Some mornings, it is great to wake up, until you realize what happened the night before.
Today was one of those days. I had woken up early to get some T-shirts made and some fence put in before the heat of the day. I made my morning post and enjoyed a cup of coffee. When I started to make my rounds though, my heart sank.
The back door of one of our chicken tractors was open. Such things should not be. This was the first clue that I was not going to have a good morning.
Inside, I could already see that there was a whole mess of feathers. Since we had not fed our chickens Alka-Seltzer tablets as an after dinner snack, the cause of this was limited.
Sure enough, broken eggs and feathers were all over outside of the chicken tractor too. Someone had enjoyed a feast last night, at the cost of our animals. When it comes to chickens, we still previously had nine hens, and two roosters. Additionally, one of our Muscovy duck mamas had taken to laying her eggs in the chicken coop. Since they were all getting along, we just let her make her nest there. Thankfully, I did not see any duck feathers, so that gave me hope. Soon I was searching the woods around the pen, looking for that lost duck.
As heartache would have it, I soon came upon the cold corpse of what had once been our duck. It is a tragic sight to behold. The duck wasn’t really even eaten, and was mostly intact. It had just been killed, and its neck had been nibbled on.
Most likely, one of these guys came over to see if it could get an easy meal last night. Unfortunately, it did. This Raccoon was one that we had recently trapped, and the photo is from another post that I had made. We enjoyed catching some fish as a family and used some the extra ones to bait traps with, since some of the neighbors had been having trouble with them lately too. It looks like I'll have to set some more traps. Tonight, I'll chop up the duck carcass and bait some traps. Hopefully, I can catch some more raccoons before they continue to feast on my flock.
Upon further investigation, I found the root of the problem. When the @little-peppers locked up the animals last night, they did not really lock them all up. This chicken tractor can be closed without locking it, as the door fits inside the metal roofing and pops shut.
This lock is supposed shut at night, but, unfortunately, it wasn't. If it had been done properly, it would have looked the photo above...
But, it looked like this instead. Lessons like this are tough ones to learn. Obviously my @little-peppers could have done a better job, but then again, @papa-pepper could have done a better job training them, or at least double-checking their work.
Since we have been hatching out a few ducklings, we were excited that our second mother duck was laying and sitting on the eggs. This could have meant a lot more free ducks for us. Thankfully, our first mama duck is hard at work raising the two she hatched first.
Additionally, one of the other babies that hatched later is still doing well, though we had to separate it from the others. For some reason, it's mother is very aggressive towards it, so we are having to raise it separately, which is fine. We would rather put forth the effort of raising it ourselves than have it end up dead.
In the end, at least we got the three original ducks that we had for free. Now, one of them is dead, but the other mother has blessed us with three new ducklings, so we are still up five ducks. Interestingly enough, one of our chicken hens has actually taken sitting over on our dead ducks nest. She has been there all morning. We are really hoping that she will hatch out the eggs that our dead mama left behind. I'll keep you posted.
Also, for those of you who were wondering, yes, "Heartache on the Homestead" is a variation on the series that @bluerthangreen has been posting, called "Hardships on the Homestead." You should check out some of those posts from @bluerthangreen. Hopefully, he will get past his hardships and I can get over my heartache.
As always, I'm @papa-pepper and here's the proof:
proof-of-heartbreaking-morning
Until next time…
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