May 15, 2018 Our New Rooster.

Our new rooster is the beautiful golden boy to the left.

Things have been so busy since my last update there simply has been no time to keep up with all of the changes. This is a small(ish) change which is interesting all on its own. I will write the longer update soon, I promise. . .

We moved the chickens to the Farm a few weeks ago and they could not be happier about the move.

We had always thought that we would leave them at the old house with the new homeowners, but getting the house to completion meant leaving them there alone and this was as inconvenient as doing all of the laundry there. So we decided to move the coop and chickens out one nice Sunday morning, on the spur of the moment. The girls immediately went about tearing down piles of composting debris and laying very tasty eggs for us.

The hounds all thought the Hens would make good toys to play with and we thought that perhaps we had made a mistake. But the girls soon got tired of being stalked and chased. Rhoda, our Rhode Island Red, took on the roll of the dominant chicken and began fighting back. The dogs lost interest about the second time the Hen charged at them, with wings out-stretched and beak ready for battle. Things simmered down after that and the chickens became something more fun to look at than chase.

But three chickens was not our original plan and we were getting impatient even as the animals all settled into the farm routine. We wanted to have at least twenty-five hens a-laying, and a few roosters to make new chicks. Part of our plan was to buy a clutch of chicks at the feed store and wait for a rooster to show up accidentally, but this was going to take more time than we wanted and Summer was coming on quickly despite our wishes, so I started looking for a rooster. The one I found was unexpectedly good.

The picture doesn't show it,
but he's really quite large.
About double Rhoda,
One and a half times the others.

As I have written before, I do a great deal of searching for things on Craig's List. (Mostly in the free section.) The choices of free roosters is larger than you might expect, but I am not the only one wanting them. I answered every ad for a few weeks, only to find the bird already taken. So I moved on to searching the Farm stuff for sale section, mostly to the same effect. In this search most of the young roosters were either bred for sale, therefore expensive, or accidentally purchased through the feed store, therefore too young. But one ad showed a perfectly respectable Buff Orpington rooster for fifteen dollars and I got to the ad about fifteen minutes after it was posted. Bottom line, I bought a really nice young rooster for fifteen dollars from a nice woman with a farm on the top of Bald Peak.

Biff crows a softer than we expected. There is a loud rooster up the road who crows all day and is very loud. He struts around and, at first, took the same guff from the dogs. For a few days he had to contend with Rhoda for the top position in the flock, but he's was easily double the size of the hen  and in a few days he figured the whole thing out. Now he leads his girls around to the best places to eat and, if a dog gets too close, he chases the threat away. Yesterday I thought I saw him trying to bully the Cinnamon Bear.

Biff, the Buff Orpington immediately
took the hens's hearts and began taking
them all over the farm.

Part of his job, as Rooster and Chief, is to encourage the making of chicks. He likes this part of the job and goes at whenever he can sneak up on a hen. We expect one of the hens will "go broody" at sometime, making us a clutch of chicks to increase our flock, but our plans need to happen more quickly that that. So last night we got impatient and bought ten new chicks to speed the plan along. Five Rhode Island Reds, five Buff Orpingtons (because the season has ended and they were out of Reds).

I'll try to make the time to catch you up on our new tractor, and all of the other progress we are making, or not making, at a later date. (When there's is more time.)