Crazy chickens, an orphaned goat and poop

2 eggs today (but I broke one on the way into the house so I flung it to the cannibal chickens before it leaked all over the place)

I went out to feed the goats this morning. Five fifteen am is early for me. At this time of day I haven't had any coffee or tea. Nothing to perk (!) me up. I NEED perking up at five fifteen in the morning. What I'm getting at is that I don't have the same level of consciousness early in the morning that I might have at say, noon. My wits are still in the same dark quiet place where they are of no danger to anyone. So I'm feeding the orphan with its mother standing next to me trying not to notice. The little one is amazing how much it can eat. It will take the entire 24 oz bottle of formula without so much as a burp. The goatling weighs about 13 lbs now. I can't drink that much at nearly 20 times its weight. Not too nearly. I noticed, as any good mother would that there was a dark crusty stain on the little baby's neck. I was alarmed. My first thought-which took only a few seconds to percolate up- was that it was blood. I couldn't imagine what else it might be. I felt it. Crusty. Very dry. The incident happened hours ago. I moved the bottle into the light with little goat still attached. Still looked bad. I picked him up and held him more towards the light to see the wound. No luck. At that point I thought I was getting late so I fed the big goats, fed the barred rock chicks and forgot to feed the big chickens. One thing about free range birds is that they are perfectly capable of finding their own food. The big advantage of the feed I give them is that it is balanced just right to promote egg laying. Barred rock hens, fed properly, are capable of laying 280 eggs a year.
In the afternoon I warmed up a new bottle of goat formula and went to check on my little charge. He was hungry and began to suck down the entire bottle. While he was distracted I explored the wound a little better. It's amazing how much 8 cups of early morning coffee and adequate sunlight can help. The "wound" was no more than poop! Our chickens have long since abandoned the proper chicken behaviour of hiding out in the chicken coop at night. Mind you we have 2 coops and one of them cost nearly $ 400.00. By any measure an extravagant chicken coop. It can house as many as 6 birds. Anyway, the chickens won't use the coops. They perfer to roost in the rafters of the barn at night. it's a real effort for them, the older ones especially to fly up to the rafters 15 feet above ground level. They use the bleeding edge of chicken technology to accomplish the feat. From the ground they will flap up to the cattle gate that closes off the chicken coop from the large animals. From there they can manage the short distance to the fence that bounds one side of the stall next door. With a short hop they can then get to the top of the chicken coop. That's about eight feet up. From there it's only a step really to the top of the tack room. Here's where it gets dicey. From the top of the tack room to the rafters is about 5 feet. They really have to screw up their courage (why do you think they are called chickens?) to actually FLY the distance. At that point they have truly flown the coop (har) and are in the safety of the rafters. Since they have gone to all that trouble, which they do every night. They seem to take great pleasure in carefully aiming and bombing any creature down below.


I found that the mid-group of chicks had learned a new trick. As far as groups go, we got 12 chickens when we bought the farm, we hatched about 10 more from the first groups eggs and the third group would be the recently purchased Barred Rock chicks. That we are down to 9 chickens total from the first two groups is a testament to the greed of raccoons. Since we got Barbecue the loss of chickens has almost stopped. Back to the trick. There is a gate that separates the backyard of the house from the yard between the barn and shed and house. The 5 remaining chickens of group 2 were all roosting and preening on top of that gate. We were so overcome with how cute it was that we avoided going out that way for the rest of the afternoon. I also got to take some pictures with my Treo 650. See photo posted above. If you look closely you can also see the peahen on the ground and one of the cats up on the deck railing in the background.