The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
August 21, 2007
Let’s start with the good news. We’re getting some rain! To say that it was getting critical here would be an understatement. It’s a bit easier handling the heat when the ground has had a good drink.
The bad news is that the preditors are out in full force this year. Our poor laying hens have been hit by fox during the day (he was seen!). We think we lost at least 10 hens to Mr. (Ms?) fox. To get away from the fox, we moved the hens across the road to a field the cows had been to a couple of days earlier. This turned out to be a bad move. One night we forgot to shut the chickens up in their moveable hen house because we were out late moving the new little laying hens into their moveable hen house. When Wayne came out in the morning to move the house to a new spot, he found 17 dead chickens! They were scattered all over the place, some as far as about 200 feet out. We think it may have been a dawn hit by a mother coyote with pups. It is the rare preditor that kills for fun, but in this case only a few of the chickens were actually eaten. The scene of the crime is usually just littered with feathers and a few body parts. The sheer number of untouched but dead chickens indicates some recreational activity. Needless to say, egg production is down.
The ugly news is that we are 99% sure that we have an owl attacking our pastured meat chickens and turkeys. To date, we have probably lost over 30 chickens and over 10 turkeys. We just love our pasturing system since it allows the birds so much freedom to eat greens, bugs and just run around. The electrified netting around the huts has done a fantastic job of protecting the chickens from the ground preditors. This is the first year we’ve lost so many to the airial ones. We’ve tried flashing red eyes, motion detector lights, the neighbors dog, etc., and nothing seems to deter it. We’ve cobbled together some poultry netting to keep the birds in the huts at night, but the system isn’t designed to be shut and opened, so it’s going to be a real pain.
I’m sharing this with you so that you understand some of the challenges of pasturing. It’s a wonderful way to raise animals, but it has it’s dark side too.
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