Where Have All the Chickens Gone?

I Did a Count in My Neighborhood. The Results Were Disturbing

Hana the hen on the roof

Things are winding down here at the bungalow and with it I’ve noticed that there are a lot less critters to worry about. The puppies have been adopted out and now both Shadow and Daisy have been spayed. We’ve had a few friends who have said that they may be able to take care of a pet and a few neighbors who have verbalized likewise. Sprout is unconcerned:

I already knew that I was not going to do a thing about either the chickens or the feral cats next door. They both seem to do okay on their own. Both populations have also been declining a lot. I talked about it with the cats specifically in this post:

Mama the feral cat next door appears pregnant. If she has kittens it will be the first litter she’s had since December of 2021. Two of the feral cats, Spooky 2 and Random Kitty, have disappeared in the past four months. With no new kittens being born in so long there’s only three cats next door that I feed anymore.

The chicken population has had a similar decline. There’s only about 6 chickens left: three hens and three roosters, from a high of around 20-25. Clover is long gone and Sunday recently disappeared and the only named chickens we have left is Hana the hen and Max the rooster. Nothing has been hatching in months and months. Just like the cats the situation slowed in 2022 and has now plummeted off a cliff.

I thought at first that the dogs were raiding nests and eggs because we don’t find very many eggs around either. But Hana sat on a clutch of 10 eggs for about a month before abandoning them. Every single egg was not viable and none were eaten by the dogs.

I’m not sure what is causing this. But now that the puppies have been adopted I don’t think it has to do with them. The dog population in our area has been stable.

The last baby chick hatched naturally that survived has a miraculous story. The mama hen had four chicks, but one day I found two of the chicks chirping loudly without their mother anywhere. I set out in search of the hen.

I found her under the papaya tree and she looked like she was dead. She was laying on her side and her eyes were crusted over. As I came closer though she tried to flap her wing. She wasn’t dead yet, but she was very close.

One of her baby chicks had nestled under her wing. The chick wouldn’t leave her mother’s side.

I inspected the hen, thinking perhaps a predator had broken her neck or caused some other damage. It wasn’t from a predator. Her eyes were crusted over and her body twitched as though she had gotten some terrible and fast acting disease. It looked to me like Marek’s disease, but an extremely bad case that I doubted the hen had any chance of living through.

Despite this I tried to give her some water and held her beak in it. She drank it, reluctantly at first. The one brown baby chick was still nestled under her wing.

I had been on a facetime video call with my younger daughter. “Catch the baby chicks!” She insisted. “They’ll die without you!” She was correct in that small and loudly chirping chicks do not last long without help, as they get too much attention from predators.

I tried to to catch the two other baby chicks but could not. Since Clover had gone I had developed a hard shell regarding the chickens, thinking it was perhaps better if they had a healthy skepticism about humans, dogs, cats, you name it. Ka tried to catch the two chicks later in the day and he was unable to either.

“The mother hen is not dead yet.” I explained to him. She was still on her side with the one baby chick nestled under her wing.

By the next morning, shockingly, the mama hen was up on her feet. But by then only two chicks remained. In the end only the one that had nestled under her wing who wouldn’t leave her side would live, along with mama hen. Perhaps their faith in each other had allowed them both to live. That was the only clutch of chicks hatched in 2023 and that is the sole survivor.

So earlier today I decided to do a count in the area, as many neighbors keep chickens and they certainly aren’t neutered or spayed. Much like not seeing kittens lately I couldn’t remember seeing a mama hen with young baby chicks following her around in a long time. This used to be a very common sight in the neighborhood.

I counted a total of 42 hens around the area. There were close to the same number of roosters but I wasn’t counting them. As I walked close to the power lines nearby I saw a few chicks around 4 months old. They looked the same age as my sole survivor and were probably hatched in March.

I walked very far away from the power lines down the dirt road towards the Muslim cemetary. There I saw two hens with chicks that were about 6 or 7 weeks old. A lot of hens were out and about with no chicks, which is a very bad sign. Normally if a hen is sitting on her clutch of eggs waiting for hatching she’d be out of sight. That so many hens were not sitting on any eggs was concerning. Almost every chicken I saw was an adult.

There were no baby chicks under the age of about seven weeks, and only a total of five hens, out of 42, who had any chicks following them at all. Those two with the youngest chicks were the farthest from the power lines. This is not a seasonal thing either. Although the rainy season does bring some problems with nesting for free range chickens, mostly in the form of flooded nests and ant infestations, there’s plenty of chicks hatched in the summer months. When what I think was Marek’s disease hit our chicken population a few years ago, it was in July. Three of our hens had chicks younger than one month old at the time.

For whatever reason, the chickens in the area are not making chicks at anywhere near the numbers they used to. Could it be a power surge through the electric lines, or some sort of infertility virus? Could it be some CRiSPR technology? Poison in the land, air or water? Any or all of the above?

What are you seeing in your area?

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