Ugh, that sux about the raccoons. I'm really very surprised we haven't lost any to predators.
We did lose a few to one of our own dogs. She'd chase anything that ran from her, catch it, and kill it. So one young hen, one layer, and a duck.
This is our red bourbon turkey, Lucy.
One of our Rhode Island Red hens. I don know her name.
One of the lovely little Black Copper Marans. She has a name, but I don't know hers either.
One more of the Marans. Her name is Beauty, but she recently died by getting her head stuck in a wooden crate and then broke her neck. Too bad cuz she was among the best specimen of the hens we had. It's difficult to get a black copper hen with that much copper on the neck and have the feathered shanks. She was actually a show quality bird and others from her lines had been winning at shows.
We have two roosters right now. Handsome George pictured above, he's a Blue Copper Marans, and we have another named Henry who is a Black Copper Marans. The blue will produce both blue and black copper. This spring we have to gets the birds separated into groups and the roosters with the hens we want bred.
We can breed the blue copper to Rhode Island Reds to produce a hybrid called a blue belle. We'll see how all that goes.
We also have a few dual purpose birds called Black Javas. I think they're actually considered endangered, there are only about 3 or 400 in the US as I understand. They're larger with small tight combs and very hardy! Sorry, I can't find pics of the Javas.
Both our roosters have large combs and both had frostbite on said combs. But, the guy we got them from said its fortunate that's all that happened as the Marans tend to be very protective of the flock and have been known to stand guard all night outside the coop and freeze to death. He lost one or two this way this year.
