Chandler0206
In the Brooder
- Apr 11, 2016
- 23
- 13
- 44
It has been a year and a bit since I've joined and I just wanted to share some of my experiences. Well I've raised some chickens on and off in some form or fashion since I was old enough to attend school (five or so in TN, where I live), and this is because my family lives on a farm. My first real experiences with poultry ended disastrously, raccoons got to the babies, roosters and other birds had their feeding schedules mixed up (and they didn't make it), and so on. When I hit maybe seventh grade, I told my parents that all I wanted for my birthday was some chickens to fill up the coop I got for Christmas and some money; they gladly agreed to both and within a few weeks I had three red stars and three black stars. I was so excited and still remember those days fondly. Sadly, those birds barely made it to a year old when the black stars killed my favorite red star (I think her name was Sweety). We separated the birds by color, but before long one of the black stars, Stella, got injured severely; luckily she made a recovery. It wasn't long after that before my one of my red stars got sick and died, but before she did she infected Stella. The rest of the story gets really sad from there, so I'll skip it. Shortly after the first birds hit a year old, we bought some more, four bantams (Two chicks died and we got a replacement for one of them. In the end we got two orangeish looking ones with beards, feathered feet, and pointy black tails and a silver-grey dorking.); an easteregger, which would grow up to be a pain in my butt rooster who fathered at least ten babies; a leghorn; and two blue andillusians. They grew and grew as birds do and eventually the bantams started sitting on the other hens' eggs and we got five chicks, one female and four roosters. The next year we bought some partridge cochins and two ducks (we were supposed to get five chickens and two ducks, but only two of each survived.) The bantams got broody again and we got four chicks this time (three roosters and one hen). Shortly after the new roosters reach 18 weeks old I sold all of the males we had, eight in total. For a while the worst thing I had to deal with was the duck stench. Then one of the ducks starts biting me as a sign of dominance, all because he thought I was going to hurt his mate. Then the raccoon war began, they killed my two orange bantams and leghorn. We started setting traps and they haven't killed a bird since; although they did crush a whole clutch of eggs that my female duck was sitting on. Lastly, the cochins have started to hatch some duck eggs and the cycle begins again.
