By Deborah Lyman
I had several ideas of what I wanted to do when
I retired from the military. One was to
have a hobby farm and raise chickens as well as Nigerian Dwarf Goats and
miniature cattle. Well I did get a cow,
Dolly, but she is a year old, small, but not miniature, jersey heifer. Spoiled rotten and I am not sure if she
thinks she is a cow, goat or human. The
only one she will let eat with her is Sinbad a withered little Nigerian
Dwarf/Pigmy cross. Everyone else best
leave Dollies food alone and relinquish theirs if she wants it.
I know this is a chicken story so on to
them. I started with several different
types of chickens. I would order
hatching eggs off eBay and enjoy watching them hatch and see the beautiful
colors of the different chicks. They
would start one color and I would guess almost daily what they would look like
when they grew up. I had so many
different color chickens. It may have
been because I love the babies so started incubating eggs and would keep eggs
going most of the time so each month I would have a batch.
I would gather white, brown, chocolate color,
dark olive green, light blue, light green and even pinkish eggs. They would give me anything from 6 to 12 eggs
a day. As the winter moved in I expected
to get none. But not my girls they would
still give 3 to 8 eggs a day most days.
I would suspect that the fact that I spoiled them and kept heat lamps on
for them might have helped.
One rooster I called pterodactyl (spelled funny
but pronounced Terodactyl). His feathers
just above his eyes would stand up (think his mom was the polish) and his
feathers were such odd bluish color kind of dark gray with a line running down
center from base to tip. He just looked
like a dinosaur something from a prehistoric movie. Then a few had the coloration of pheasants,
some white and some black. There were
even a few red hens thrown in. I love a
very colorful laying flock.
One incident I had with one chicken was a young
full size polish hen. It was feeding
time and she was very pushy. She ended
up with a broken leg from being stepped on by Dolly the “little” heifer. She took several months to heal
and she moved into a small coop that was inhabited by a bantam Cochin hen and a Mille
Fleur d'Uccle Bantam. She just walked
right in (or hop/walked) to the pen while I was feeding one night and refused
to leave. The three were great together.
Little Ms. Cochin and Mr. D’Uccle were mates. I did not know that they would bond as
closely as they did. It was the
strangest thing ever. The two would never leave each others side more than a
yard or two. If in different pens they
would get as close as possible and just sit there until put back together. Little Ms. Cochin would sit and raise anything and any
number of eggs that she could cover when she was as flat as she could make
herself. I never saw a small hen make
herself so flat. Lol Mr. d’Uccle was rescued as a very young bird. He was a little crippled thing when he came
to me. Ms. Cochin took him in as her mate almost
immediately. The D’Uccle could not roost
because he had crippled feet but he would be right there under the roost. He loved it when Ms. Cochin would sit on eggs he would snuggle
next to her and help incubate them. Once
the bittys hatched he would even let the little ones use him as a fill in
mother when they wanted. He would be
sitting in the pen and suddenly a chick would pop its head out of his back from
under his wing. It was a shock the first
time but soon became a common occurrence.
I started getting the Sablepoot/Booted Bantams
because I thought I could start raising pure breed chickens. I kept them separate from the others and it
probably was good since the roosters did not like sharing their barn yard. There would be several “rooster talks”
through the chicken wire almost daily. I
soon started incubating the Sablepoot eggs too and at first I forgot to mark
them so the hatching time was always surprising. Of course not all of the little ones will be
the color that they are when they grow up so the guessing was on again.
The pure breed Booted Bantams could not be found
in the local area so I would have them shipped.
It took over a year but I had finally acquired a pair of black, pair of
blue, trio of porcelain, two trios of mille fleur, and a quad of white and trio
of Golden Neck Booted Bantams late in the fall.
I was even contacted by a gentleman in Puerto Rico
that wanted to buy my entire last hatch of Sablepoots and have them shipped to
him. I was very excited with the turn of
events.
The year before in the spring I was all set to
take a hen and rooster to the fair for the chicken show. So I contacted the state Vet and talked to
them about getting certified NPIP. The
lady I talked to basically told me that there was not any reason to worry about
it because if I took them to a show they would be checked there. Well that sounded funny but ok I don’t know everything
so I was all ready to go to the show.
NO, that was not meant to be. The
chickens had other ideas. The rooster
somehow ripped off his toe nail (yep blood everywhere) and the hen started
molting (feathers everywhere). All in
one night so I figured they had no interest in going to the fair. LOL Well
summer and fall came and went as I kept incubating and getting really cool
looking chicks from all the mixes.
I decided to get a few of the large hens to sell
in the spring once they started to lay eggs.
So I filled the incubator some more to build up the girls so they would
lay about the time the price for hens would be good. I had two batches of chicks hatch and I
actually had one turn out Silky. I had
not had Silky hens and roosters since I first started and then decided to find
them a home so the winter would not kill them with the cold. I was so excited.
The group of booted bantams had a buyer and the
two batches of full size bittys would be laying in the spring so would go for a
good price. My hobby farm would be doing
better. The chickens might even pay for
their chicken feed. It was really
looking like my farm would get off its feet.
Then the other foot came crashing down……. I had
several chickens come down with colds and figured it was the changing
weather. Shoot most of us get colds
right? Well soon I had a few that had
infected sinus and they would require all but minor surgery to clean the large
swollen pockets on the side of their face out on almost a daily basis. Some took a few days, some never recovered
and then others took several months to either heal or pass away. It was getting so sad. The last to go this way was a little hen that
fought for months and was finally looking like she was kicking the
infection. She just keeled over one
night and I found her the next morning.
I started to think about everything that had
been happening in the last several months and realized my hatch rate had gone
from 80-90% down to less than 25%, and when I lost two roosters on the same
night (one was Mr. D’Uccle the mate to the little Ms. Cochin and the other one
was the only Golden Neck Booted bantam rooster). I took the two to the vet and
asked for him to tell me what the heck it was.
He sent the two roosters to be necropsies at the university.
In two
days my Vet told me that some of the tests came back and the roosters had coccidiosis and I was a little upset but it is something that can be
managed. I started the coccidiosis treatments right away.
While walking around a store with my mom, cousin
and aunt my cell phone rings. I got the
news-----the worse possible news---- they had Mycoplasma Gallisepticum AND
Mycoplasma Synovia. I did not know at
the time what those were but I sure do now.
My hope that this illness was going to be a fixable illness died when
my local vet said I needed to talk to the government vet. Which I did right away while the rest of the
family continued to shop.
I don’t remember much of the first conversation
I had with the State/Federal Vet, but what I do remember was that he used the word eradicate
and I did not hear much after that. The
next discussions we had were a lot more coherent and productive. We talked about any options of keeping any of
the birds alive. I had two batches of
babies that had not seen or been in contact with the other chickens. My little Silky, and all the other babies - the
youngest were only a month old. When I
did the research on the diseases I was devastated when I saw the words
“horizontally transmitted through eggs” and the only guaranteed method of
eradication of the disease was the destruction of the flock. I corresponded several times as well as
talked on the phone but to no avail.
There was no way to save any of the birds. So the date was set for the people to come
out and destroy my babies.
Taking care of them each day knowing what was
going to happen was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. I was almost in tears most of the time. The night before THE day I had to lock the
animals in the shed/barn after dark so that the chickens would not be out. The
chickens were not happy when they woke to find they were not able to free
range. When I went to let the goats and
cow out the chickens tried to rush the door.
It reminded me of something out of a very bad horror movie involving
flesh eating chickens or something. At the appointed time they arrived. I had already told the government vet I would
not be able to stay. He said he
understood. The group of people that
showed up with the Vet were nice people and I got the impression they
understood I was having a hard time with the situation. They asked a few questions and had me sign
some papers, and then I left. My
neighbor, Dan, stayed in case they needed anything. Dan later told me the people were not cruel
at all to the birds. They carried the
birds like I would and not by their legs.
He said he thought they really seemed to care about the birds and tried
to cause as little trauma to the babies as possible. Not that a situation with strangers dressed
in white suits catching them could be totally without stress.
When I came home the first thing I remember was
the lack of chicken sounds. What I
remember about my return is that was the day the chickens stopped singing.
The moral of this very long sad story is to never
take anything for granted. Get the flock
tested, when in doubt check it out and NEVER buy birds or eggs from a
non-certified flock. Ideally keep a
closed flock.
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The above experience is from Keeping Chickens Newsletter subscriber Deborah
Lyman "The last month has caused me a
lot of heartache and in a lot of ways I could have stopped it but........ Like
everyone else I felt the devastating things only happened to the other
guy. By sharing this experience I hope to stop others from suffering the heartache I have had
the last few weeks."
