While the East Coast got soaked, we’ve been in a beastly heatwave that was lethal to the poultry population at the Dilwedel compound.<\/p>\n
Wyandotte the chicken succumbed to the 103 degree heat yesterday. After only five chickens emerged this morning, I found her under the roost.<\/p>\n
I feel terrible and neglectful. We’ve had a lot going on and didn’t check on them during the midday heat yesterday. It was crazy though. Sally and John departed in the evening. Joanna arrived unexpectedly — a hurricane-related detour after her trip to NorCal.<\/p>\n
Maybe if we had checked on them we would’ve spotted Wyandotte’s symptoms and been able to rehydrate her and or take her inside to cool her off. The rest of the flock is fine and they had plenty of water. Chickens are delicate but she seemed too young and healthy to be done in by the heat. I never thought that we’d lose a chicken in her prime. It seems so random and wasteful. As I told Peter tearfully this morning, “I didn’t want her to die! I wanted to kill her and eat her!” Though given how much I cry when our flock is culled naturally, we’ll have to see if I can actually pull that off.<\/p>\n
We will remember Wyandotte fondly. She was a beautiful hen and a good layer. I loved the dark green sheen on her black neck feathers. She was the first to give us eggs. I remember how happy we were when Peter picked her up and found that first light brown egg in a little grass nest that she scratched behind the compost bins. When she was just a chick, we couldn’t tell her apart from Barred Rock. They both looked like balls of black fluff with yellow bellies. She liked to boss around the rest of the girls but she will be missed by her friends, Australorp and Barbara the Barred Rock.<\/p>\n
A brief memorial service was held this evening and attended by Jo, Gabe, Raquel, Peter and Simon, who screamed the whole time. She was buried under the fig tree in the front yard.<\/p>\n
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While the East Coast got soaked, we’ve been in a beastly heatwave that was lethal to the poultry population at the Dilwedel compound. Wyandotte the chicken succumbed to the 103 degree heat yesterday. After only five chickens emerged this morning, I found her under the roost. I feel terrible and neglectful. We’ve had a lot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-g-gallus-domesticus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stemwedel.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stemwedel.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stemwedel.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stemwedel.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stemwedel.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.stemwedel.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":624,"href":"http:\/\/www.stemwedel.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621\/revisions\/624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stemwedel.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stemwedel.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stemwedel.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}