I broke my ankle early this summer and DH who tolerated the chickens and left most of the gardening up to me has ended up becoming a farmer. Pretty big step for a city guy. I had 5 welsummer hens, 5 BO's one of which was a roo with problems and a few other hens. Only the wellies were laying. We live in the woods with plenty of predators, especially fox and I was hospitalized a couple of times. I expected to loose a few chickens especially since some like to fly over my electric net fence. The BO's were the worst. I kept waiting to hear a roo crow, never have but the count stayed the same. He told me one of the chickens was going to die one day that was very hot. I suspected it was the roo (these chickens were hatched end of Feb). I didn't mean to keep him because he always looked sick when it was cool/rainey back in the spring but I lost both my other roos to a fox and he seemed to be doing better. I told him he could cull him if he wanted but before he got it done said roo started looking okay. We lost some presumedly to a fox and the count for BO's became 4. I had actually been able to look at the roo to make sure it was a roo by now. It seemed all the hens were laying but I felt I should have been getting more eggs but some of the breeds were new to me. It turned cool and the roo looked sickly again (55 at night cool). We decided to cull him but before he got the deed done he found the roo dead at the edge of the chicken yard. He apparently went to sleep with his head stuck thru the fence and the head was chewed off. That was 2 days ago. Now the BO count was 3. This morning my husband woke me up and wanted to know how many BO's did he tell me there were. I told him 3, he said he thought so. I was expecting him to tell me there were 0 to 2 because 2 hens were flying out of the fence and I figured they were fox food....but...No! The current BO count is 4 hens!!
Could it have gone broody and hid for a few weeks? Sometimes they don't give up until it's been a month. She could even have hatched a few and lost them to praetors.
That was all I could figure also. It amazes me she survivied with all the predators around. The roo must have had some type of genetic problem and I seriously doubt there are any fertile eggs around here. No one ever saw him do the deed and he never even crowed.
