It Killed My Chicken Despite My Best Efforts

I was walking up and I said, well, there's a dead chicken.

Where was it?

Right here.

I guess it was right there. See all those feathers? So let's say it was right there. Yeah. Okay. All right, it was right there. Now the fence was right there, right?

Yeah. Okay, it was on the fence a little.

That makes me think it was an animal. I tried to get it to the corner and tried to pull it out. Maybe. Did this happen during the day?

Yes.

So when you came out and saw this chicken, it was still daylight?

Yes, but what I'm thinking, it was, it was dusky. Okay, so what I'm thinking, Papa, is the chicken just stayed out and a thing came and just got it.

One of our Icelandic chickens has gotten killed. It's gotten killed by a predator despite having 3 pretty much fail-proof, bomb-proof predator prevention tactics in place. It happened. One or more of those failed. We're going to be looking at that today.

Breast was taken apart and the head was gone.

Yeah. And we're also going to talk about what I'm going to do about it and bringing in mainly the fourth most powerful predator prevention tool. You guys up and at them, ready to go?

Yeah.

The animals too. Yeah, but don't— why aren't they spoiled?

Yeah, they are.

But you can't be spoiled with too much love, can you? No. Too much love and attention?

I don't think so.

Now when it snows like that, it's wet, thick snow on the fence, and there hasn't been a lot of light to charge the fence, so it's probably not hitting hard, and then it could be grounding out, so the The electric fence could have been useless, but I'm thinking though, the goose— how'd the goose miss it?

That's what I was saying, that maybe the chicken was locked up. I mean, didn't go in, because I'd have— I've— I have shut them up pretty early because they've been off.

So were all the chickens up?

Most of them.

They were already up.

Sure, the goose and the roosters are there.

And then this one was left out.

Probably.

Was it cold? Was the body cold or was the body still warm? Stiff.

I didn't feel the body.

Okay, so that means it had maybe been dead for a while. So it was maybe a day kill. Ah, that's a tough one. So our 3 fail-safes failed. Locking, locking them up at night— well, it wasn't night, so that was useless. Electric fence and on. Probably wasn't that hot. And the goose though, the goose though should have stepped up in that case, but just didn't for whatever reason. Something was really hungry and didn't care about the goose flapping and squawking.

Uh, yes, things are really hungry in the snow, I bet. Yeah, there's not much besides— there are rats.

Yeah, you tell them Mama wants you. She's coming real soon. You starting to get used to us? I like that, that's good. So she's getting more and more used to us every day, aren't you? Aren't you, honey? We're just handling you. You just said you want to come pet her. Please. So when I see a head off, when I see a head off and innards out, I think one of two things. If it was during the daytime, a hawk. If it was more towards evening, night, a raccoon. Jonah brought this to me after he doing his nighttime chores, so I guess theoretically could have been either one of those. I want to put the Icelandic chickens in here to clean up the weeds around these raspberries and blueberries, spread the mulch a bit. We'll get new mulch. Now is a great time to do it in the winter. These blueberries though are still pretty low. They're going to need some protection, I think. We might experiment with them, put them in here, just not very long. The raspberries though, because they have low-hanging— they have low greenery, that's gonna be trouble. I think a chicken would shred that to pieces. Of course, we could experiment. First, let's try it over here with the blueberries. They're going to be a little more hardy, less low-hanging greens. I think the stems are established enough and high enough chickens and their scratching aren't going to tear it up. And we'll probably just keep them in here a few days. Let's try it. All right, you ready? Let's get them. Let's get them all in. Let's get them all handled, used to us. Let's capture all their manure. Come on, come on, Aunt Flossie. You too, you too. It's dead. I guess you're okay. Wow, that was too easy. You got to be kidding me. Come on, come on. She did it by herself. Come on. I didn't even expect that, so I didn't have the— I didn't have the— I didn't have the— I didn't have the head gate open. Come on, come on. You're right, go in there. Go in there. Okay, Josiah, get me her— get me her chafe. That's from me. We're gonna start calming you. Good things happen when we come around. And then we'll start training her in this sanctuary. We're coming, we're coming. Uh, because she's gonna have a baby in February or March. You hold the gate. She's gonna walk up in there. Actually, she might go right in. Look at that! Oh, so close, so close, Phyllis. So good. Oh, be no time before she's going right in. Let's get intimate. Good job, good job. Pet her while she eats. Show her we're all right. One of the main reasons we had the chickens way out there on pastures, they were following cows to spread the cow manure around, get the fly larvae out of the cow manure, break the pest cycle. So the other reason we were having chickens on pasture is they were leaving their deposits. Manure gonna improve the soil. They would scratch, kind of massage the, the pasture. And they can get 20% of their diet off the land between the grass and the bugs. Look at my harvest! Excellent! Um, so we ended up moving them. Can you see them over there? We ended up moving them closer and putting them on another job Let's just have pumpkins. We never harvested them, they were actually volunteers. Let's cut them open for easy access for the chicken. This is actually a natural dewormer, so this is great. These pumpkin seeds, a pig would tear right into that, not a chicken. Let's open it for them. Let me try to give you some perspective here. Where the ICs are going are behind the bus.

Yeah, they will be, they will be easy moving because it's basically all the way to the road and then they hop one hill.

It's just downhill to the road. The ICs now are way up there. Can you bet you can barely see them right there? Safe and secure inside the Chickshaw Mini-Me. So let's get their fence up. Put everything inside the coop, fence on top of the coop, get them over there. We got them over here just fine. I'm thinking I put the, the Shaw as close to these blueberries as I can because they drop so much manure at night. I want to fertilize these berries. Okay, trying to let them out, see what they do. Yeah, grab the stuff out so I don't have to jump over everything. Ideally, I would hang this on something on the outside of the Shaw. New job. Look, first thing he goes for, the pumpkins. Get you some dewormer there, guys.

Oh, I know where a sledgehammer is. Oh, like a hand slip.

That won't go in by hand right there, huh? This is really shallow soil, which is another reason to run the chickens on it, build the soil up. We set up a time lapse on it. To see how they were going to do it, to make sure they didn't tear up the blueberries. That was yesterday. Today, let's go check on it. We've already let them out, but I'll take you over there and we'll see how they did with the blueberries after we get this yogurt started. So we've got the dehydrator. Did you put the starter in it? No, let's put starter. Can you help me? I do know this, you want your milk to be 100 degrees. It should be, it just is fresh out of her, comes out of her at 100 degrees. So you can either do it fresh, you can either start the yogurt fresh after you get it out of her, or heat up cold yogurt to 100 degrees. We have the dehydrator going at 100 degrees. Let's test it. We're at just 85, so should we let the dehydrator bring it up to 100, or should we put it in the— on the stove and heat it up? Um, we can just put it in the dehydrator and see if that works.

I don't know, I've never done it that way because it does cool when you pour it.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense because it's sitting in the bucket. From the cold air. It's probably 50 degrees outside. It's like 40 degrees. Oh, okay. Um, another thing that we have to do is cover it. 6 hours later, we'll have yogurt. Let's go see how the ices did. Oh man, it's almost dark. I meant to check this a lot earlier. Whoops, that's a little too close to that mulch. That's getting a little too dirty. Let's put that out here. But look, look, they've torn up so much of these weeds without tearing up the plants just yet. Maybe, just maybe, one more day in here, they ate all their pumpkin seeds. I think you guys have behaved yourself with the blueberries. Did you eat the leaves? I don't think so. Good job. Look, stirred it up, gotten into the weeds. I like it.