News from the yard

What a busy spring it was for our family. But the chickens didn’t seem to notice.
While we were madly careening through the last months of school, hammering on grades with tutors, juggling football (yes, the new year-round sport), workouts, personal trainers, knee surgery, driver’s education and flights to San Francisco every week for work, the chickens didn’t care. They were just busy being chickens.

While my blog responsibilities piled up, I felt too guilty to post my thoughts because my clients follow and there was ALWAYS something I owed someone. During this crazy time I thought about how stressed we were inside the house and how stress-free they were out in the yard. The spring was cool and nice, and everyone was getting along. Cori started laying pretty little green eggs right on schedule and somehow that makes her all grown up in the other hens’ opinion.

There were some days where we had maximum production; five eggs a day! School finally ended at the same day asmy big San Francisco project, and in one day we went from overdrive to summer vacation. My sister Debbie stopped by one afternoon and found me in the back yard with the chickens. While we were talking, I noticed one of the Lizard Twins was breathing heavy and had fluid build-up in her neck. It’s possible she got something stuck in her crop. I researched possible issues but we didn’t find anything that described her symptoms. Two days later, she died.

I felt terrible that I didn’t know what to do for her. I visited with Dottie at Western Ranchman and she sold me a book with great information, but our best resource to date has been blogs where people share their common sense.

Beginning with this post, I’ll be adding our tips and advice in a section called Hensense. Hopefully something I pass on will help someone else. We were sad to lose one of our big, beefy chickens. The Reds had gotten so big we changed their name to “47 Heavy”, which is the term the airline pilots of the jumbo jets like FedEx and China Air use when speaking to the tower, so they’ll have extra room when taking off. Our remaining 47 Heavy is, without a doubt, in charge in the yard, but there is no way she’ll ever get off the ground.

Hensense: I now know to add a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar to water or use a dropper of olive oil with a neck massage helps a chicken who may have something caught in the crop.