Category: aminals.

The fox is still out there. The chickens have been cooped up in their house for three days now, and they are getting a little fidgety. This weekend, the temps will hit the 90s again, and then Cluckheim Keep will be too warm during the day. So we had to commission a quick emergency project—a fox-proof 120 square-foot outdoor addition to Cluckheim Keep. Thankfully, our handyman is really good with a table saw.

(That bottom right shot shows the residents supervising the labor force.)

It’s incomplete, but it will be finished at some point tomorrow. The mesh that encloses the run is 19-gauge galvanized hardware cloth, skirted two feet out from the run and staked down to prevent digging. The corner posts are 4x4s, and the roof is thick plywood that will get a tarpaper cover. It weighs about twice as much as the shed. I don’t see anything short of a bear getting in there, and that bear would have to put some serious shoulder into it to break it. One thing is for certain—the foxes won’t be able to pull off any snatch & run attacks anymore.

The chickens are happier free-ranging, obviously, but they’re not happy at all when they get chewed on by a fox, so this will have to be a compromise. With the extra bill for materials and labor, however, those eggs are going to cost us about ten bucks a piece. On the plus side–if we ever decide to give up on the chicken thing, that run will make  a great little garden house.

Another fox grabbed a chicken on the front lawn just a little while ago. I ran out, and he let go of the chicken and ran off. This time, I didn’t have a good shot, and he was running toward the public road anyway.

Two hours of patrolling and coaxing later, I have seven chickens in the chicken house, and one very traumatized chicken in the underbrush behind it. She lost a bunch of feathers and won’t let me come near her. I’ll have to see if she collects herself enough to com back to the coop. One of the araucanas is missing. That puts us at eight, seven if the injured araucana doesn’t gather herself enough to let me coop her up before nightfall.

Yeah, they’re wild animals, doing what predators do, but right now I am not feeling charitable toward foxes. I put a lot of work into those chickens.

I’ll have to go to Home Despot and buy some lumber and chicken wire for a large chicken run. It seems we have a few too many predators running around here to make free-ranging chickens a wise proposition.

After a few nighttime incidents with Elderly Dog, the Castle now sports a handful of handicapped access ramps for geriatric dachshunds:

There’s another contraption on the dog door that leads into the garage. It’s a nifty ramp that can be raised and lowered from the inside of the house. That makes four special handicapped access ramps in the house for the benefit of Elderly Dog, who can no longer hop over the ledges by herself.

When you have five dogs, we don’t really have a month that passes without some sort of dog-related expense. There are vaccination boosters, small and moderate injuries, regular check-ups, emergency visits…all I know is that if I had all the money we’ve spent on vet bills in a pile on my kitchen table, we could easily buy a new and not-too-shabby car and then use the rest of the cash to all go to Germany on vacation for a month. But you do what you have to do to keep your Animal-American Non-Human Companions safe and comfy.

The chickens have a new home, the mighty Cluckheim Keep.

There are some leveling and roof issues to be worked out this weekend, but Cluckheim Keep should be reasonably fortified against predators. They can’t tunnel into it, and those walls are pretty hard to chew through.

I’m a little surprised at how much I enjoy having chickens around. Our ten chicks have turned into ten pullets that are almost fully grown adult hens now. We still have all ten of them—no accidents, predators, or other attrition, although one of them had a run-in with a dachshund that luckily only ended in some missing feathers.

They’re entertaining to watch. We have a routine in place where they get let out of their coop first thing in the morning, and they’ll wander around the property in a flock all day and eat bugs. When it starts to get dark, they’ll all come back to the coop and head upstairs to roost for the night, and all I have to do is to lock them up. I never realized how smart chickens actually are, or that they’re social birds with a flock hierarchy. I’m also amused by the way they all come running when I set foot outside—I know they have learned to associate me with food, but it still makes me feel a bit like the Chicken Whisperer.

We bought a large garden shed, eight by ten feet, to use as a chicken house. Right now they’re still in their coop, but this weekend I’ll place the coop inside the new chicken house to get them used to the new digs. They’ll weather the winter better in the shed, and they’ll be safer from predators at night.

Of course, they’ll have to lay about three thousand eggs for us to save enough in grocery store egg purchases to make up for all the chicken swag we’ve bought to get the little cluckers situated.

Owning ten laying hens is definitely something that we couldn’t have done at the old place in suburban Knoxville. Ten acres out in the country leave one some room for agricultural experiments.

The ameraucanas have distinct plumage patterns, so they’re easy to tell apart. We’ve named all of them. The barred rocks all look the same, so they’re just about impossible to tell apart. Those are Clucky One through Clucky Five.