I lost Gregor today.

Keeping chickens, it happens. It isn’t even the worst event in the past month, but this happening after that event compounded my sense of grief about it.

Gregor was special

All of the babies I lost were special.

But Gregor meant something special. He was a “grandbaby”. That is, he was hatched from a bird I also hatched. I didn’t hatch his grandpa or his dad, but I raised them both from day olds.

He was also very unique. Except for his siblings and even they were unique.

Gregor’s family

Admiral Silkbar

His grandpa was Admiral Silkbar. He was half silkie and half Blue Isbar.

Get it? Silk…. Bar? It made me laugh. 🤣

Kiki

Admiral Silkbar mated with Kiki, Gregor’s grandma and a Japanese Bantam and produced a very unique hen, Lt Silkbar.

One of the little black chicks in the photo of Kiki is Gregor’s dad, Filch. I didn’t hatch them but Kiki was more than happy to be a “surrogate mom”, so to speak, keep them warm and show them chicken ways.

Lieutenant Silkbar

Lieutenant Silkbar, a somewhat obvious name, considering, had her Dad’s coloring and beard, with her Mom’s patterns. She was no doubt one of a kind, I doubt that combination of genes were ever crossed before. But who knows!

Filch

Gregor’s dad was a Svarthona. Not long after he fertilized the eggs, he got traded to someone who wanted a pet rooster, and he was quite unique looking. The breed is supposed to be all black, but he had a bunch of leakage, which I hear is from inbreeding but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Either way, he was a handsome dude.

He got named after the Harry Potter character, who was a “squib”, a member of the magical community that had no magic. I mean, it seemed appropriate at the time.

Filch got rehomed to a guy I met at a fair who recently lost his rooster.

The pairing hatched 4 babies. Two of them I kept long term, Sandor and Gregor.

Sandor & Gregor

When you have as many chickens as I do, you start naming them after random shit. I was watching Game of Thrones and, of course, the two brothers were named Sandor and Gregor. That’s how Filch got named.

It ended up being kind of prophetic as they had a pretty serious sibling rivalry, which usually didn’t get violent. No one ever got hurt, as dramatic as it looks.

But generally, they were bros.

Sandor passed away a couple of years ago from a predator situation, which was extremely sad. He was one of my favorite chickens.

Generally, I keep most of my roosters isolated from the hens, except for a few lucky dudes. This would keep the rooster fighting to a minimum. So much so, I barely had any rooster hostility and they just run around together.

Sandor and Gregor generally got relegated to the rooster community. Not long after Sandor passed, Gregor decided he was going to live with the ladies and would jump over the fence and be there. His Japanese Bantam heritage made it hard to keep him from where he wanted to be.

Why it’s hard

Gregor died today.

It was from an illness. He was an old(ish) man. And birds are just fragile creatures. He had an impacted crop, and nothing I did seemed to help the situation. Him being older meant his body didn’t heal as well, and who knows?

But losing a pet is never easy. And considering I lost a bunch from a predator attack a month ago, it may seem trivial.

But what I really lost with Gregor was a bloodline.

In fact, just before he got sick, I decided to do a small hatch. Mostly because after November, I wanted to secure the bloodline. I had genes of birds I wanted to preserve. And my birds are all on the upper side of old. I’m not sure how much longer their eggs will be viable.

So I threw a dozen eggs in an incubator. Not necessarily the wisest idea as I’m having a lot of money problems. But, part of my reasoning is that having a few more birds that laid eggs will make it easier to rehome my flock if I need to. Plus, with the economic situation what it is, generally, having eggs to sell to neighbors is a nice benefit.

None hatched.

I had three that looked like they might, but they didn’t. I opened them up after and there was one fully formed baby chick that clearly was a Gregor and Fulcrum baby. Fulcrum was his little girlfriend that always hung out with him.

Fulcrum is the daughter of one of my favorite Ayam Cemani roosters that passed a while back. And her mother came from the same breeding stock as Admiral Silkbar, though not related directly.

So their baby would have been a weird barnyard mix descended from a few lineages of my favorite birds. It was nearly all black, and it would have no doubt been beautiful.

It’s sad for a lot of obvious reasons, but it’s saddest because it’s a sign that things are coming to a close and I’m losing all my favorite birds. It felt a bit like them persisting through their progeny, and with that ceasing to be viable, it’s tough. And while I have a few Admiral Silkbar progeny still, I have no more Lt. Silkbar progeny. And I have no idea if their eggs can even be hatched.

My chicken flock has been my autistic special interest for nearly a decade, and my lil birds have been my company since I had a stroke, and through all the isolation COVID/post-2020 has left me in. It’s a sunken feeling that, despite all that time and effort, having to watch it all fade away. And while I’m genuinely grateful for the time I’ve had with them, and I love all the babies I still have, it’s hard to reconcile.

And it’s hard to expect anyone to relate or understand, though I am sure plenty of people do.

Writing this helped, some.