It's been a bad few weeks for animals on the farm. Our Rooster died. Roo was a good rooster. I liked him a lot. He was good to his girls and I could trust him around my little guy. He was never aggressive toward us.

He wandered into the road and got hit by a car. We also lost three hens that way. Yes, we need a fence. Yes, they shouldn't be in the road. But seriously, we don't live at a sharp curve, or on a hill. You can see what's in the road in front of our house for a good long way before you get there. It's not a busy road by almost any standard. It is a country road, lined with farms and more than one with free-roaming, road-wandering chickens (and dogs, and cats, and horses). All the chickens who were killed were bright white, like most of the flock. And they do try to get out of the way of cars. So how hard is it to avoid them? I know the guy we actually saw hit one, didn't even try. He didn't even slow down. In fact he hit the gas after the deed was done. Guilty much?

Sigh.

And then we lost all three of our keets (baby guinea fowl). It turned cold and rainy this week and they couldn't keep warm. We lost two of them in one day, before we realized that they were in trouble. The three older guineas and the lame rooster that shared their run and coop had been doing a beautiful job of keep them tucked under a wing, so we hadn't been worried. After that, I moved the last keet inside with a guinea hen to keep it company, while I spent the day moving and setting up their coop to be dry, warm and out of the wind. Then I put them all back out there and they did fine that night. But last night they didn't go into their coop (they like to sleep in the run, for some reason) and the last keet died.

So, it's been a rough few weeks.