I never really went away. I just wasn't here.

Wow. Did I really just let two years go by without updating this blog? More than that, I essentially went two years without writing a goddamned thing, unless you count Facebook posts. I never stopped thinking about this blog or the fact I wasn't writing anything anymore. It was just one more thing in my life to feel shitty about. One more thing I should be doing instead of whatever drudgery or nonsense I was doing instead.

It's not that there weren't interesting things to write about. I never did do the write-up on the autopsy of my four-legged chicken, Four-Door Dostoyevsky. Nor did I tell you about my second four-legged chicken, Suzi Quatro. She died last year from a devastating respiratory infection that swept through my flock, wiping out a third of my birds. Just a couple days ago, I got another four-legged chicken. It was a baby, about a week old, that died a few hours after I got it.

I'm still working at Moore Farms & Friends - recently voted best CSA in Atlanta for the third time in four years by Atlanta's alternative weekly, Creative Loafing. Been there two and a half years now and I love it. I work with great people and feel like I have a job that actually does some sort of good in the world. It's part-time, which is how I like it. I'll only make about $13,000 this year but, after living on $6,000 a year for so long, I feel like I'm living high on the proverbial hog. You have no idea how good it feels to not have to save up for six weeks to buy a four-pound sack of sugar or to contemplate stealing a freshly-caught quail from your cat.

I'm making enough at this job (product packaging and bookkeeping) that I finally quit the last of all my shitty odd jobs. No more cleaning other people's houses or taking care of old people. No more mystery shopping or sorting eggs in a factory farm.

The only business sideline I have now is the sale of skulls, bones, mummified specimens and other natural oddities. Earlier this year I went from selling to a couple private collectors to selling to the public. I had a booth at the most awesome folk-art festival this side of the Mississippi: Doo-Nanny. I didn't know how well my wares would go over but it turned out that dead stuff sells like hotcakes - people were throwing money at me all weekend. In two days, I made as much money as I used to make in a good month (which isn't all that good when you remember I was only making six grand a year). 

I will be back at Doo-Nanny again in March with even better stuff. From as small as a mouse scapula to as large as a horse skull. From as common as chicken vertebrae to as rare as an infection-ravaged possum ulna. Mummified rats, rattlesnake skins, dried chicken feet, gastroliths, miscellaneous teeth, cat claws - I got all your weirdo voodoo needs covered. I may even have a mummified four-legged baby chicken ready for sale by spring.

Alcohol sales finally became legal here in Randolph County this year for the first time in over 100 years. Now it's only a 15-minute roundtrip to buy cheap crappy beer instead of an hour. Good beer is now only a half-hour roundtrip instead of an hour and a half.

I went back to Alaska last month for an all-too-short six-day whirlwind trip. It was my first time back in almost seven years (!). My good friend, Buzz Schwall, unexpectedly passed away and many of our mutual friends passed the hat to buy me a ticket home for the memorial. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was good to be home again amongst my tribe but...well, I don't really want to dwell on the bad stuff. I can't really help but dwell on it, but lets just say I don't want to dwell on it here. It is what it is and there's nothing I can do about it now. There's always one in the crowd who goes out of their way to prove the old adage that you can't go home again. Wah wah, woe is me, whatthefuckever.

When I woke up in my old house in Spenard that first morning, walking into the kitchen for morning chitchat with Angela, it truly felt like I had woke up from some long nightmare. A week later, I woke up back in Alabama and then it was my time in Anchorage that felt like a dream. I'm still struggling to put it all in perspective. 

While I was there, I was a guest on my dear friend, CC's, internet radio show. You can listen to it right here if you're so inclined. You can hear how ravaged my voice is after a week of non-stop talking, especially when compared to my voice on the old poetry slam piece of mine she played. My voice continued to deteriorate even after I returned to Alabama but it's finally back to normal now. For my first few days back, my voice kept cracking like that of a boy going through puberty. It was a reminder of how little I actually talk out loud in my present incarnation as a hermit. 

 Me 'n' CC

The current population of Spenardo del Sur consists of me, five cats, ten goats and 17 or 18 chickens. There's one hen who hasn't been seen in a couple weeks but I'm hoping she's sitting on a nest of eggs. Rattlesnake season has kept me from checking on her but cooler weather has arrived and I hope to look for her in the next couple days. There's also one dog, Melee. She was an abandoned puppy I found last year - one in a litter of five. The animal shelter only had room for three which left me stuck with two. The other dog, Ruckus, died at about six months old. Both he and Melee got very sick, most likely ate something poisonous. Melee got better, Ruckus didn't. 

She's an honorary chicken

So, I just wanted to let you all know I'm still alive and kicking. Well, alive anyway. A number of you have written and called, wondering when the blog was coming back. It's gratifying to know that my musings were actually being read - even more so to know they were missed. But for the last two years I have just been wallowing in my own crapitude here at rock bottom, wondering if there was any point in writing about whatever cute thing the chickens did that day.

I really do want to get this thing jump-started again. It's part of my grand plan to climb up from the depths of my own despair and rejoin the world, even if only the online world. I figure, even if I have nothing current to write about, I have the last two years to draw upon for stories and photos.

Many thanks to everyone for their support over these difficult years of self-imposed exile in rural Alabama. Here's to hoping that this is the beginning of something better. If only because the thought of something worse is mindbogglingly insane.

No More Four-Door

It is with great sadness that I announce the death of my little four-legged miracle chicken. I ended up naming the bird Four-Door Dostoyevsky. I liked referring to the legs as front/rear driver side and front/rear passenger side. But since the parasitic twin (ie. the passenger) was on the bird's left side, that actually made Four-Door a right hand drive chicken. You know, like in England. The car comparison also gave me a delicate way to refer to his two...um...exhaust pipes.

The official cause of death as ruled by Spenardo del Sur's coroner (a.k.a. me) was pulmonary hypertension. In smaller words: freaky chicken had a bad ticker. It may or may not have had anything to do with the parasitic twin. Pulmonary hypertension is pretty common in factory farm refugees. They grow so big so fast and it can put a great strain on their developing hearts and lungs.

I was holding Four-Door when he died. The moment of death is pretty easily recognizable: pupils dilate, head flops over and they shit themselves. It's pretty much the same for all of us when we die (yep, you're gonna shit yourself when it happens).

My right hand was under his left wing. He didn't have many feathers there yet so my hand rested against bare skin. For almost four full minutes after Four-Door died, I could feel his parasitic twin's heart continue to beat.

It probably would've stopped beating sooner if I hadn't been giving the bird mouth-to-mouth. As long as I was getting any heartbeat, I was holding out hope. I am a crazy chicken lady and that's what crazy chicken ladies do. Me and Four-Door had big plans for this coming spring, dammit!


Of course, there was an autopsy. Of course, there were lots of photographs taken. Of course, I will post a bunch of them here - just not today. The end of the month snuck up on me again and I wanted to be sure November at least had one measly post. For now, I'll post a photo that better represents how I'd like to remember Four-Door (instead of flayed, splayed and filleted on the kitchen counter). Here he lounges on the poop deck in an old pie pan.



You are now thinking of some kind of food joke. Perhaps something about chicken pot pie. This will inevitably lead some of you to wonder if I ate Four-Door Dostoyevsky.

I did not.

Not that there was anything wrong with Four-Door's flesh (though the extra legs had absolutely no meat on them whatsoever - quite literally skin and bones). It's just that several days had passed before I was able to conduct the autopsy so I wound up feeding the meat to the cats. I saved the skeleton though. It will be an awesome souvenir of the time I had that stupid idea about homesteading in rural Alabama.

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen!

The universe has heard my cry and given me a distraction from my drudgery.

First it sent Pilgrim.



He's about a year old and is a factory farm refugee. He showed up on his own Saturday. Found him sleeping in a stand of tall grass near the driveway. Looks like he spent a few days traveling the underground chicken railroad before finally reaching Spenardo del Sur.

I don't need another rooster. Pilgrim makes eight. That is a stupid number of roosters. But I'm a sucker for a hard luck story and he seems to be getting along with the three roosters he lives with - Pasha, Bart and Zevon - so he can stay.

The universe sensed that I was not impressed enough with this gift so it sent me another chicken.

An incredible chicken.

A stupendous, fantastical chicken that will amaze and delight kids from one to a hundred. Step right up and take a gander at the most awesome sight you'll see all day. Trust me when I tell you that you don't want to miss this. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you....

THE FOUR-LEGGED CHICKEN!!!!

It was culled from a commercial chicken farm yesterday. Sentenced to death for the crime of producing twice as many drumsticks as anybody else. What kind of country do we live in where someone is penalized for that? So I have commuted its sentence to life as a happy free range chicken who moonlights as a sideshow freak.

I don't know yet if it's a boy or girl. I certainly don't need a ninth rooster but, if it is a boy, I'm leaning towards the name Sideshow Bob. If it's a girl, I'm thinking Suzi Quatro.

This morning I put it with ten other baby chicks I have behind the house. The four-legged chicken is only a week older than they are. The meeting seemed to go okay. Nobody was openly hostile but they were all very curious about the extra appendages.

August in a nutshell

I had a birthday in August. I'm now 43. Sometimes feel much older though. If I knew I'd live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.

Went to a hula party. It was my friend Evan's birthday party but it was the day before mine so I just celebrated early. That's Evan in the coconut bra.

The Freaky Tiki

Lightning struck Spenardo del Sur again. This time it hit a dead tree next to the goat shed. I'm sure the goats were not pleased since they were in the shed at the time - a mere 30 feet away. I watched the strike from a more comfortable distance of 500 feet.

It wasn't until the next day that I saw the damage the blast did to Frankencoop 100 feet away. The east wing of Frankencoop has been closed off for a long time now. The eastern outside wall was in bad shape. I mean bad. The ceiling ain't great either. Got too scary going in there everyday to collect eggs so I sealed it up.

The day after the storm (which only lasted 45 minutes but left an inch of rain and numerous lighting strikes within three Mississippis), I stepped into Frankencoop and noticed that this dresser was face down on the floor.

The dresser helps block the hole in the drywall that leads to the east wing. (On top of the dresser are old feed boxes salvaged from the barn I tore down, repurposed as nesting boxes.)

When I looked through the uncovered hole, this is what I saw:

The lightning had been the straw that broke the camel's back - or in this case, broke my grandma's kitchen wall. The entire door frame, which I'd boarded up when I first started work on Frankencoop, came crashing down which, in turn, knocked the dresser over. The window which had been next to the door actually had fallen out a couple months back. If you click and embiggen the picture, you can actually see the trunk of the stricken tree. It's currently being obscured by the mass of kudzu covering the outside of the wall (or, should I say, where the wall used to be).

I knew the day would come when that wall came down. And that day came in August. I think I really need to finish tearing that old house down this winter while some of the vintage wood can still be salvaged. That means a new chicken coop because the 19 birds currently living there have to go somewhere.

Here's a pic of the tree. It's to the left of the shed. It's just a trunk. It died a few years ago and all the branches had already fallen off. I'm surprised the shed is still standing . The goats have absolutely destroyed it over the last four years.

Celeste and Rosemary mug for the camera.

I was bummed to see that the pine struck back in June is starting to die. I noticed last week that the needles on a number of branches are turning brown. Damn it. I liked that tree.


Other stuff happened in August too but it's late and I have to be up early.

Spenardo Showdown

It's been chaos with the chickens. Got eight new concentration coop refugees yesterday, one of which is a rooster. I normally don't take roosters but the guy had already brought him here and I didn't have the heart to say no. I knew if I said no the rooster would just be killed and thrown in the incinerator. I'm hoping to find him a new home because I absolutely cannot keep him.

Sad factory rooster

They're all sequestered right now in a coop addition I've been working on behind my house. It started as a temporary pen to house some refugees last summer and evolved into this third world-looking affair. It's still a work in progress though I don't think it'll be any more impressive when it's completed.



Note the hen on the bottom left. She's laying an egg. Every spring, when they start laying eggs again after the winter, some of the hens will insist on finding their own hiding spots for eggs, no matter how many nice cozy nests I have built for them. Eggs turn up in tufts of grass, cardboard boxes, under the stairs, any random nook or cranny. This is where the Easter egg hunt comes from.

The two roosters who already live at my house are not happy about the new guy. Pasha wants to get at him because he lives to kick the ass of any rooster that gets in his way. Bart wants to get at him because he dreams of doing the ass kicking for a change.

The pecking order of the hens had already been in flux since the recent death of two porch chickens one of which was Murray, the long-time reigning queen of the porch chickens. This comes right on the heels of the demise of Cheepacabra, queen of Frankencoop. Spenardo del Sur has no chicken queens!

One of Bart's hens recently defected over to Pasha's coop. I didn't want to fight about it so I let her. Tonight, another of Bart's ladies decided she didn't want to sleep under the back stairs anymore either. Instead, she wanted to sleep alone on the porch behind some buckets in the corner.

Normally I wouldn't allow such a thing. The porch is undefended territory where any critter could just mosey up the steps. But I shrugged and figured it's been a long time since anything other than a cat or chicken has been on the porch. What harm could come of it? It's like a kid asking if he can pitch a tent in the yard and sleep outside for a night. I didn't want to fight about it so I let her.

About an hour after dark, I hear her making a fuss on the porch. I flip on the light to see her waddling down the stairs. I look in the corner and find a big fat possum sniffing about. I run out the door and scoop her up, taking her around to the back stairs. I explain to her that she's just going to have to sleep with Bart tonight and I'll arrange different accommodations tomorrow if she so desires.

I dart inside through the back door and make a beeline for the front door, picking up the already loaded .22 on the way. By the time I get back onto the porch, the fat possum is squeezing through a gap that leads to Pasha and his ladies.

Porch chickens aren't nearly as secure at night as Frankencoop chickens. Frankencoop is a fortress compared to my front porch and back stairs which are only kinda sorta secure. But in three years of porch chickens, this is the first time a possum has attempted this maneuver (although the cats do it all the time).

Even though its big fat possum ass is pointed straight at me, I don't really have a good shot at it. We're in pretty close quarters and I have a lot of crap on the porch right now. Instead, I run down the stairs and hope to prevent the possum from making it through the gap.

Too late!

I didn't feel like I could get a good shot without risking hitting something else. You can't see it in the picture, but there's a cat right behind that corner post (you can see her a little better in the next photos). I used that two-by-four on the bottom right a couple times to help "guide" the possum. Rather than let me guide it outside the chicken wire where it could scurry into the dark night, the possum insisted on taking the more perilous route up the porch's south face.




When it finally made it to the top, I took the two-by-four and tried to nudge it off the railing and back onto the porch. When it wouldn't budge, I gave it a good thwack. Possums have one hell of a grip.

I realized that, if I was standing on the other side, I couldn't ask for a better shot at it. I ran back to the top of the stairs and took aim. For a moment, it felt like I was playing one of those carnival arcade games. I imagined the possum with a bulls-eye on its side and, if I hit it, I'd win some dopey prize like giant sunglasses or a comb.

What I actually got was a bleeding possum that almost took out a tray of tomato seedlings when it fell from the rail.


It huddled in that spot between the buckets with its back to me for several minutes. I could see it was still breathing. After a while, it slowly emerged, bleeding from the mouth. I hadn't shot it in the head. I'd gone for a body shot, hoping to keep the skull intact for Angela.

It left a trail of blood across the porch as it made its way for the stairs. I figured I'd finish it off when it got on the ground and I could get a clear shot. I didn't feel comfortable shooting at something so close to my feet. Plus, I didn't want to be forever explaining the bullet hole in the stairs.

While the possum traversed the porch, I peered between the buckets where it had huddled, bleeding, with it's back to me. I wanted to see how much blood had been lost. To my surprise, blood was not all she lost.

Yep, the possum was a she.



It had been a body shot alright. A two-for-one shot. You can see the bullet wound on the baby's right side. It must've been not-so-safely nestled in mama possum's marsupial pouch. If this had been the carnival arcade, I might have won an invisible dog or transistor radio.

But this wasn't the carnival and now I felt like a fucking monster. I looked back to the wounded mama possum. She turned to look at me one last time before lumbering down the stairs, bleeding on each step. My mind searched for a fitting song to play over this dramatic scene: The condemned descending the stairs into the dark night, bleeding, leaving behind a dead child, a gun pointed at her back. I couldn't think of a song but it would probably be something by Nick Cave or Johnny Cash.

When we were both finally on level ground, I positioned myself for the second shot. The damned cats kept getting in my way and she was moving closer and closer to the shadows beyond the reach of my porch light. I quickly pulled the trigger before it was too late. She bolted and I was able to squeeze off one more round before she melted into the darkness just a few feet away. I might've chanced a third shot if she hadn't been running in the direction of the propane tank.

The grass is high and my flashlight is weak. I have no desire to try and track her through the yard in the dark moonless night. I hope she dies quick. She no doubt had other babies. They will die too. I also hope its quick. I will look for her in the morning. Maybe Angela will get a new skull after all.

Cheepacabra has left the building

Flown the coop. Bought the farm. Whatever you want to call it. Cheepacabra, Queen of the Chickens, is no more.

Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet queen,

and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Auction Extravaganza!

Today, Tom and I went a mile or so down the road to watch the giant McMansion get auctioned off to the highest bidder. There are many places that this 13,000 sq. ft. house would fit right in. My neck of the backwoods is not one of them.

I'm not going to use this blog to spread small-town gossip about why this mansion was built in the first place or why it's being sold only a few years later. Gossip like that is better spread in-person over a cup of coffee or a couple beers.

Not many people came out for the auction - maybe 75 at best (and that's including kids in tow). I bet more than half were looky-loos like myself and most of the rest were thinking about bidding on some of the contents. If you were looking to buy, bargains were to be had.

The only item I would've really liked to have was this little mostly-finished cabin. I could've turned it into the most awesome chicken coop ever. Already on skids and ready to move - a mere mile from my property - it went for $600.



The McMansion itself sold for a little more than a third of the original asking price. Along with 13 acres of land, it went for $450,000.

My entire crappy mobile home might fit on that second floor balcony, but I still have the better view.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

A couple nights ago, clear skies allowed the Talladega Mountains to cast their shadows across the sky at sunset. According to Wikipedia, it's the very tail end of the Blue Ridge Mountains - located about 40 miles to the west. On a clear day, you can see Mt. Cheaha from my place - the highest point in Alabama. (At 2413 feet, the Alaskan in me has trouble calling it a mountain. If trees can grow on top of it, it is not a mountain.)

If you click on the picture for the bigger version, you can see Venus just above and to the right of the new moon in the upper left corner. I took this picture from inside my livingroom. You won't see anything like this from the big McMansion (which is located in the darkness a little above and to the left of the dot of light in the bottom right corner).


After the McMansion had a new owner, we went to my neighbor's place to pick their excess blueberries. We filled a two-gallon bucket before a sudden downpour drove us back to my house.

But the rain stopped as suddenly as it started and we took off back down the hill to the East Alabama Goat and Poultry Auction. Again, neither of us were looking to buy anything but I always enjoy checking out all the different kinds of chickens (and occasional guineas, turkeys, quail, pheasants and even pigs and bunnies).

Here's a little taste of good old-fashioned auctioneering for ya:

And then there were thirty-five

Sigh...So Mirabel died, though it had nothing to do with the incident that caused her to lose sight in one of her eyes. She ended up dying of heatstroke - the first of my chickens to die of such a thing.

I found her shortly after it happened. I had been in the backyard pen collecting eggs not long before she died and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Since the backyard birds are usually confined to the pen, I always make sure they have shade and water in there. In fact, Mirabel was sitting in the shade when she died, just a few feet from a full water dish.

She'd only been dead a short time before I found her so I was able to salvage the meat. Since I had Couchsurfers last weekend, this meant I was able to provide a tasty meal of chicken curry to my houseguests.


I've been slowly working on integrating the backyard and front yard flocks. The hens all get along fine but the two roosters, Bart and Pasha, still hate eachother. But it's getting better. They now seem to be able to share the hilltop (and hens) without trying to kill eachother. Today will be the real test as I will be gone for most of the day and they will be unsupervised for the first time.

The fact that the hen with the bad leg is still living on the front porch just adds to the chicken chaos (though she usually spend the daylight hours in the grass behind the house).


Of the three chicks born this spring, at least two have turned out to be roosters. The jury's still out on the third, though I suspect/hope that one may be a hen. If so, it will be the very first hen born in Frankencoop. Not counting the very first batch of chickens I hatched and raised by myself over three years ago (of which four remain), every chicken born here has turned out to be a rooster. With three full grown cocks in Frankencoop and two at the house, I don't need anymore roosters. Guess there'll be more chicken curry on the menu this winter.

What might not be on the winter menu is a lot of vegetables. In the last month, I've gotten about half an inch of rain. I've watched plenty of storms pass close by - some dumping rain just a couple miles from my place. Lots of stuff just withered and died. For the second year in a row, the corn is toast. Been working overtime to make sure the tomatoes and hot peppers survive. Even the kudzu is starting to wilt.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the old pear tree. So far, this has been the best year for that tree. It's chock full of hundreds of almost ripe pears. I'm thinking about pear wine...

Gonna be another hot one today. Forecast calls for triple digit temps - not a drop of rain in sight. It's only quarter after eight in the morning and it's already 85 degrees inside the house.

49 Days

I recently read that factory-farm chickens raised as fryers are ready to send to the slaughterhouse 49 days after they hatch. Fryers are the chickens you buy whole or in pieces at the grocery store. If you bought a package of drumsticks for a BBQ this weekend, those legs came from fryers. Those chickens were roughly seven weeks old when they died.

Today, my baby chicks turned 49 days old. They don't look anywhere near big enough to eat. They've barely passed the kabob stage.


Of course, fryers from the concentration coops are fed a special diet of shit that makes 'em grow real big real fast, unlike my little 49ers who eat real food.

I can't help but think of all those people who shun veal because omg it's baby cows but scarf down dozens of baby chickens. Sure, they're big chickens, but they're still just babies.

By request: Snake Autopsy

Angela asked me to video the retrieval of plastic Easter eggs from the chicken snake I killed yesterday. So I did. Ask and ye shall receive:



Turns out there was only one plastic egg inside the snake - the rest were all real chicken eggs. The snake must have eaten the eggs right before I killed it because the shells weren't crushed when I took those earlier pictures. I wrongly assumed it had eaten four of the brightly colored fake eggs.

The disturbing part is, several plastic Easter eggs are still missing. Where is the snake that ate those?

I've had it with these motherfucking snakes in this motherfucking chicken coop!

Found another chicken snake helping itself to eggs this afternoon. This time, it swallowed four plastic Easter eggs I'd put in some nests to encourage the chickens to lay there. It also ate at least two real eggs. I'll get a more accurate count when I chop it up for tomorrow's kitty breakfast feast (and retrieve my decoy eggs).


I was more than a little impressed with my aim this time. The first shot hit it just below the head, causing it to duck back into the nest on top of an old dresser. I patiently waited for it to raise its head again and, when it did, I shot it right in the face. It raised its head up about a foot high, waving back and forth like a snake charmer was playing a tune. I squeezed the trigger again and managed yet another head shot. This time, the snake collapsed back into the nest.

I fished it out with a broom handle and carried it outside. But, even with a bullet in the brain, it still wasn't dead. I don't like to see anything suffer - even an egg-thieving snake - so when it kept writhing around, I squashed its head to jelly with the heel of my boot. Even then, it refused to give up the ghost.

I thought for sure it was over when it shit. Everything shits and/or pisses itself when it dies. Over the last three and a half years I've seen enough things die up close and personal to know that's the cue to drop the final curtain. So when this snake let out a great spurt of shit two feet into the air - more of an ejaculation really - I was surprised to see it still squirm and twitch for another ten minutes.

Before it finally shuffled off this mortal coil (get it? snake? coil?), it vomited up egg yolk. I found some scars that make me think this wasn't even the first time it had been shot. All in all, this snake wins the award for the longest, most melodramatic death scene. I bet it tastes like ham.


Mirabel gets to keep her eye after all. When the swelling went down, her eyelid opened. But it was all droopy and made her look like a stroke victim - or a stoner. It's almost back to normal but she's now blind in that eye. Her biggest trouble seems to be maneuvering stairs. As she descends, she drifts further and further to her right until she usually drops off the side of one of last steps.

The unnamed chicken with the bad leg is doing better. She can stand on it and walk a little bit but she's nowhere near full recovery. Still no definite word on whether or not she'll be able to join the general population again or be slathered in herbs and spices. She currently lives on the porch a.k.a. the poop deck.

Sometimes I put her in the grass behind the house, next to the pen where I've been keeping the latest refugees and Pasha the rooster. She's safe from roosters back there because Pasha's penned up and Bart won't go behind the house because Pasha's back there. Pasha is content in the pen with the refugee hens but, if he saw Bart, he would move heaven and earth to get out and kick his ass. So Bart has no problem staying on his side of the house.

Took six of the latest refugees down to Frankencoop. One refugee died the other night. Don't know why she died. Factory farm refugees just have a lot of health issues.

That leaves seven birds in the triage coop behind the house - Pasha, five refugees and Mirabel (she likes bossing the newbies around). Bart and six other hens live under the poop deck with full access to the yard. One recovering bird confined to the poop deck. Frankencoop is holding twenty one birds - the six new refugees, three roosters, nine hens and three babies. Thirty six birds in all.

That's a lot of eggs. Even with thieving chicken snakes about.

Five more refugees

The owner of the nearby factory farm dropped off five more hens today. One had eluded capture and fled the warehouse, spending the last couple nights outside where it managed to not get eaten by predators.

The other four had been living beneath the floor slats in the warehouse where they long ago tried to escape their doomed existence as sex slaves - breeders for The Man. This allowed them to keep all their feathers but left them in a position to get shit on alot. To them, I guess it was the lesser of two evils.


Welcome home, sisters.






There are now seven chickens under the front porch and thirteen in the triage coop behind the house. That's twenty total living up at the house - more than are living in Frankencoop right now, which is currently housing fourteen adults and three baby chicks. Thirty seven chickens in all.

I now have a rooster on each side of the house - both under open windows. This is the most effective alarm clock I have ever owned. Sadly, you can't choose the time it goes off nor does it have a snooze button. There is no oversleeping when you sleep with the chickens.