Revenge of the Chicken

We've had a rough couple of months here at Walnut Grove. A few weeks ago, Ruby stepped on a nail, the treatment for which required 10 days of the following: a daily hoof soak and wrap; a shot of penicillin in the neck, twice a day; a dose of antibiotic powder in her food; and a dose of Bute (pain med paste) twice a day. I was expecting her to give me a hard time (and rightly so--who wants to have a needle stuck in her neck or a tube of paste jammed down her throat!), but surprisingly, she cooperated nicely. She definitely has her mother's disposition. We're still giving her the Bute, and Dr. Clark (aka "Saint Vet") is going to X-ray her foot soon. Hopefully, she will have a full recovery. In addition to Ruby's injury, we've had some chicken tragedies of late. Not long after Ruby stepped on the nail, my sweet little pet hen, Lola, died. She was born with a cross-beak and could barely eat. I hand-fed her for several weeks, but I knew she wasn't going to live very long. The night after she died, though, a raccoon got into the chicken coop and slaughtered about 6 hens--something I wasn't quite so prepared for. I woke up to find several mutilated and decapitated bodies strewn about the farm. Marge, my best mother hen (several pictures of her are on this blog), was lying headless in a nest box. And poor Sunny, one of my Aracaunas, wasn't even dead yet. She was wondering around with her skin hanging off, while the survivor chickens pecked at her. Not a pretty sight. The next night, the coon hit the banty coop (it pulled off the boards I had NAILED over the entryway). The mess was unbelievable (apparently, this coon was a picky eater). At that point, I was finished respecting the ways of the food chain; we set a trap and caught and killed the culprit. No more chicken dinners for that ring-tale!

Here are pictures of some of the chickens from Marge's clutch this year and the bantys that my uncle gave me to replace the ones I lost to the coon--they are settling nicely into the role of garbage disposals, devouring kitchen scraps and scouring manure piles for bug larvae. Ecologists might call such a re-generation of the species "The Circle of Life"; I call it "Revenge of the Chicken"!