We started out with 16 baby chicks that arrived by mail in May of this year. We decided to give away 5 of them because we were concerned that our chicken coop would be too small for all of them once they were full grown.
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| Walter keeping watch over the ladies. |
Sadly one chicken mysteriously disappeared a few weeks ago. The other night we lost another four of our ladies. We have been letting them out to free range in our yard and they have been venturing further and further from the house. They always come home to roost right around dusk. On the night that we lost them it was late before we remembered to shut the door to the coop.
The night before the ladies went missing I had seen a skunk scamper under the deck. In fact we narrowly escaped an incident with Bella getting sprayed. I think it must have been that skunk that got them. I feel so badly that our carelessness caused our chickens to die. We set an alarm in the house so that we don't forget to close the door for the ladies as soon as it gets dark.
Hey guys, sorry to hear about the chickens. Did Rob or Nikki tell you about their ducks? They don't roost at night, and with no body of water for safety, they kept loosing one per night...I can't imagine how the last one felt on night 6 or whatever it was.
ReplyDeleteTim, I bet you could build one of these to make those overnight ski trips less worrying!
http://www.dinosaursandrobots.com/2009/04/automatic-chicken-door.html
I am so sorry about your chickens. I was going to tell you about the automatic chicken doors but seth beat me to it. We haven't decided if we are going to put a roof on our pen or get an automatic door. They have some kits on ebay too.
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