We recently moved from surburbia to what we lovingly refer to as "our little farm." 2 flat, unrestricted acres...our dream! We are ignoring that the house is old and needs lots and lots of work and the never ending maintenance of upkeeping the place.
Well, we moved in and quickly acquired: 2 rabbits, 6 chickens, 2 goats, one pot bellied pig and 2 kittens. Here is where the story of our little farming bliss gets complicated. 4 of the chickens were about the same size; small little balls of fluff. I insisted that I just had to have a silkie chick. I love silkies, with their funny little mohawks and fluffy feet. They remind me of little punk clowns. The problem started when I saw the silkies for sale. There were various sizes and I thought for sure that the smallest chicks were the closest in size to our older chicks at home. I was very, very wrong. They were only about half the size of the older chicks. From past chicken ownership, I knew that the bigger chicks would peck the little chicks until they died so the chicks had to be separated. Now we had 2 sets of various sized chickens to clean up after until they were all old enough to live together peacefully.
No problem. Then one of the silkies died. Not wanting the remaining silkie to be left all alone, I tried unsuccessfully to get it a little friend it's same size. There weren't any little silkies left to be bought. I tried to find more little chicks its same size but again, no one had little chicks. So poor little silkie was left alone.
One of my husband's co-workers heard about our silkie plight and decided to help us out. He hatched us a duck and proudly gave it to my husband along with a chicken about the same size as our silkie. Great! Now silkie chick has a friend. The new problem is the 3 day old duck with no buddy. My search for baby ducklings came up empty handed.
We tried putting the silkie with the new duck and the new chicken. Silkie is a bully and wouldn't stop pecking duckling. Duckling would hide under new chick like new chick was its mother. It was very sad to watch since new chick wasn't much bigger than duckling but tried its hardest to protect duckling. Well, since silkie seems to be strong enough to bully two roomates we thought she could hold her own with the older chicks. Perfect solution! Silkie could now live outside in the coop with the older teenage chickens while new chick and duckling live together inside. We were wrong, the teenage chickens were very very mean to silkie.
New solution, silkie and new chick live together peacefully but duckling is alone. The duckling does not like being alone and frequently lets us know by her loud peeping and flapping around her box. So today, I bought another duck. It is twice as big as duckling but the expert duck lady at the duck selling store assured me that since they are both still young that the bigger duck will not kill duckling. I have yet to put them together because my husband will not be a happy man if the duckling is killed. Stay tuned for the ever evolving duck tale:
to recap:
4 chicks, 2 silkies
1 silkie died, 1 silkie left
1 silkie is too small to be left with 4 big chicks
Add 1 more chick and 1 duckling
Now we have 3 teenage chicks outside, 2 pre-teen chicks inside and 1 lonely duckling
Add 1 teenage duck and hope it does not kill lonely duckling
Not wanting any ducks, now I am the owner of 2 ducks and hoping that at least one of them will survive. I never knew raising something as simple as chickens and ducks could be so complicated!
No comments:
Post a Comment