Chicken Drama

I have to tell ya, I never thought I would have a blog post titled - "Chicken Drama" but here we are....no really, here I am holding a chicken and a baby. Ha - what a sight :)

OK, on to the drama....

In mid July around 6:40am each morning we started hearing a loud crow coming from our backyard. Not an ideal sound to hear when you live in a neighborhood in the city, not a farm and you are under the impression that you had 3 female chickens.

Now let me tell you, figuring out whether you have a male or female chick is kind of a crap shoot to begin with. There are no obvious, um... "parts"... if you will, to confirm the sex of the baby chicken. What there is, is a lot of voo-doo-like tricks that are done to guess. In our case the guy held each chick in his hand and dangled a piece of copper wire on a string over the chick to determine the sex. Umm...yeah....maybe we should be thankful we don't have a backyard full of roosters.

The crowing culprit - Lou our Barred Rock chicken. In this post I described Lou as the undeniable leader of the group. When the crowing first started we dug deep into Google to find out if it was possible to have a crowing hen. Turns out, it is. From what we read, in small back yard flocks with only hens, it is not uncommon for one of the hens to take on the role of alpha and crow. We hoped this was the case, but even if it was we couldn't have a crowing hen, alpha or not. So, we decided to do what any sane-minded person with 3 chickens, one of which crowed and two children would do - we got another chicken. Actually we got 2 more.

Meet Dolly

& Pearl

Our thought - if we brought in a new chicken that was a bit older then it would be the alpha and Lou would stop crowing. So, we got Dolly - a Lavender Americana. Dolly is a year old and was already producing eggs when we got her. Because Lou, Dot and Pip had been together since day one we didn't want to introduce Dolly to the group alone so we got Pearl at the same time. She is a Silkie and a few weeks younger than the original 3. 

We quickly learned that a pecking order is real. The new chickens did not receive a warm welcome from the group. Maybe I'm naive, but in my mind, the girls would invite them in, show them the nesting boxes, Lou would stop crowing and the 5 of them would live happily ever after, producing an array of colored eggs for us. WRONG. The OG chickens were not happy to meet the new chickens and were down right mean to them. Especially Lou. Dolly, our hopeful alpha was clearly intimidated by Lou and quickly owned her lowly position on the pecking order.  So now we had chicken fights AND a crowing chicken. Sadly, we were forced to make the hard decision to send Lou to live on a farm in Tifton, GA. It was a bummer to lose her, but the flock as a whole as been better since. Now, a few months later all 4 chickens are friends, no one crows AND Dolly started laying eggs!

It took her some time to get acclimated, but once she did we started getting these pretty blue eggs just about every other day.

Once we started getting eggs we took right to Amazon/Etsy and got ourselves all set up with half dozen boxes. Once the other girls start laying too, we may go with the full dozen size containers, but for now, how legit do we look?

Life with our backyard flock is pretty sweet right now. It's fun to check the nesting boxes each day for an egg and the excitement in finding one never gets old! We look forward to the multi-colored eggs in our future, but for now,  we are just happy everyone is getting along and no one is crowing.

All photos are my own.