.
That sounds perfect! My happy temperature is 21 or below. We have about 4/5 months before it will start getting that low. It will start getting tolerable in September/October -ish.
Play referee, rather than judge and jury, that's my motto.
