Who’s Going Chicken Hunting? WE’S GOING CHICKEN HUNTING!

Although most people find the goats much more interesting, the Chicken, not the egg or the goat, really came first. When we first discovered that we would be moving to the country, I went ahead and bought 20 chickens over the Internet. We were living in a 3-bedroom house in a subdivision on James Island, SC. People thought we were crazy to buy any livestock before even closing on the house, but I knew that sooner would be better than later in this case. They needed to live in a box inside for the first 6 weeks of their lives anyway, so why not get started ASAP? I ordered 14 Silver Laced Wyandotte hens, 5 Ameraucana hens, and 1 Ameraucana rooster. The Wyandottes lay brown eggs and the Ameraucana lay blue and green eggs, and all of them are due to start laying sometime around November or December. I thought with an Ameraucana rooster, heaven only knows what kind of eggs their future generations would lay! The poultry company shipped 2 extra Ameraucana hens, I suppose just in case some did not survive transport. This is how I ended up with 22 chickens.


I swear there’s nothing cuter than a baby chicken. Their fuzzy little butts are my favorite part.

You can see the blue paint that they marked my rooster with. He was a handsome fella even then. The black ones are Wyandottes, and the brown and yellow are the Ameraucana chicks.

Once they started to free range on our new property, we quickly lost one of the brown Ameraucana hens to a hawk. I was heartbroken and did not let them out of their coop for a week. Speaking of which, here’s a picture of the coop.It’s an old shed that was already here. I wrapped the back part of the car port in chickenwire for their run, hammered a hole in the wall for a little door for them, and voila! As they got bigger I discovered they needed a bigger run for rainy days when I lock them in, cause they got CRANKY! They were all fighting and picking on each other because they were too crowded in the small run. So, I made Dustin move the last of our stuff still unpacked from under the carport, and gave them the other side as well.

This is me hands-on-mothering a sick chicken. She had sour crop from eating too much grass her first time outside, and I had to force-feed her water with olive oil and sand in it. Fun fun. She was so desperate for company that she took a shining to me. When I’d go in to check on her, she’d fly out of the tub and run over onto my bare foot and try to hide in the bottom of my pant leg. Dustin finally told me to go lay on the couch and cuddle with her for a while. I brought snacks in hopes she’d eat something. I know it looks stupid, but it worked!

Here they are during Chicken Puberty. They were very awkward looking there for a while, especially the black Wyandotte’s.A few weeks later we had a devastating event here at the farm. Let me give you some back-story first. A couple months before we had any inkling that we may be moving, let alone to the country, we had the grand idea to get Ayden a puppy. We got him a rather expensive Beagle puppy named Marek. He grew up to be about the most annoying animal I’ve ever had to be around, between his incessant BARKING AND HOWLING, lack of housebreaking ability, biting, and did I mention the barking? It’s honestly the worst sound I’ve ever heard. It would make Ayden cry for heaven’s sake. We kept telling ourselves things would be better once we moved to the country because he would have a huge yard to roam in. Even then, though, he still managed to go to the bathroom on our front porch, bark incessantly, and was so underfoot that simply walking outside became a dangerous act. And to top it all off, Ayden hated him. He refused to even set foot outside if Marek was around.

Here’s the devil dog himself.

To make a long story short, we put up with his antics until he broke into the chicken coop and got a hold of one of my chickens and was in the process of plucking her when we rescued her. At this point I had been begging Dustin to let me get rid of him, but he still held out hope that things would get better. But when he attacked one of my innocent chickens who, mind you, never once peed on my carpet, bit anyone, or barked so much it had all of us at each other's throats, even Dustin had had enough. He told me I could find him another home. Our neighbor said he would like him, so I watched that $250 dog walk out the gate for free and had never felt happier. A few weeks of blessed peace and silence went by, when we returned home one raining evening to find Marek on the back porch. Strange. Especially considering our fence was still closed and there were no holes dug under it anywhere. Dustin took him back to the neighbor’s house and returned to lock the chickens, which had started free ranging in the yard after Marek’s departure, in the coop for the night. There were only 4 in the coop. It was about 10:30 pm at this point, and the next few hours consisted of Dustin and I crawling around in the bushes with flashlights as it poured down rain, looking for the missing chickens. What we found was not pretty. We found a few under the front bushes, soaking wet (which can kill a young chicken easily), bloody, and missing half their feathers. I was horribly upset at this point, but retained my composure until I found one with a broken leg that fell over on her side when I put her in the warm and dry coop. At this point I lost it. Next I found a pair of orange chicken legs sticking up from a mound of dirt under the back porch. And another half buried chicken 10 feet away. It was like a horror movie, shining around in the dark and finding random body parts of these poor animals that you have taken care of for weeks. I went to bed that night with my blood racing through my veins, fantasizing in detail about what I would be doing to That Dog if we had only not taken him back home. I remember a knife was involved in most of these fantasies. I have always considered myself an animal lover, but an army could not have stopped me from taking that dog’s life that night. The final verdict after all was said and done was 3 dead chickens scattered about the yard, one permanently missing, and multiple bloodied and plucked, one with a broken leg, and one that died 2 days later from her injuries. At this point I am down to 17 chickens out of the original 22. The next morning I took Ayden to school, called the Swap Shop on the local radio station, and listed a 6-month-old Beagle for $100. I had a man call and offer me $50, which I immediately accepted. I walked over to my neighbor’s house and told his father I am repossessing the dog and that they owe me for my dead chickens. I used that $50 to expand the chicken coop for my poor traumatized and mauled chickens. The Wyandotte chicken with the broken leg spent 3 weeks in my bathtub as I nursed her back to health, and is now back out with her flock. I can hardly tell which one she is until she runs because she has a bit of a bounce to her step, but she’s still steadily improving.

Our cat, Ambrose, has befriended the chickens. At our old house in Charleston he was a friend to all the neighborhood cats, and he has really missed them since we moved out here. I think he’s a little desperate, personally.

Seriously. He’s always with them. Where there are chickens there is Ambrose. He’s recently taken to spooking them. He likes to jump out and startle one. She’ll squawk and jump back then look at him like, “Oh. It’s you. What?” The white chicken on the far right is my Ameraucana rooster, quite attractive if I do say so myself. The second black chicken with the red wattles on his face is another rooster, who was supposed to be a hen. They must have sexed him wrong at the hatchery. Oh, well. Everybody seems to be getting a long well so far. Makes my breeding plan more interesting, as now future generations can be either pure Wyandotte, pure Ameraucana, or a cross between the two. It’ll be like a miniature version of America here at In Your Dreams Farm.