The Ill Fated Chicken Concern

I've wanted chickens for some time now.   My good friend Metanoia in Adelaide bought chickens over a year and a half ago (she used to write about them on one of her blogs - Backyard Hens) and hearing about her chickens made me really yearn for my own.

Perhaps I was also a little inspired by watching TV shows such as The Edible Garden by Alys Fowler and River Cottage with Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall.   Hugh particularly puts a lot of emphasis on supporting heritage breeds of chickens and I thought this was a very worthy thing. 

So, inspired and ready to get chickens I bought a chicken coop (it was on sale but still a pricey purchase at around $500).   Rhys and I erected the coop one afternoon.  It was huge!  It was dubbed the Chicken Mansion due to it's size.  I'm not particularly happy with the limited area of the run itself and would like to find some way of extending it but the coop itself was very grand and included a laying box with a lid I could lift for easy access (at the back of the coop).

Chicken Mansion - under new management and ready for residents.

I then decided it was high time to get some chickens to fill my coop.   I was determined to get interesting, heritage breed chickens.   Somewhere along my internet travels I had discovered a heritage breed of chickens called Araucanas.   I was faschinated.  Apparently, the lavender coloured hens lay eggs with a light blue shell.   I was SOLD!  I wanted needed Aracaunas.

The problem was that the Brisbane floods had washed out one of the main rare chicken breeders in the area.  Aracaunas became rarer than hen's teeth.  Ok... maybe not that rare, but close.  All the reputable companies I had previously been scoping out were unable to source any. So in desperation I turned to an online chicken sale forum.  Two Aracauna pullets - $40 each, one lavender, the other lavender and russet.   It was a big and exciting day for me when I drove out to pick up my chickens from a free-lance chicken lady.

This is where everything really started to go wrong- mostly because of my lack of experience in buying chicken stock and lack of research about what to look for.

She showed me the two Aracaunas she had put aside for me.  This is my thought processing that occurred upon seeing both chickens:

Lavender: Oh - poor little thing looks so scruffy and unwell.  She must be so hen-pecked by the others.  Poor little thing.  What a weird bald spot. 

Loretta:  Her nostrils are wet and she's much bigger than I expected.  What is this niggling feeling I have in the back of my brain?  Oh well.

So when asked if I was happy with them I quietly had a reservation or two.  They didn't look like perfect chickens to me.... but what did I know about chickens?  So I said yes, I was happy to take them.  I paid and I took them home to reside in Chicken Mansion. 

Loretta peering out in the morning.  Food?

As I proudly watched my chickens I looked at Loretta more closely and the niggling in my brain got worse.  She looked kind of non-hennish.  Like, she wasn't a plump, little round thing and she had long feathers around her neck.  But surely not!  The lady had said she was selling me girls.

Over the next few weeks I started to trust my niggling more and more.  I did some research on how to identify roosters.   She had some of the features roosters have but not all.   She was brave and bold,  she was bigger than other hens supposedly her age.  She would sometimes jump-kick at the door with her long legs when she wanted it open.  Her comb was rather pinkish but then, as a first-time chicken owner I wasn't sure how pink it should be before I cried "rooster".   She also had pointed saddle feathers, her tail started looking more and more sickle like and she had hackle feathers - those long feathers at her neck. 

Loretta or Lawrence?  It became more and more obvious.

The list went on but I was in denial.   I decided I couldn't possibly be sure until she either laid an egg or crowed. 

Meanwhile,  Lavender never looked any healthier.   Her bald spot remained - yet I never saw her being pecked at by Loretta.  She didn't grow much at all and when she was alarmed enough to skwark, she let out a weird kind of hooting call rather than a typical chicken skwark.   I was concerned that she might have some disease so further internet research went on.  I decided I should check the two of the birds for mites.   It was the first time I'd done a full check-over the two birds.   I didn't see any evidence of mites but what I did find was a disgusting, big, veined lump on her chest, which I thought might be a tumour.

Lavender - scraggly and little.  The runt of chickens.

Later, after the two chickens had gone to the great chicken coop in the sky,  I was reading a handguide to chicken keeping and learned that the lump was much more likely a swollen crop, something that was very treatable.

So I was decidedly unsatisfied with my two fowls.   The kittens didn't think much of them either, glaring at them from the back window.  The only person in the household who found delight in the chickens was Rhys.

So he was non too happy the day that Loretta crowed in the morning and I decreed she, nay - both of them - had to go that day.   Off she he and Lavender went,  to a friend's house where they were subsequently eaten for dinner.   I was fine with this.   To me, they were chickens I had bought to do a job, not to love as pets.   I didn't get any eggs from either chook but if they could do good elsewhere by providing a meal then so be it.    Rhys on the other hand was a little sullen about the whole thing and has been bugging me since with, "So when are you getting new chickens?"

Now that the sour memory of my first chicken experience has faded I think it's time to clean up and clean out the Chicken Mansion and get new chickens - this time I'm going for utility chickens -from a company that exchanges them if they turn out to be roosters.