The Rhode Island Red that injured her leg had to be put down after several weeks of non-healing. We tried, but could not get her to heal.
After Rhody got hurt, we dealt with a Polar Vortex for a few days before Christmas. Thankfully, we did not lose our power to our house, but the cold was extremely difficult on the birds. The freezing water pail and pool for the ducks was not fun. The ducks and most of the chickens did fine with extra bedding in their coops. But, Tiny suffered hypothermia and died on the first subfreezing day. We had a brooder warmer inside the coop, but she didn't use it, and we didn't catch her situation in time to save her. Being so deformed, her metabolism never worked correctly, and this super cold temp became too much, unfortunately.
Shortly after Christmas, we had a major wind and rain storm that blew in from the south west with 85+mph gusts that would pick up the duck coop and fling it four or five feet away. The winds did not pick up the chicken coop/mansion, but did push it sideways a foot or two, from time to time. No birds injured of the chickens or the ducks, thankfully. The duck coop did land on the electric fencing, and broke a few of the cheap fence posts that we were able to quickly replace. The winds broke a lot of branches from our trees, but luckily, nothing major was damaged. We picked up 240# of sand bags from the local gravel company to weight down the coop. Lots of trees and huge branches went down.
During one of the large gusts, one of our ducks, Toast, caught air just right to the point of going up about 15 feet into the air, and landing on the outside of the pen. Normally, when she flies, she's only up about a foot or two off the ground. So this was a super surprise for her "abilities." We had to go out in the storm and get her back inside the pen so that the other ducks didn't get hurt trying to get to her. For days after that, she would rapidly flap her wings and run all around the pen trying to "catch air." She just didn't have the same "conditions" to replicate that event. Ducks are so funny and entertaining.
About eight hours into the storm, we lost power for period of time, after a transformer blew, nearby. We were thankful that the power came back on within 8 hours, only to discover that our house was receiving power surges. It blew out a few of our GFCI and breakers in the power panel, and one of the outlets started smoldering. So we called an electrician out to be advised that the power company had not "reconnected" our power supply correctly, and we were receiving way too much power. That we needed to keep the electricity turned off to the entire house until the power company could fix it at their end. The irony is that all our neighbors had power. And, well, we did too, BUT, too much! We had to wait two more days without power and were just super thankful that it was not freezing outside, too. We were able to keep the inside of the house semi-warm, about 55 to 65F.
Since we are on a well, we had a very limited water supply that we had saved from when the lights first started flickering at the start of the storm. We need electricity to pump water from the well to the house. Thankfully, before we lost power, we had filled two bath tubs with water, along with a five gallon crock pot. We also had some water left in our almost empty water tank out in our field, to take care of the animals and allow us to do basic chores. However, by the third day, we were getting ready to take a trip to a neighbor to get our spare water restocked.
When the power company crew came back out, they advised that they had not connected the wire to our house correctly, and yes, it was a potential disaster. They gave us a card to file a claim for the damages that the power situation created.
Rhody was on a downhill slide through all this. Shortly after the new year, we culled and processed her. We used her carcass to create chicken stock. So the holidays, in and of themselves, were less than joyous for all that we had to deal with.
The ducks and our only active laying hen at the time, Rhody, had stopped laying eggs when it got super cold. As of today, the ducks have not yet started laying eggs again. However, our other, non-active laying hen did start laying eggs again just before New Years. Then, last Sunday, one of our younger Marans pullets started laying eggs. She has, since, laid four cute little eggs. Plus, today, one of the Comets laid her first egg. So, I think we are back on track with egg production, even without the ducks laying. Whew!
Having the eggs again is really good because there is an egg shortage at many grocery stores due to Avian Influenza (AI) wiping out entire flocks of all types of poultry. We are trying to be super cautious to protect our flocks. There are a lot of reports of backyard flocks dying across the state. Since it takes five to six months to raise layers from chicks, this situation is going to be a slow and costly recovery for a lot of commercial and backyard egg raisers.
I'm hopeful that this will be a positive for us, ultimately, if I receive the 50 chicks that I ordered for delivery in mid-February. I'm hopeful because I will need to sell a lot of chicks/pullets by April of this year, or I'm going to have an overcrowding situation on my hands. Decided to get all the chicks at once rather than two smaller batches in the late winter and the early summer. This is going to be a test to see if one large batch will be more efficient of our time and cost of starting them. So, before winter is over, we will start brooding 50 day-old chicks in our garage. After those chicks are old enough to go outside, we will be starting our meat chicks around the time of Easter, in April.
