The Case of The Terrified Chooks - Part I

In Australia they call live chickens chooks. Once it hits the killing cone, however, it becomes chicken. For whatever reason, I enjoy referring to the chickens as chooks.

Thus, The Case of the Terrified Chooks, which all started one night when I failed to complete a critical chore on the farm. Closing the chicken coop door. You see, the chicken-brained chooks aren’t exactly quiet in their coop. Nor are they very cleanly. Both of which completely give them away to predators. Until now we haven’t had an issue with predators and the coop. I’ve forgotten to close the door on a few occasions (sorry chooks!), but luckily nothing happened.

Elvis and his lady, Sassafras. Winona dust bathing under the swing. She's the queen

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Of Guineas and Guard Dogs

Almost two months ago I posted about the guinea egg mobile that we built and rolled out into the pastures. The purpose of the guinea egg mobile is for pest control, but eventually they'll also lay some might fine eggs. At the same time the egg mobile provides shade and shelter for the goats. The guineas are great foragers, so we feed them a nominal amount of feed in order to keep them coming back to the egg mobile, but other than that they’re on their own.


Guinea keets on their first day out
At first the guinea keets were still quite small (only 6 weeks old), so they remained in the coop, getting accustomed to home for another 3-4 weeks. We laid fresh hay on the floor of the coop and after about a week the keets would eat it and scratch it through the cracks. We would replace with new hay and the process repeats. It worked well, but we were really looking forward to having them out free-ranging.

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