Stinkerpants

RIP Petunia

April 7, 2009 in Urban Hippies • Backyard Chickens

How many more of these posts am I going to have to write?!

Petunia, our Rhode Island Red, died today.  Yesterday I picked her up and noticed that she’d lost a lot of weight.  This was not something that happened over a long period of time–it was seriously in the last week or so, and she was acting fine.  I mentioned it to Y.  When he got home from work, he agreed that she might have lost a little weight, but she was acting normal.  She pooped and it looked yellow and runny.  “Kind of like an egg,” I commented. Petunia had yet to lay an egg.

This morning we got up and checked on the chickens.  Petunia didn’t come down from the top of the coop with the rest of the chickens.  We took her out and examined her, and she seemed kind of listless.

I did a bunch of Googling.  She didn’t seem to have what killed Lily, because she wasn’t gasping or anything.  I came across a forum post about impacted eggs, and suddenly I remembered thinking that her poop looked like egg.  We made the first appointment with the vet: today at 3:30pm.  I went to a business meeting in the city, and when I got back, she was dead.

And that’s it.  Just dead.

And not to be too graphic, but there was a pool of that yellow and runny eggy looking stuff around her.

Right now, I am waiting on a phone call from the vet.  I have a feeling she had an impacted egg, which broke inside her.  I feel horrible–she must have been in so much pain.

This sucks.

We have EGGS!

March 24, 2009 in Urban Hippies • Backyard Chickens

A LOT has been going on recently, chicken-wise.  Namely, THIS has been going on:

We’ve now received FOUR EGGS!  All courtesy of Rosarita!!  Who is Rosarita, you might ask?  Well, that’s what else is new.

This is Rosarita, with Petunia:

Rosarita is our “replacement” chicken.  Jane, the girl we bought Petunia and Lily from, replaced poor Lily with a new chicken.  Rosarita is QUITE the athlete, let me tell you!  I met Jane at a local college campus to pick her up.  She accidentally got loose, and we had to chase her all over the parking lot!  She eventually flew into a bush and got stuck–otherwise we never would have caught her!  She is a FAST chicken.  Picture it, people: me running after a chicken, armed only with a giant blanket from the backseat of our Prius. I was not very successful, to say the least.

Clearly, Rosarita has a lot of personality.  If you’re interested in her breed, she’s an Ancona.  Apparently they lay earlier than most chickens, so that explains why she’s given us four eggs and Petunia’s given us none, even though they’re the same age. Sadly, I personally have yet to discover an egg.  Y’s found them all!  The first one came while I was in Oregon.

We also have some other news:

Yep!  Those are chicks!  Y and I recently decided that we wanted the experience of raising chicks.  So we’re raising four little babes (we have three already and will get another one this week) and will sell the ones we don’t decide to keep.

We have two little ladies that look like the guy above (they’re Buff Orpingtons) and one Barred Rock.

Buff Orpingtons grow up to look like this:

(photo source BTW, check out this page if you like chickens, btw! It’s awesome!)

Cute, huh?!  I think we might keep Buttercup.  The other one is a loudmouth and is also super cute–her name is Dahlia.

Barred Rock hens are super cool and grow up to look like this:

(image source)

Our little Barred Rock chickie is named Daisy.  I don’t have any good photos of her yet, but hopefully soon!

Believe it or not, there’s still more news on the chicken front, but I’m going to save it for another post.  In the meantime, CLUCK! CLUCK!

Two New Chickens

March 4, 2009 in Urban Hippies • Backyard Chickens

Yesterday I told you guys about what happened to Lily.  Right after it happened, Y and I were pretty depressed.  I kept wondering, “is keeping chickens really this hard?  I thought it was supposed to be easy!  Or at least easier than this…” I’m still not 100% clear on the answer to this question, but we’re not giving up.

Last night, we bought two 6-week old chicks from a very nice guy in Berkeley.

The gray one is a Silver Laced Wyandotte, and the white one is an Ameraucana.  We decided to name the Wyandotte “Violet” and the Ameraucana “Rosebud.”  I am currently calling them “chicklets.”

The guy we bought them from, David, was very cool.  When we told him about what happened to Lily, he was super understanding.  He said that dealing with death is part of raising chickens.  He has had some bad experiences with predators himself.

So, we’re trucking along here.  We put Petunia back outside because the weather is improving and we felt bad about keeping her cooped up inside.  Violet and Rosebud are still in the back room (and will be for quite awhile).

Next week, we’re going to pick up another chicken–this is a chicken that Petunia grew up with.  In July we’ll be getting one more, bringing our grand total to 5.  We’ll have brown, white, dark brown, and greenish-blue eggs when they all start laying.  I’m excited.  :)

Violet is super sweet:

Rosebud doesn’t like to be held so much:

I am very excited about these new additions!  Thank you, David!

RIP Lily the Chicken

March 3, 2009 in Urban Hippies • Backyard Chickens

This weekend was a little bit traumatizing, chicken-wise.

One of our chickens died.  Yes, that’s right: died.

It all started about a week ago, when we heard a weird noise from the backyard, kind of like a barking or a loud squeak.  To be honest, our neighbor has a VERY loud and obnoxious beagle, and we thought it was him.  Later on, though, when Y was out cleaning the chicken pen, he discovered the noise was coming from Lily.

It seemed like she might have something caught in her beak, because it looked like she was sneezing.  A quick search on backyardchickens.com, though, produced some disturbing results: if your chicken is shaking her head, you’re in a bad state.  WTF?  I swear to you, she was fine the day before.

Then we noticed that she was opening and closing her beak over and over again.  So I got out the video camera so we could send a video to the girl we bought her from.  On the video, you can hear that it sounds like she’s gasping for air (in person, you couldn’t really hear that, though):

(Note: I can’t get the YouTube link to embed, so here’s the link if you’re interested).

Not wanting to take any chances, I made an appointment with the vet.I have to admit,  I felt like kind of a weirdo driving a chicken to the vet in a cardboard box.  When I got there, though, they acted like seeing a chicken was nothing out of the ordinary.  Our vet listened to her little chicken heart and her little chicken lungs and took her little chicken temperature.Then he announced that she had pneumonia.

WTF.  It’s not that cold outside, and I swear to you, we didn’t do anything to make our chicken sick.  The vet said that chickens can appear totally healthy, and then rapidly decline.  So it’s possible that she had this when we got her.  He gave us some medication (I had to inject the chicken!), but he said that she’d lost a lot of weight and she didn’t sound good.

Apparently chickens spend a lot of their energy keeping warm, so we brought Lily inside and put a heating pad under part of her box.  We faithfully gave her injections and she seemed to be doing better.  We felt sorry for Petunia, outside all by herself, so we brought her inside too.

Then, on Sunday, Y went in the back room to give the chickens some banana and was horrified by what he saw.  Lily looked like she was on death’s door.  I won’t go into too much detail (because it’s sad and unnecessary), but let’s just say this: she clearly was not going to make it through the next hour–and she looked like she was in a lot of pain.

Considering I’d been in to check on them not 20 minutes earlier, I was shocked by how quickly she deteriorated.  She did not look like that when I went in–admittedly she was not very active, but she did not look like that.

The kind thing to do was put her down.  The saddest part (at least for us) was that we were going to have to do it.  And the way you put down a chicken?  It’s not exactly pleasant for the human in charge, which (in this case) was Y.  Again, I won’t go into too much detail.

Needless to say, we emailed the girl who we bought the chickens from.  It turns out that her Australorp just died, too–with the same symptoms.  She was super apologetic and said that sometimes chickens can get pneumonia from mold spores.  Her guess was that the “batch” of Australorps she got had compromised immune systems.  Very sad.

So now we have just one chicken, although we have plans to get more in the very near future.  The girl we bought the chickens from said she’d give us another one, and we’re going to get a couple more in addition (Y is going to build a bigger, badder coop when the weather improves).  We definitely don’t want Petunia to get lonely.

Our Chickens!

February 10, 2009 in Urban Hippies • Backyard Chickens

Have you ever had so much to do that you don’t get around to doing anything? That’s kind of how this week has been so far, at least when it comes to blogging.  This weekend was PACKED.  I completed an item on my 101 in 1001 list, we were able to move into our kitchen (and start cooking!) and…we got our chickens!  So as you can see, I have a lot to talk about.

Everyone seemed pretty curious about the chickens, so I’ll start with them.

On Sunday morning, Y and I drove back up to Santa Rosa to buy a pen for the chickens.  This pen fits around the coop, so during the daytime they can run around but still remain enclosed.  At first Y planned to build one, but then…well, then he changed his mind.

After picking up the pen, we drove south to San Anselmo, where we met the girl who sold us the chickens, Jane.  She was AWESOME.  She showed us her goats (OMG they are so cute!), and then introduced us to our chickens.

Here they were when we first met them:

The second she turned that crate around, I knew that there was no FiFi in that crate.  Y and I generally find that our animals kind of name themselves.   We have lots of names in mind, but one just ends up fitting.  So as much as I loved the name FiFi, Lily was in that crate.  Lily and Petunia.  Lily is the black one (an Australorp) and Petunia is the brown one (a Rhode Island Red).

Before we left, Jane showed Y how to clip their wings so they couldn’t fly over our fence.  This process sounded really painful to me, but as it turns out, you just cut a little bit off of some of their feathers–no biggie.  Y and I were both pretty proud of him for successfully clipping bird wings, though.  It sounds really impressive, don’t you think?

Then we put Lily and Petunia in a cardboard box, and I held them on my lap for the drive home.  They make the cutest little noises!

Lulabelle was pretty excited about our new family members, too.

When we got home, we moved the coop into place and started to set it up.  This coop is called the Chick ‘n’ Hutch.  In theory, buying a ready-made coop is a great idea.  In practice…well, let’s just say it’s kind of cheaply made.  Y believes that he will be building a wonderful, giant coop from scratch this summer and housing five chickens in it.  We’ll see!

Y covered the mesh on the bottom with cardboard (the wire is bad for chicken feet) while Lulabelle observed and sometimes offered her wise advice.

After filling the coop with some pine chips, it was time to show the ladies their new home.

They seemed unimpressed, to be totally honest.

Once we gave them some food, though, they were more enthusiastic:

While the ladies were dining, Y started to put the pen together.  And because I’m a slacker, I never managed to take a full photo of the finished pen.  You can imagine it, though, right?  It has a top and a front.

And so we have our chickens.  Jane gave us 12 eggs to get us started (and I made a delicious frittata!), but our hens have yet to give us anything.  I’d call them slackers, but they probably have to get used to their surroundings first–or they might not be old enough to lay eggs yet.

Lily is a lot more friendly than Petunia.  Apparently it’s a trait of her breed.  She has kind of an irridescent sheen to her feathers, which is pretty.

Petunia is more timid, but I like that she’s a red head. :)

That’s all, folks!