A stray rooster wandered onto
Brad
Krueger’s farm this past year. At first his dogs cornered it under
some machinery, but this chicken was smarter than your average farm dog
and managed to migrate itself over to the Krueger home, where his wife
immediately recognized how special the chicken was and adopted him as
the new house pet alongside their two cats.



I’m sure the cats were less
than thrilled to have a new brother, but the Krueger’s owe their lives
to the vigilance of their pet chicken. A few weeks ago a large fire
broke out in their home and the smoke detectors failed. You guessed it.
Their pet chicken knew something was wrong and alerted the couple in
enough time to escape with the chicken and one of the cats.



How smart are chickens? Smart
enough to know when to unleash their not so subtle alert when a
situation gets dangerous, and their battery never needs to be changed.



Image credit goes to Didactohedron
at Wikipedia also known as Fir0002/Flagstaffotos.

The grass is just barely
starting to grow in this late spring, so our flock is still foraging in
the woods.  However, it’s time to get serious about getting the
pastures back in order since I figure I’ll be wanting to shut the flock
back onto grass within a few weeks.

Step one was replacing a
fence section and gate that had fallen in under the weight of heavy
snow this winter.  Mark opted to paint
the untreated wood
in hopes it would last longer.

The next step was to revisit the dog
door idea. 
Lucy has been breaking holes in our chicken moats all winter, which weren’t
much trouble then since the flock was in the woods, but now are
becoming tunnels through which chickens enter the garden and scratch up
my precious spring seedlings.  That behavior has to stop, so
Mark’s trying another set of dog doors, and if they fail, will go back
to electroshock
therapy.



Finally, I seeded the
bare ground on the terraces with oats in hopes of doing
a bit of soil-bulding before the broilers need to move into that
area.  I had originally wanted to sow grass and clover there and
let the paddock take a year off from chicken feet, but it’s probably
smarter to spend a year building organic matter first before moving to
the final sward.

Now we just need to wait
for warm weather to catch up with our pasture preparations.  Until
the grass is growing quickly, we’ll keep the flock scratching in the
woods.