My littles have gotten so big! They are almost 4 months old. I started out with 19 and over the past couple months the roosters have come out and shown their true colors. So far we have had 5 roosters…which is not going to work out. I really do not like roosters…they cost money, pick on the girls and attack my kids (and give nothing in return…ha!)! So, I had my husband humanely put down 4 of them and we kept one…our big white frizzy rooster who was beautiful and still nice to us 🙂 Frizzy the rooster had just started learning his full crow, I actually kinda liked him…but then came August 18th.
I went to let the littles out Thursday morning around 7:30am like I usually do. I opened the door and there were 3 huge piles of poop and no little chicks to greet me. I was scared to peek inside the little door because I didn’t know what was in there and what I would find. After I let out a sad scream…and nobody was around to help me…I pulled on my big girl panties and went into the coop. It was awful. For the past 3 years I’ve never had an attack on my chickens…I’ve heard about them, and read about them, but I thought I was pretty good at fortifying the coops so that it wouldn’t happen to me. I was so wrong and my chicks had to pay for it.
What I found was a hole dug under the coop…and some POS (skunk or racoon) killed Frizzy the rooster first…then moved on to my scared hens. He killed 2 others and wounded 2. The 2 that were wounded I had to pull out of the coop and shoot them so they wouldn’t suffer anymore. The coop had feathers and blood everywhere and the hens that were OK were scared to death. They were at the top of the rafters, hiding in between the pallet slots. It was a sad day.
I cleaned up the mess and left so that the other littles would hopefully come out and eventually they did.
I didn’t know what to do at first. I knew that the killer would be back that night looking for more…so I had a plan to dig a trench all the way around the coop and put small fencing a foot down so that they couldn’t dig into the coop…but I also know that this may not work long term. So I thought that it was time to love them to the big hen coop…it is solid. It has a floor and nothing can ever dig or claw its way into that coop. So I decided to combine them. I have 6 older hens and now 9 little hens. It was quite the challenge to catch all the littles and put them in the big coop, but we finally managed and it will be the perfect solution to hopefully not have anymore attacks on my girls!
