About those Chickens.....~ Mariella

Remember how excited we were about our new little chicks? 

Well….things don’t always go as planned on the ranch, especially when dogs are concerned. A week after we got Star and Chomp, I came home after work and walked down to the house to drop my basket and goodies and then go up to bring the little chicks in. My son sweetly offered to take my basket down for me so I went straight to the chickens.

http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2013/03/we-have-chickens-mariella.html

I got there just in time to find a very self-satisfied Alsatian with a feathery submissive looking parcel in his mouth sauntering off to find a pleasant spot to conclude his snack! I’m sure they heard my screaming in Plettenberg Bay! He dropped the chick and it bolted, suddenly revived, into the fynbos.

I was so grateful that I’d trained them to come to me using the same call every time I fed them because even after having them for so little time, Star came running out at me from bushes like a trooper when I called. With no feathers on the lawn to mark her demise, we've deduced that Chomp, the stronger of the two, made a run for it and is lost to the great wilderness forever. The kids were a mess and I was troubled, as we were due to leave for a Crystal show in a week and what oh what to do with the surviving chicken?

After much deliberation we organized to take him back to his old farm to hang out with other chicks until our return and that he would live in our house for the rest of the week with daily outings to his earthy box. 

‘In our house’ soon became ‘In our laps’ which led to ‘On my shoulder’ and so the week went on, me feeling like a farm yard pirate and Star slowly healing from a dropped wing. Suffice to say we got attached! It was a dog show when we dropped Star off before we left, and even more so when we were told that Star is a Rooster! 

Anyone who has roosters will tell you that they do not, contrary to popular belief, cock-a-doodle-doo before sun up. They do it whenever it suits them, on the hour twenty fours a day to be more precise, which is the reason we didn’t want one, the chicken hok being so close to the Grandparents house and all.

So, with a very heavy heart, we bade Star goodbye and he has grown to be the biggest rooster in the hen house!

Moving along, we went ahead with reinforcing the fig cage, a seven meter cage which stops birds from ransacking the very fruitful fig trees. We sank steel mesh we bought secondhand from Birds of Eden thirty cm into the ground (see what the mongeese say about that!) and built them a cute little chicken house with a ladder and everything! We will be painting it this weekend, will update images once it's done.

We decided on koekoeks, which are a breed developed in South African. 

The Research Council of South Africa has the following to say about them:

http://www.arc.agric.za/home.asp?pid=2706

We have six, and got them at six weeks old instead of two. They are so fascinating to watch, incessantly peck-pecking as they do, but they don’t sit on my shoulder or fall asleep on Rocket, the non-hunting dog. They are not the Star in my night sky but they are strong, safe chickens and I can’t wait to hunt for our first eggs!