dino's got to go

 

 

well, our once very friendly and docile bantam americana rooster attacked claire twice yesterday. i didn't see the first attack just saw her running from dino and crying. i saw the second one, however, and gosh, it was just plain mean. he flew up to her face and started pecking and scratching at her. she suffered a small scratch on her chin and was traumatized. i chased dino down, yelling, "bad rooster! bad rooster!"

so my next project is to find out which silkies are roosters and find someone who will do the butchering.

i am going to keep our other americana rooster and our bantam brahma rooster and hope for the best. i hear fertile eggs are healthier, they do a good job protecting the hens, and i would love for some of the hens to raise their own chicks.

roosters?

so we may have up to 6 roosters in our flock. only one crows because apparently he is the dominant one and keeps the other ones quiet. dino, is a bantam americauna whom we adopted from a homeschooler living in a san francisco neighborhood where roosters are not welcome. heck, i'll take him, i thought! i had forgotten to special order a rooster. this isn't downtown boulder! we are on 5 acres and roosters are welcome here.

when we first took dino in, our chickens were staying at a chicken motel, our neighbor's old chicken coop. we had had several break ins to our coop so we needed to fortify it with hardware cloth. they had an extended stay of about 2 months. when we finally got them back home, i had a rude awakening the next morning. damn, dino is loud! and he is waking up my kids. oh no, i can't make it through the day with over tired kiddos! i was so ready to leave dino down by the creek early one evening. patrick with those big sad eyes stopped me. i took dino back to the neighbor's coop and left him there all by himself. he was there for 2 days while i worried about what to do with him. i am not ready to butcher a chicken yet, plus what would happened if his original caretaker e-mailed me to check in on him? then it happened. another crow coming from our coop one morning. we had two roosters! he had just been afraid to crow apparently because dino would not allow it. i brought dino back. most days the kids slept through the crowing but there were just enough mornings that they didn't. i bought a fan from ace hardware. i told the salesperson my dilemma. i needed a fan to drown out the crows of a small but very loud rooster so that my kids could sleep. she took down every fan from a very high shelf so that we could find the loudest. at first we didn't get the fan speed quite right. i thought i might lose my mind the first morning listening to that noise. i told matt to try the fan on medium speed the next morning. ah, bliss. we haven't heard dino's crows since and we all wake up when we are well rested. but the question still remains. just how many roosters do we have?