We Lost Freddy

My husband has been working tirelessly for weeks (okay maybe he got a bit tired) on our chicken coop. It isn’t exactly a 5 star chicken coop. It is an old barn that had a giant hole cut in the back for chickens to go in and out and it has a run made out of chicken wire and hardware cloth that has been stapled over a bunch of wooden beams.

It literally looks like someone slapped it together.

I’m pretty sure someone did. However, until we can really get the the infrastructure done the way we want to, our coop works for the present. My husband has been going out whenever he could to scoop the old chicken poop and dirt out of the coop. Every day he’d be covered in grime, sweat, dust, and who knows what else. He found about five random chicken corpses buried in the inches of dirt. We have no idea how many chickens used to live at our homestead, but we are guessing quite a large number if they never noticed the dead chickens being buried by the others right under their noses.

He spent hours digging out the muck and laying down more hardware cloth (for digging minks) in the floors to then bury the cloth under a layer of dirt again. He fixed all the holes in the chicken wire in the doors and the walls of the run and stapled pieces and wood planks back together.

We had just bought 8 baby chicks (and lost a sweet little one as we believe she had a heart or digestion problem), and they were growing faster than we could believe. They’d started to outgrow their coop, and we knew that we needed a rooster and a finished coop fast.

So for his birthday, we drove over an hour to what we had heard was a pretty great flock swap. We had a dog crate ready to go and before we had even stepped out of the car we had a grumpy looking farmer offering us a rooster for no charge.

He was the ugliest rooster I had ever seen. I think his comb and wattle had been removed to protect him from frostbite (after all, it’s the mountains), and it looked like he had been attacked by something. Half of his tail feathers looked like they had been plucked out and he was ridiculously scrawny.

I was a bit worried and I asked ‘Is he mean?’ (I had never had a rooster before, but knew they could lead to a rather sour experience hahaha).

‘Ho yeah.’

But my husband wanted him immediately. We shoved him into the dog crate, I sat in the car, and he wasted no time before he started crowing.

I looked at my sweet life partner and spoke my fear ‘What if he’s mean?’

‘We put him in a pot.’

And he went out and bought a second rooster, just in case.

This rooster was gorgeous. I’m not exaggerating - he was beautiful. Friendly, fluffy, a Rhode Island Red with swagger but also an extremely calm temperament. We paid $8 for him, and his owner also provided a comfy box for him to ride home in.

We divided our coop in half, and put Mr Scraggly on one side and Mr Handsome on the other.

I decided to name the ugly one Freddy Krueger, and the handsome one Freddy Mercury. (It was extremely fitting).

Handsome Freddy wasted no time jumping on my husband’s back and making a comfy perch, while Freddy K kept running from us terrified. We didn’t have time to get the automatic door we had just bought up and running, but figured with all of the work we had done on the coop so far it was secure enough for the first night.

We were wrong.

That night a pair of raccoons (we had seen them on our porch just a week before) busted through the wooden panels on the wall, broke into the coop, and killed Freddy Mercury.

If you know anything about raccoons, you know what we woke up to the next day.

It was devastating.

Freddy Krueger was strutting around the next morning like nothing had happened, and sweet Freddy Mercury was gone.

We lost him.

We were so upset. Not only did we lose a rooster, but we had lost the NICE one! And the raccoons broke into a coop he had been working on for weeks!

We immediately worked on closing the holes and reinforcing the boards and started putting cinder blocks over the hole at night, but it didn’t matter. We had felt our first loss that really felt like our fault. The baby we had lost was simply bad timing and poor genetics. We were not to blame.

This one, we felt like it was.

But honestly.. it’s kinda been working out.

Freddy K was introduced to our growing hens last week.

And they are doing amazing.

There aren’t fights, he is showing them the treats, and while he is still first in the coop at night, he already seems pretty protective (even if he runs away from us).

What if.. sometimes the messier option is better? What if the flashy one isn’t always the best route?

What if..when we are left with the ugly chicken.. it is for a reason and the reason is a great one?

I’ve been working with a great artist (Toby Ross) on some projects.

I really fell in love with his use of line, color simplification, and how he can express emotion in such a raw and amplified way.

You can find more of his work here:

https://www.tiktok.com/@lonelyisthecloud

You’ll definitely see his work featured on some upcoming items, for SURE.

In the meantime, I really hope you will look at the messy parts of your own life. The sloppy or not as handsome ones, and see if they aren’t messy, just amplified and perhaps perfect for your situation.

I hope you can see the mess and the movement for the potential that it is.

And in the meantime, learn to protect your chickens a bit better.

XOXO,

Windham