Welcome to Season 2! As you may remember last season we discussed our inability to keep our chicken brood alive, and that we had started over. Since Season 1’s end, we have added many more chickens to our coop, and unfortunately begun losing some as well. Darn Bird Flu.

On this episode, we’re discussing the newest edition of poultry farming at home with the Chamberlains. We talk about how many chickens we ended up with, by breed, about the new run that we built with extra lumber “Ft. Bocks”, and about Bird Flu 2022 that’s eating our brood alive.

Our Chickens (by the numbers)

• Poultry farming at home is more fun with variety
• We purchased nearly 30 chickens to make our start this time around
• Brahmas, Rhode Island Reds, Silver and Gold Laced Wyandottes, and a mess of Speckled Banty hens and a rooster

The New Run

• We found out the hard way last year, that without a proper run we would lose everything to predators
• This year we built the Fort Knox of chicken runs.
• We named it Ft. Bocks…
• We used some left over lumber that had been lying around for several years and made something to hopefully keep our chickens safe for years to come

Bird Flu 2022

• We started losing birds about a week after we finished our brood purchasing
• The symptoms have been setting in pretty quickly
• Imagine the influenza that you experience… but in a chicken.
• The small birds are dead within 48 hours (normally)
• The full grown brahmas have been living for 3 weeks with the flu