The Great Chicken Adventure: Week 23

Wow I'm delinquent at keeping a blog!! I promise I didn't check out of chicken care the way I checked out of blogging this past month. Everything has been crazy busy between the harvest, some butchering and "extra curricular activities". As sad as I am to see things winding down, Im glad in a way. Its been such a busy and consuming first year of farming. But I am starting to see the fruit of all my hard work. Week 23 in the chicken coop brings a slightly reduced flock. We started with 33 chickens, butchered Bernie, the first troublemaker-dictator, then we butchered his "sister" who was actually a male, then we did a big lot of 5 miscellaneous roosters, bringing the chicken total to 26 birds. We didn't have a scale to weigh the end results but taking a guess they were each around 4 pounds of well fed rooster. Now its so quiet to go into the coop, theres practically no fighting, and theres no bloodspots (from stress) in the eggs anymore, yay!! We still will have another 4 or 5 to butcher, whenever we get time. We had to kill off Racing Stripe the most beautiful rooster, because he was fighting with everyone! If another rooster even looked at him, there would be an all-out-feather-flying fight. Rob is the new king of the coop and the little garden helper is still alive too. The hens are laying eggs quite faithfully, everyday there are about 3-5 for me to collect. And I haven't been in need of eggs yet. Two hens have made a habit of laying on the floor, but fortunately they haven't made the habit of eating their eggs (yet)... Occasionally I let all the chickens come outside on the grass and theyre just in their glory when I do that. They make the funniest excited noises! And eat grass like its going out of style! The chickens still get a fair bit of garden and veggie scraps. They went pretty wild over the pumpkin skin I gave them. Theyre on 100% laying mash (even the males) and they get an additional scoop of oats (when I remember to give it to them). Im going to start them on oyster shells this week at some point, that will help the hens with building their shells.
Below are some picture of the birds during the last month.