Roosterless No More!

We’ve definitely had our chicken woes this year. Our straight-run Dominique chicks turned out to be 75% roosters. We kept one, and then something killed it, leaving behind a pile of feathers. A month or so later, a stray dog killed one of the hens. This isn’t the way to grow a flock! Of the six Speckled Sussex pullets I bought last spring, Dan caught a skunk in the chicken coop, eating one of the chicks. It had killed two, leaving us with four. So this summer, we’ve had six six hens and no rooster. Can’t have a self-sustaining flock that way!

Our Sussex are going on five months old, and we reckoned that this time of year, there should be a possibility of finding a Speckled Sussex rooster. Autumn is when folks want to get rid of spring roosters, and Craigslist is full of them. Dozens of rooster ads, for all types ranging in price from $5 to $20 each. But nobody seemed to have Speckled Sussex. Patience and diligence paid off, however, and last week Dan found a Speckled Sussex rooster – for free!

Amazingly, introductions were made with no squabbling, no stand-offs, and no challenges to the existing pecking order. The girls were just as interested in him as he was in them, and everybody got along from the get-go. That’s the smoothest chicken introduction we’ve ever had.