The post that started the chicken madness....

This is an introductory bit about our chickens. Let me start by saying I’m a fan of the color blue... so when I was researching what breeds of chickens I’d like to try, when I found out there were chicken breeds which would lay various shades of BLUE eggs I was stoked.

And for those of you out there who think blue chicken eggs is oh, so staggering, here’s a little leap I didn’t make mentally for a while. What’s so surprising about a blue egg from a bird? Robins (the ones we get in North America) lay blue eggs. And most people have seen brown eggs from various kinds of birds, including chickens, so depending on breed, breeding, and other things (genetics and biology are rarely as 1+1=2 as standard mathematics!) you can get eggs from chickens which come in colors widely colored as brown like a good chocolate bar, white as those mass production store bought ones (or as white as typing paper, and laid fresh this morning from the, say, leghorn hen in your flock, depending), and a blue approaching robin’s egg blue (but maybe not quite so saturated). And then from there, kind of like mixing paints (but even more complex) are the other options you can get... brown and tans ranging between a really dark (ok, post-sunburns?) skin tan depending on how much white and how much brown are in the genetics, and then from there, adding a blue twist to the gene pool gives you greenish eggs!

So, ok, I wanted blue eggs from at least one of my gals, at least eventually. But I also wanted birds which were going to be less than cannon fodder for the local predators when they free range—since we have the space, I’d rather let them go do their thing than try to enclose a large enough area for me to feel comfortable with the mental stimulation and not-bored-ness and not overgrazing and not overcrowding socially in a run. Oh hey, it’s probably a good idea to explain what I mean by a chicken run (ok, I liked the movie but the movie title is a play on an actual term). In an eggshell, the chicken run is the enclosed area for the birds to go and hang out in which isn’t the actual coop... think of it like a house (the coop) and the yard in which the kiddos (or doggies...) are given access to for good health reasons (exercise, potentially for food, say if you have wild strawberries or grasshoppers or ... depends if you’re feeding chickens or kiddos), and just to not go nuts from being stuck in the same old confines going stir crazy or getting on each other’s nerves and getting in fights). We do have a sort of half-run for the flock, it’s roughly roofed and walled on the sides attached to the coop, but is open on the other side. In really unpleasant weather, the chickens can at least hang out in there instead of never leaving the coop. They also have one or two other spots in the yard they like to hang out in less than optimum conditions.

One of the reasons we (I mostly, the chickens are kind of my baby and Doc just gets dragged along for the ride, although he might phrase it differently), anyway the reason the chickens are free range instead of having a huge run includes my lazyness/cheapo-ness. The effort and expense of enclosing an area large enough for about 20 birds to my satisfaction would be a pretty big deal. Going at it half-heartedly would not be a good idea, if I didn’t get it pretty well fortified, it just means that, if a fox, raccoon, opossum, or other predator got in with them, then there are bunch of freaked out panicked chickens flapping and running around but unable to escape (unless I managed to enclose or build perches only available to birds but chickens can’t fly super well and raccoons and other stuff can climb well...). The cliché ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ sort of comes to mind, as well as brief pictures of mangled chickens. So I decided if I wasn’t going to try to use something stronger than chicken wire (so a bear didn’t decide to just walk through it) and wasn’t going to sink serious fence posts, as well as burry at least a 3 foot wide strip of chicken wire along the inner or outer edge of the coop to discourage digging under the fence, and secure that to the fence, as well as cover the entire top with chicken wire like a roof to keep hawks out (and the hawk thing isn’t at all a random phobia, Doc has a story to tell on that one, it involved a severed bird leg)... well, to sum it up, I decided that letting them at least have a flea and hide chance was better than essentially packaging them up for easy capture.

We’ve gone through a few coops in the last few years. We started with a Tractor Supply Co. coop from a kit... and while we still have it, I wouldn’t recommend it for durability or water proofness. It’s been covered by a tarp and plastic most of the time. It was only big enough for around 3 chickens. Then there was the coop that Doc built with incredible ingenuity out of pallets and a truck topper thingy (ok, it’s the thing that goes on the back of a pick-up truck that makes the tuck bed an enclosed space with a roof about in line with the cab’s roof, and with the windows on the side, and the flap door in back...those things. I used to think they were camper tops but I think that’s something else now? Anyway, you know what I mean, I hope). That was good for probably 15 birds maybe, I never actually did the math and measurements, but it had some drawbacks (the door, for the most part) due to the limitations of the materials. And this will be our second winter following our second summer with the current coop. It’s esssentially 8 feet ish by 8 feet ish, and was built by the husband of a friend of mine through where I used to work for their flock of chickens. We added a bit more chip board stuff to the walls, and a bit more chicken wire and stuff, and now we have a pretty sturdy coop with 3 walls mostly made from that chip board stuff (think chunky spam plywood), one with chicken wire sturdily covering it, a shingled roof, and no floor. Well, ok, of course the inside isn’t, like, an oubliette or a black hole or anything like that. Before we moved the coop there, we scraped the ground basically level, put down chicken wire and fine gravel, and then the coop, and then when the coop was in place, we put a nice layer of sand down on top of the gravel. The sand drains better than sawdust, which means it doesn’t get so nasty or make frozen ice blocks of wet poopy sawdust. It just makes piles of poop along under the rungs where the chickens roost and poop all night. Then I just go and rake them near the door, and shovel them out... it has been working well so far!

Anyway, going back to me figuring out what chickens I wanted, I also wanted something cold hardy, because I wasn’t planning on trying to really heat the coop in the winter. With our solar panels, there’s no way we’d be able to run heat lamps, and just the thought of trying to figure out a stove in there without the chance of any sort of issues with smoke inhalation if things go wrong while I’m not in the coop or costing a kidney and a limb steered me away from putting a wood stove into the coop. Also, if you heat the coop, you better be sure you can heat it consistently ALL winter. It’s like this, if the chickens don’t have a chance to ease into the cold weather, their bodies don’t make an effort to prepare. So the day you forget to check their stove one last time before bed time, or you forget to turn on the heat lamps, or if you have typical utilities and the power goes out, suddenly those chicken bodies which aren’t really ready for a night at say, about 20 below freezing (or 10 degrees Fahrenheit, either way you want to say it) aren’t feeling too happy about it. Frostbite, death, and at the least, misery come to mind as results. So, instead of that sort of worry, effort, and paranoia about the coop catching fire with the birds locked in overnight or something like suffocating the birds with poor chimney venting or something, I went for hardy birds, and for a well insulated and draft-resistant coop.

Speaking of which, I was looking into adding a new breed last spring, and was emailing questions to a local-ish breeder of them, and their response to my queries on the chicken-popsicle avoidance issue was that if the chickens are protected from the elements and from the wind, a healthy well fed chicken of normal size (not a bantam-the ‘smaller-sized’ versions of some breeds, in some cases, think soda can with neck and head, feathers, tail and legs) produces 5 Watts just by living, so it sort of puts off its own heat. I presume the feathers hold most of that to the body. And on top of that, I figure if there are pheasants (not native) and turkeys (native) making it through the winter here, birds of that shape can probably do it especially if they have a bit of an advantage, such as a nice sheltered location like a coop, and food and water provided (and the logical things like not being one of the breeds which, for example, is known quite accurately as a ‘naked-neck’ or similar things like that).

So I went for breeds which were known to be cold hardy. And we actually ended up with what I call “trainer chickens” because I found some on Craigslist for el cheapo ($3 each) which were adults. Did I mention that when we did get chickens, we were kind of faced with the fun time of finding suitable, affordable, adult chickens? Remember that heat lamp versus solar panel issue? Same thing for getting eggs and an incubator, then keeping them under a heat lamp until they got big enough to face the big scary cold summer nights on their own. That brings up the next idea I wanted in at least some of my hens: the ability and tendency to go broody. A lot of breeds have actually lost the idea of “Hey, I should keep putting eggs here until I have a bunch, then carefully sit on them, care for them, and nurture the little balls of feathers that come out.” That making little chickens out of eggs thing is called going broody. A lot of the breeds which are optimized for egg production over other things don’t actually do that... they just lay an egg and move on with life. That way you don’t lose egg production when the hen is thinking of starting a family. We wanted to be able to make more chickens “old school.”

In addition to the going broody thing, if you want to have eggs that make chicks, you’ll need a hen AND a rooster. Hens will lay eggs whether or not they’ve been hanging out with a rooster, but the eggs won’t develop unless there’s a rooster in the mix. Roosters also protect the hens (and ok, an angry chicken doesn’t sound like much until you look at a grown rooster’s spurs... and I can tell you about my stitches one day). Some breeds have more aggressive tendencies, others are a little less likely to be too much to handle. And once you have a hen that broody, I suppose there’s actually a work-around if you don’t want a rooster in your flock: you get fresh eggs from a hen which has hung around a rooster. Some of our birds came in that way, and then we put them under our broody hen when we sort of triggered her broody instinct by putting a whole nest-full of fake eggs where she liked to lay eggs. A hen often doesn’t care where the eggs she’s sitting on came from, once she decides to sit on them, they’re HERS. Ralf, our white shepherd mix found this out with her first batch. True story, but I’ll write it elsewhere. (Spoiler, the chicken won). Another thing to consider with roosters, as well as with hens, is the comb shape and size... pointy and narrow bits are very prone to frostbite. Nice tight little ones are much less likely to have issues with the cold, but don’t do so well in the super hot temperatures. Luckily, this isn’t Arizona.

I’d finally narrowed it down to maybe some Austrolorps, Orpingtons, Buckeyes, Easter Eggers, preferably at least one Ameracauna (not Americauna, that’s just a spelling twist to make Easter Eggers sound fancier and more expensive... I think I’ve got the letters right, one of them is a registered breed with the group that moderates chicken shows and stuff, the other is just a fancy name for mutt, not that there’s anything wrong with mutts), not the Araucana (because like the Ameracauna it lays blue eggs, but unlike them, it has a lethal gene so about 1 in 4 of certain pairings just don’t hatch...). Maybe some other kinds. What I ended up with was the trainer chickens on the el cheapo price scale.

Our first chickens were some ‘spent hens’ a lady was selling because every two years she rotates one of her flocks. A real quick chicken intro here: A hen sits on about 10 eggs or so, and if she’s really pumping them out, she lays 1 egg a day. So either it takes her 10 days to get a nest ready to sit on, or you can add them or somehen else puts hers in, too, or maybe she stole some, but anyway, when she hits her goal number, she starts sitting on them. It takes 21 days for them to hatch. And then after about 18 weeks, you might start getting eggs. And then at about 2 years (about! remember, it’s not exactly a science), a hen hits what I call ‘eggopause’... I’m not sure I’ve actually hit a specific term for this, other than she ends up dropping in egg production to about 1/3 or less what it was. A hen which laid daily might only lay once to three times a week. That called a ‘spent hen.’ So a lot of people who have chickens, especially if they want to make a profit or even just pay a bit back towards the feed and supplies as a hobby and sell eggs, they often will rotate flocks. Spent hens get ...recycled. Some people eat theirs, some people give them away, or sell them. This particular lady couldn’t face eating them herself (whether or not she did the final act, she couldn’t eat them), so she sold them cheap on Craigslist (not many people pay big money for run-of-the-mill spent hens) and told herself they might be getting a good life... Luckily, ours did pretty well, all things considered. I haven’t had a chicken hit the 8-12 year life span yet, but those birds, Gertrude, Molly, and RoticerieSam/Fantastic Egg Layin Sam (long story) didn’t get the chop simply because they had biologically slowed down. I’m pretty sure, looking back, that one of them introduced me to the ...unjoys of chickens bred for massive production and sale of chickens, which I can only think of as along the lines of but maybe not quite so yucky as puppy mills. I’ve had a few chickens fall oddly ill, and I’m pretty sure at least some of them have had congenital issues.

Now we’ve reached a seriously long introduction, this hopefully lays a foundation for other posts to build on.

Hm, p.s. Yes, we name our birds. They’ve all had names. Yes, we do eat them occasionally. Yes, we do kill them ourselves. I do most of them, Doc has done a few. I pluck and gut and process them. Doc often cooks them. Yes, it’s not fun, but I can’t face looking at a bird, who’s got a name and a personality, and saying ‘today you die, but I don’t have the guts to say it to your face and do it myself.’ I’ll pay you the respect of not sweeping the unpleasant stuff under the emotional rug.

Some of our birds have been taken by predators. We have battled the dreaded coon. Some of our birds have shown up with injuries at the end of the day, some have recovered with rest and what care I can give them, some have not and I’ve given them the last bit of mercy and dignity and love I could do, with a sharp ax. Some of them have just never come home one night. But I’m pretty sure our birds have had some pretty fun times out in the woods and shrubs, scratching, pecking, hunting, and being a chicken. Some of our birds have been with us since the first winter, others I’ve held in my hand as the little tiny cute ball of fluff baby chickens are.

Oh yah, they eat stink bugs and for some reason, a good number of our birds are intimidated by earth worms...