I am officially the worst blogger ever.  Nope.  It's true.  It has been over a year since I have written anything.  Sigh.  I'm so bad at this.  It has been a busy year too.  Tons of craziness going on.  Let me explain... no let me sum up.

I hatched like crazy all last summer and then sold like crazy to balance the pens out.  I was pretty happy with how the Ameraucana pen was going, but then the splash rooster started showing gold leakage.  Not a good thing.  I got eggs from a new line and managed to hatch out a hen and two roosters.  The old boy went off to Camp Kenmore back in the early spring and the new boys have been desperately trying to make more chickens for months.  At some point I will separate them into different pens, but for now both boys are in there with all the girls.  The funny part is that neither one is really the alpha.  They are both scared of the older hens!  Silly boys!
Last September I came home one night to find an entire pen of chickens dead.  There were no marks on them.  They were just dead.  A couple were missing, but it looked like the others just fell over dead.  It was terribly sad since it was my pen of the original big chickens.  It was also terribly confusing.  What could do such a thing?  I ruled out poison and possums and snakes.  I thought perhaps a weasel, but there was no blood or feathers.  Just laid out chickens.  I set up a game cam thinking that I'd see raccoons or something similar.  Nope.  Check this out-

It's a bobcat!! And a coyote, but the coyote was just passing through.  I've known about the coyotes since I moved in.  You can hear them all around the house and I see them every couple of years.  But the bobcat is new!  ARG!!!
Thus began the bobcat saga.  He made repeated trips to my coops as evidenced by the game cam.  He enjoyed the lovely buffet that I set out nightly in the traps.  I caught him twice in the big trap.  It took him approximately 23 seconds to get out of that one.  People kept telling me to "shoot the thang", but I never saw him face to face.  Thank heavens!  After months of trauma he just quit showing up.  Either he decided it wasn't worth it anymore or he got shot during hunting season.  Here's hoping that he won't show up again!  He was a little too much country for me.  Sheesh!

I ended up ordering chicks in October and now have a pen full of welsummers ready to fill my egg cartons.  More pictures of them later.

More cat trouble started in August, but that is a tale for another day.  I will try terribly hard to actually write on this thing again.  I have tons of pictures to add to get us up to date and the craziness at my house continues.  I think people are no longer shocked when I share the strange happenings.  Apparently it's my normal.  Sigh.

More to come...