Because of the threat of hawk attack, the remaining 6 layers and the rooster have been confined to their coop. They’re not happy about it, and when you think about, it makes total sense. Even if they had witnessed a hawk attack on a flock-mate, they probably don’t remember it now. All they know is that they’re stuck in their nighttime quarters and they’d rather be outside, scratching, running around, and doing their chicken thing.
In researching how others had resolved issues with hawks attacking chickens, a couple of posters had indicated that some states issue depredation permits. It sounded sketchy to us, so we reached out to the KY Fish & Wildlife agency about the predation – they advised that all hawks are federally protected in KY under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and that killing a hawk is a federal offense. The agency helpfully recommended that we keep the chickens confined for a few days so that the hawk would lose interest (good to know we were already on the right track!). Kudos to KY Fish & Wildlife, too – they are very responsive and genuinely seem to want to help citizens who are losing livestock due to predation (within the parameters of applicable law, of course).
After the unsuccessful attempt to breed the NZ does last month, it looks like we may have at least one kindling at the end of the month. Today, we spied Ava sporting a “haystache”, which is usually a sign that a doe is pregnant. It’s pretty early (she was bred a week ago), so there’s a possibility this could be a false pregnancy.
The Muscovy eggs ordered last week were shipped by the seller on Monday by Priority Mail. Unfortunately, they were mysteriously delayed in transit and didn’t arrive at the local post office (and strangely, went to a different PO, rather than the one to which we’re assigned) until today. We’ve been watching the tracking carefully, so as soon as we saw that they had arrived at the local PO, we called and asked them to hold the package for pickup.