Those Aggravating Roosters

Roosters are necessary if you want baby chickens. We don’t need any more chickens so I’m pretty sure we don’t need any roosters. I’m willing to keep one Dominique rooster just to produce babies if we ever need any more chickens, but I think I’m going to get some Dominique eggs from my dental hygienist and hatch them so we can add some new genes to our pool. We’ve had the same old rooster since the beginning so he’s the father of all our Dominique. They make decent meat birds and they’re decent layers. I also like the Brown Speckled Sussex and may keep that rooster for more of those chickens and Vince wants to raise more Anconas but other than that, we don’t need any roosters.  In my opinion, the way to get rid of roosters is . . do the deed and they end up in the freezer!  Vince’s idea is we keep separating them from the hens so we end up with a little community of roosters and our hens are living alone in peace. What’s the point? Are we going to just feed them and clean their coops til they die of old age? 

Our two little empty coop/cages have been turned into bachelor pads! 

A couple of years ago, the bantams had hatched babies (notice how that keeps happening!) and we wanted to get them out of the main coop because the babies were so small, they kept escaping through the fence so we bought this little coop at Tractor Supply. We now have a big lavendar marans in this coop.

Here are all the red hens from next door waiting and watching for the lavender marans to come out. This reminds me of when I was a kid . . maybe younger middle school days . . we had a guy who delivered our newspapers and he was so darned good looking. But, I suppose at that age, all high school boys were good looking! Anyway, the neighborhood girls would sit outside in the afternoons (we had afternoon paper delivery back then), trying to act like we were just hitting there . . no reason . . just sitting; but we were waiting to catch a glimpse of the delivery boy.  He was a whole lot cute than that crazy rooster!

OK . . back to today and real life . . yesterday two of the bantam roosters were being brutal to the hens. Since three of the hens are in the coop dealing with babies or hatching eggs, that left way too few hens outside to deal with the roosters and their desires. I asked Vince to please get rid of two of them . . the more aggressive ones. No, he couldn’t get rid of them but he would put them in the other smaller coop.

This means we have chickens in 7 coops/pens now so that means there are 14 water containers to clean and fill every day (one inside and one outside). No way that’s going to continue

I’ve posted ads on local chicken groups and craig’s list for roosters and my compassion for the life of a rooster does not outweigh my frustration with some of the people who respond to those ads so I see rooster and dumplings  or rooster gumbo in my future!

And the shovel in the picture . . you cannot believe how many snakes we’re seeing. There’s hardly a day that goes by that we don’t see one . . or more! I’ve put a shovel or a hoe by every coop and am still missing more of them than I’m getting. This is the first year we’ve seen so many .. including some kind of snake inside the shop and a rattlesnake on the back porch of the house!