We thought we’d re-home most of the roosters. Until Tiny started crowing and then we decided we had to keep them. It didn’t help that Ms. Jackie said she LOVES roosters… so we jokingly refer to them as Ms. Jackie’s roosters.
All of which meant we had to build a third coop/run! Ugh.
Chicken math is a real thing. You go from thinking you’ll have a few hens and a little coop/run to having 12 chickens (7 hens, 5 roos) and three coops/runs!
I found a LOL Cottage on FB Marketplace for $50. It was bright pink and we didn’t think that was appropriate for a coop right next to Frank & Jackie’s house so I spray painted it in colors to match our houses (we both have yellow houses – they have a silver metal roof, ours is a white metal roof), added hardware cloth and some roosts, and TW put avian cloth across the entire side yard to keep them in our yard and hopefully keep the hawks and owls out.
We got it finished on Sunday, June 14. TW caught each rooster and carried it over to the yard. It all went well – even the introduction of Big Bird to the mix. There was some posturing. There was a little blood. But all in all, it went really well.
Until bed time – all five of the roos really wanted to go back to the houses they were used to so we (TW) had to chase them all around the side yard and put them into their new LOL Cottage Coop.
Mrs. K and Grey Stuff were fairly easy for TW to catch. Tiny, who started this whole rooster flock thing, escaped through a small hole in the avian cloth that I’d meant to fill with a PVC pipe feeder and landed in Frank & Jackie’s yard. By then, the sun was good and well set and it was getting dark.
We grabbed some beach towels, cornered him against the fence, and… he flew back into the main part of our yard. At which point, we had to go alll the way back around to our backyard to try and catch him there. Again – the beach towels spooked him so he flew over the fence and into… the avian cloth, where he got tangled enough that TW could grab him.
That just left Chip and Big Bird. Chip was roosting in some huge Florida bush thing and we ended up catching him by cornering him with the beach towels and some avian cloth. TW grabbed Big Bird with a beach towel and… done. 35 minutes was how long it took from the time we went out to close the girls’ popup door and see how we could coerce the boys into their new house.
I did put the Sesame St Cam into the roosters’ coop but all we really saw for most of the night was Mrs. K and/or Grey Stuff.
The next night, we had to catch them again – but it was a little easier to do.
The third night, they went in all on their own. Well, Mrs. K went in but then she came back out and TW did scoop her up and put her back since all the others were tucked in.
And then… a horrible thing happened. TW was organizing the box room and thought I had the dogs with me. I was upstairs working and thought TW had the dogs with her. Turns out, Buster and Lola had broken into the rooster run and… we lost Grey Stuff, Tiny, and Chip. Big Bird seems just fine and Mrs. K looks like she’s in shock.
And there we have chicken math, again. Brand new happy rooster home of five decimated withing just a few minutes. It’s a sad day here. A very sad day.