It's true Jean - your husband's reality. As a business you can make money but for 10 hens at home each dozen eggs would be about $300 a pop until you paid off the coop at $899 and the freight to a home at $365, not to mention buying the chickens. Started 17 week old laying poulets are about $12 each but the shipping on them is $49 (they do come with their shots however). Then there is the feed and having to work it each day to keep everything extremely clean and fresh. You have to keep chickens away from wild birds and their droppings, not to mention the predators, but oh the romance of having a barnyard and a self sustaining life (without the hard work of course because you are rich enough to hire a few people to actually run the place). He he he... My co-worker had chickens and their chickens lived outside during the day and sometimes at night, but had a shed they could go into if they wanted. They lost some to predators and sometimes the eggs were just laying around on the ground and other times the hens would lay in thick shrubby growth at the edge of their woodlot (in the brambles). Betcha egg gathering was the pits there! She said they shot a opposum one time that was raiding a favorite hen's nest - the hen woke them up screaming her bloody head off and running to beat the band (they are fast she said) and with the flashlight they saw the possum on the nest eating the eggs. Boom - bye bye possie. Awww...... poor possie - he only wanted some fresh eggs too!

I've never seen bronzed cowbirds here, but I can imagine they might come this far north some years. I've seen some birds here some years that I never expected to ever see here, so it isn't hard to imagine that the bronzed cowbirds might be in Tree's part of the state. I have seen rusty blackbirds but I think they were bigger than what Tree described. Still, we all have to remember that sometimes a person is looking at a half-grown adult, or at a female, and their size and coloring won't be the same as the full-grown males (which often are the ones shown in ID photos). One of my neighbors commented 3 or 4 years ago that after all the terrible drought years since 2005, he's seen a lot of rare birds here that you normally don't see in Oklahoma. Maybe we have some of those rare birds still hanging around here.....maybe once they came here to visit, they liked it.

Falling trees would be a problem but we have none that close enough to the house to cause problems. I don't have any bird feeders out. I like to encourage them to feed on their own by planting certain plants, keeping brush piles, etc. but I may need to start doing this. Even if my yard was the way I wanted it, filled to the brim with food and home opportunities, the majority of the rest of the world just isn't as hospitable to them as our properties are. My lovely wooded town is being filled up with clear cut properties to place large houses and boring lawns with non-native plants here and there. It's people like us that offer wildlife few respites in the increasingly developing world. Makes me sad that so much wildlife is being extirpated. Thank you Oscar! I've been struggling with health issues and haven't been able to do much, even tiny little things like gardening. I finally found out why I've been a zombie these past ten years. I'm suffering from a high degree of sleep apnea that resulted in severe sleep deprivation despite my sleeping over half the day away. I wake up over 40 times an hour! If anyone is routinely tired, I really encourage you to get a sleep study done! I don't even fit the profile but it turned out that I have it.

MIght be a Common Grackle (as opposed to the more normal Great-tailed that you would see).The bird in the photo I have attached is a Common Grackle. Boat-tailed Grackle doesn't occur in Houston (proper). In Texas Boat-taileds are found in coastal saltmarsh areas. Great-taileds are the common city grackle. Another consideration would be a Red-winged Blackbird. I have seen individuals without the red shoulders. A photo showing the head and beak shape would help. Both Great-tailed and Common Grackles will have light yellowish eyes (as will Brewer's and Rusty Blackbirds). Cowbirds usually have dark eyes, except Bronzed whose eyes are red. Red-winged Blackbirds have dark eyes as well. This post was edited by FHFchrish on Fri, Apr 5, 13 at 16:37