Today is Wednesday, and it's been a few days since my last blog. The last few days have been a ringer. Sunday was a wet morning delivering papers. On top of that the papers were late to arrive at the branch, so it was a hurried rush to put the papers together, hurry to get to the route, and deliver said papers, while also having to tie the bags for 5 hours. After finishing the route came home to find one of our roosters had passed away during the night.
Quetip was a wonderful rooster who only crowed first thing in the morning, if the hens were out of sorts, or if my husband was grilling in the backyard. He loved being picked up and cuddled by myself and the kids. It was a horrible shock, he didn't show any signs of sickness, the day before. Now we have had a lot of other animals to pass away, but it never gets easier. We experienced a whole set of pullets freezing during a power outage. Along with this same outage my treasured Savannah Monitor (Sammy) and all of our snake collection couldn't take the sudden drop in temperature all froze. During a weeks outage during an ice storm a few years ago.
That collection included my son Sebastian's leopard geckos, my Reticulated, and Ball Pythons. We've had a stray dog to kill one of our oldest original hens. We've even watched time and time again as our rescue ferrets slowly left. What made this go around so much worse for our family is that come Monday morning when my oldest Sebastian went out to do his morning chores of tending to the chickens, Quetip had mysteriously been revealed, with his burial site undisturbed. Needless to say we had to put him back adding black pepper since animals do not like the smell. After a very long day with my youngest little Lincoln teething, yet another of my treasured pets was soon to follow, my Blue Tongue Skink (Licorice) due to old age.
Come Tuesday morning upon hearing our dogs barking before leaving for our paper route I found the culprit of the roosters sudden reveal. A mother possum and 8 of her young babies. Now we've never had any trouble of possums or coon ever harming our flock before. We've always made sure to leave scraps in the back corner of our property to keep them far enough away from our flock yet still let them do their job of tending to bugs and other nightly activities. The poor momma possum and her babies must have been hungry enough to keep digging up the poor chicken even in Tuesday morning's pooring rain. So sadly we let nature take it's course. We continued on to our routes feeling a little down along with the nonstop rain. The kids and I came home from kiddos therapy later that morning to yet another chicken this time showing illness. So we broke out the chicken kit filled with yogurt, apple cider vinager, herbs, and Vex RX.
Old Lace received round the clock care and fluids every hour on the hour, cuddles, a heat lamp but the poor guy to slipped away in the early hours of the Wednesay morning. We believe due to being depressed of our other roosters loss. They we're two peas in a pod always together. Before leaving for the kids therapy we burried Old Lace, next to his best friend adding wolf urine to hopefully keep our momma possum and her babies away. Also adding more scraps to the corner of the property. Running a homestead comes with its rewards, but also has it's hardships. No matter the amount of loss, it still takes it's toll. You just have to keep pushing forward looking at the end picture. We've had a great run with our chickens thus far, having our time to process and hope to learn better for farther down the road.
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