Dropstone Farms

It’s our third year with poultry, and the raccoons have finally found us.

We are down to one laying duck (from four) — they took one on Sunday, one on Monday, and one on Tuesday. So the hens and remaining survivor duck are all staying inside the coop until we can figure out another solution. It’s a bummer; I like seeing them free-ranging around the yard and I definitely like the tasty rich orange yolks they lay because of eating so much grass and weeds.
Also, while the hens slow down their laying in the winter, the ducks are champs and keep laying an egg a day each, pretty much all winter. So we’re looking for some more Khaki Campbell ducks on Craigslist and such. Let us know if you know of any that are available.

Then on Monday night, the dogs woke us up at about 1:30 and we ran out to see a couple big raccoons around the brooders that hold the turkeys (4 weeks old), batch 2 of our broilers (also 4 weeks old), and batch 3 of the broilers (like 5 days old).
We think there should have been 23 turkeys; there are 15 left. There should have been about 58 broilers from batch 2; there are 45 now (though to be fair, we couldn’t count them before and they escaped a lot when they were small, and we might’ve lost some before). The small broilers seem to have been undisturbed.

Raccoon carnage is particularly icky to clean up after, as they often don’t eat the whole bird or carry it away, and in fact if they can reach through the chicken wire and grab a bird, they’ll just gnaw on it through the wire and leave the rest of the body inside the brooder for you to find in the morning.

We have put up electric fence around the brooders and the greenhouse too, where the 30 turkey poults that arrived today are brooding.

Tuesday night we were woken up at about the same time, and the dogs barked a bit then quieted down and seemed confused. The brooders were untouched. I hopefully infer that the dogs were barking at the sound of raccoons learning about electric fence, and subsequently taking off in the other direction.

This affects our turkey availability, obviously, though I’m not quite sure yet how we’ll work it out. Due to some procrastination on our part combined with a really bad experience with Privett Hatchery, we are taking a gamble that the poults that arrived today will be big enough in time for Thanksgiving. We may have only smallish (8-10 pounds) turkeys. If they are really small, we may only sell the fifteen that are left from the first batch for Thanksgiving — they will be a month older — and do today’s 30 for Christmas. Or I guess we could do whoever’s big at Thanksgiving, and give the rest another month to keep growing.

In any case, I’m not sure yet how to take orders for turkeys. I know people will want to secure their turkeys early, so I hope we don’t have to wait too late; I’d be sad if folks waited for us and didn’t order from others, and then we couldn’t deliver and they had to use a storebought bird.

To that end, please put your name and email address if you want to be on the non-binding list of interested people: http://tinyurl.com/turkeyinterestlist. We’ll go down the list first-come first-served, and contact folks as we have birds, and if you have found another source, we’ll just move on to the next person.

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An inevitable day, especially with six dogs total across our lot and our two neighbors’, but a sad one all the same. This weekend the neighbor Lab pup learned she could jump the fence, and yesterday she also learned how to kill chickens. Garth was home getting ready to come meet me in Seattle to go see Star Trek, and when he got out of the shower he found our dogs, who were inside, all agitated, and looked outside to see the neighbor pup in the coop. The flock was scattered — he found poor Stripes’ body somewhere outside the pen, and Sick Chicken was lying up in the woods. Stripes had always been always a loner, the straggler and social outcast of the flock, so I wasn’t surprised about that, and Sick Chicken, though all better and happily reintegrated with the others, was still slower, and had a paler comb than she used to have. So I was sad, but not surprised to get Garth’s frantic phone call telling me it was these two that he had definitely found. We canceled movie plans and I hurried home as fast as is possible when one is dependent on a ferry schedule. Along the way I heard that all the others — Black Chicken, Other Black Chicken, Other Red Chicken (aka Miz Bitch), and Wilhemina — were definitely alive, as well as the two ducks and the four Wyandotte youngsters who live in the coop.

This flock was our first, and as such straddled a difficult line between pets and livestock, but leaning towards livestock. We are sad at the reduction of the flock, of course, but in this case we are also saddened by the loss of these two chickens in particular. Next time it won’t be so bad — this was our farm’s first loss of animal life — and even so, it didn’t mess me up as much as I expected (though Garth says he is “more tweaked than [he] thought [he] would be”).

So thanks, little chickens. We hope you only had one bad day in your lives. Despite your vocal protestations about how horrible it was to be left all day, or even until 7 o’clock in the morning, in your 8×14′ coop, we hope the former was true. We’ll miss you.

Stripes (with Necky in the background), originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Stripes (Drill chicken), originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Stripes perches on the grape arbor to do her impression of Drill Cat.

Sick chicken is still angry but is happier outside than not, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

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