Home at Last!

Two days after Christmas, I took the chickens out to the coop. It was a cold day and a colder night, so I worried about them and shut them in tight despite all I’ve read and heard about giving them adequate ventilation (now that it’s warmer, both windows are open). They slept huddled in a pile wedged in next to their water bucket, but seemed none the worse for wear the next morning.

It’s finally warmed up and the sun’s out today so I took advantage of the thawed soil to readjust the fencing a little. The energizer quit in the rain two nights ago, but the battery’s fine, so I’m guessing I need to protect it from the weather. Once I have that squared away, I can let the chickens out.

I’ve had their chicken door open to the little run for a couple of days now, but they’re only now thinking about coming out, tempted by treats left at the bottom of the ramp and their first experience of the sun!

In Transition

By the time the chicks were five weeks old, they had thoroughly outgrown the tank and needed to be housed in something a little more spacious.

They're little chickens now, bantam size, and fully feathered.

Zen is getting very tall.

Rachel, hoping for a handout.

I had hoped to be able to transfer them outside to the coop at this stage, but they're still a little tender for our current Arctic conditions.

I rigged up a very inelegant pen in my unheated mudroom with a piece of drywall and the top I had made for the tank. They are enjoying their space, but it's pretty cold, even here.

Currently I'm keeping the heatlamp on at night and they huddle under it to sleep.

The weather's predicted to remain cold, with a string of single digit nights this weekend. I think I'll be keeping them in until after Christmas.

Growing Up

Last Saturday, I paused during a very busy weekend to take a few pictures of the girls. At two and a half weeks old, they have already changed drastically from the fuzzy puffballs of their first week and are well on their way to gangly adolescence. Their growth rate is really impressive--I can usually see changes day to day. Today I noticed Belle's comb reddening--a sign that she may be a he. I have no other Dominiques to compare with so we'll see.

Goldi's feathers are coming in and she's changing from blonde to buff.

Steve put a beginner perch in their tank and they vie with each other for the chance to use it. The chicken on the perch usually gets its feet pecked by the others! This is Zen, who as a Jersy Giant, is slow to mature and is a bit behind the others in getting her feathers.

Rachel (the speckled Sussex) is getting her speckles coming in on her shoulders and wings.

As soon as they mastered the perch, they started thinking about getting out of the tank which is only a foot tall. There's a lot of hopping and flying around when I take the lid off to feed them. They've yet to reach freedom, but Belle especially, makes it her mission to reach the edge of the tank at every opportunity.

Now, a week after these pictures were taken, they've been moved from the kitchen to my unheated sunporch because of the dust level (which blossomed in their third week) and their increasing discomfort in the heat. They seem fairly comfortable out there with two heat lamps despite the now-freezing outdoor temperatures.

We decided to insulate the coop and should have that completed this weekend. There's no electricity out there so I'm not sure yet when the chicks will move out, but they're growing fast!

Meet the Girls!

The day after Steve and I finished the outdoor run for the coop in October, I started calling hatcheries to get day-old chicks. All the hatcheries in Ohio had closed up shop for the season, but Privett Hatchery in New Mexico had chicks available.

The minimum order was 25, so Nancy, a friend from work who has a farm, graciously agreed to acquire 20-odd chicks so I could have my six! I had planned to get just Buff Orpingtons, but once I looked at the breeds that Nancy chose, I ended up getting a mix. Her criteria are the same as mine--dual-purpose brown egg layers that are cold-hardy and docile.

I took a chance having them shipped this time of year, and they came on a very cold day. They were sent in a small box with lots of ventilation holes and no insulation, so they were very lucky to have made the trip alive (and now after reading horror stories of chicks dying of cold in transit, I would not do it again). But they did make it, and they were screaming their heads off in the post office when I went to pick them up!

I had hoped to be able to keep them warm enough out in my unheated sunporch, but it was immediately clear that they were too cold, so we moved them to the kitchen and kept them in a stock tank under two heatlamps the first weekend. They are still inside, but down to one lamp. We’ll see how it goes.

I ordered all pullets, but sexing day-old chicks is an art and the hatchery only guarantees a 90% success rate. I won’t know for sure for another month, so for now I am assuming they are all girls!

Today they are 8 days old and their wing and tail feathers are emerging. Some of them are adept at reaching the “starter perch” that Steve made for them, and they’re also the ones that are eyeing the walls of the tank thinking about escape!

I’ve been watching them this week, and have worked out a rough pecking order although I’ve read that they really won’t get into it for another week. This appears to be true, because most of the pecking I’ve been witnessing has seemed more exploratory (does this taste good?) than aggressive (take that!).

This is Flicka who is at the top of the heap for the moment. She’s an Orpington, a breed that was developed in 1886 by William Cook in Orpington, County Kent, England. The buff variety which is currently the most popular was developed later from Hamburg, Cochin, and Dorkling breeds. They’re known to be quick to mature, and my three really seem to be the most busy and inquisitive of the lot. Of the three, Flicka is the medium-sized one, and it surprised me that after adding up the numbers for the last 4 days that she was the one that ended up on top.

Goldi is another Orpington and is the biggest chick of my group. She’s not the boldest, but spends a lot of her time stretched up peering at me and over the edge of the tank.

Rachel is a speckled Sussex, the most common breed in England from about 1850 to 1950. It’s possible that this breed was bought to England by the Romans 2000 years ago. The Sussex chicks were initially the most bold and curious during the first three days when I had all 29 chicks. Rachel was the first of my group to get tail feathers, but she’s mellower than the Orpingtons.

Belle is a Dominique, the oldest breed in the US. She looks black now, but she’ll end up with an indistinct barred pattern that can already be seen in her wing feathers. She’s the boldest one of my group--first to eat out of my hand and the first on the perch. The breed is known for liking to free-range and I can tell she’s contemplating escape!

Clucky, named by Steve in his proud family tradition of pet names (Scruffy, Scrappy, Chubby, Tubby), is the third Orpington and she came to me pasted up (which is what it sounds like). This is a potentially fatal condition, and I spent a lot of time cleaning her up and watching her the first couple of days. She’s been vigorous the whole time though, and now, although smaller than the other Orpingtons, she seems like she’ll be fine.

Zen, at the bottom of the totem pole, is a Jersy Giant, so although she may be low-ranking now, she’ll eventually outgrow the rest. Giants are the largest chicken breed--capons can weigh 20 pounds! They’re slow to mature, so that may be why she’s at the bottom of the heap right now.

All the breed info in this post came from:

Ekarius, Carol. 2007. Storey’s Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds. Storey Publishing, North Adams, MA.

The Big Chicken Rescue

Ten years ago, a tornado destroyed some of the buildings of the Buckeye Egg Farm near Johnstown, Ohio. The chickens in those buildings were all slated for euthanasia and initially I didn’t think too hard about how that would be accomplished. Turns out it was going to be by starvation or live burial (which was shown on the local news), whichever came first. The facility was giving chickens away to whoever wanted some. A friend mentioned it at work, and just like that I grabbed some boxes, dashed through the local feed store drive-through, and was off to rescue some chickens!

I had planned to get around 15 birds (not that there was much planning involved)--ten for another coworker who had a farm, and since I figured I’d lose a few (they’d been without food or water for a week at that point), I thought I’d end up with two or three. I thought with that number, Steve and I could put something together that wouldn’t require going to Chicken Castle lengths.

It was pretty chaotic out there. I joined a line of cars, and as I was busy punching air holes in the boxes, workers with no English were packing them in, so I ended up with twenty hens.

When I got home, I opened up the boxes on my sunporch (mostly unfinished and unheated with a concrete floor), put food and water down for them, and dashed back out to find a dog crate and maybe a pen. When I returned over an hour later, all the birds were still sitting in the boxes (these were factory farm hens--used to being crammed together, and now starved for a week and stressed by the trip). I took them out one by one and gave each one some water with a syringe, and then they came back to life. Once mobile, they trashed my porch in no time flat--I recently read that the transit time from beak to butt in a laying hen is just 2.5 hours. This I believe. I couldn’t find anyone to take more than the original ten that I had planned to give away, and two did die, so that left me with eight. I had spent most of my Hiram years working with bantams, and I had forgotten how big standard chickens are. A dog crate wasn’t going to cut it.

I brought the ten to be given away to work and they were released for the day in an unused greenhouse. They were quite the attraction and lots of pictures were taken!

I steeled myself for the expense, and went out with Steve the next evening to choose a shed. I figured I’d sleep on it and go out the next day to buy it. It would have been none to soon since by then, the birds were pretty darned perky and finding out for the first time in their lives that they could indeed fly. In the subsequent big cleanup, chicken poop was discovered on the 11-foot ceiling!

Luckily (I guess), a coworker of Steve’s decided she would like the chickens for her farm. She came out to get them, and my life went back to normal. I missed them though. They were starting to act like real chickens before I gave them away. I had thought a life of close confinement would have damaged them, but they seemed completely mentally recovered in just a few days, and I found them quite charming. Both sets quickly started laying again and had good lives. I know at least one of them was still alive in 2007. Even though I hadn’t thought it through, it was nice to have done a good thing.

In the Beginning

I am currently in the process of setting up a coop and acquiring a (small!) flock of backyard chickens, and since it already promises to be an adventure like so many of my previous chicken experiences have been, I thought it would be fun to write a blog about it.

Although backyard chickens are now suburban chic, they wouldn’t necessarily seem like something I should want, so some background is in order.

While I now live in rural north-central Ohio in an agricultural area--soybeans to the north, corn to the east, cattle and sheep down the road, I grew up in a heavily forested suburban area. My only exposure to chickens prior to college were the two banties that lived next door for a summer. They were small and white, and at least one of them was a rooster because I remember it crowing all the time. I was much less enchanted with them than I was with the Pekin ducks that preceded them.

I went to Hiram College in the 1980’s near the end of the heyday of its famous field biology station, the brainchild of the late “Prof” James Barrow. The large, forested property was originally a farm, with many of the original buildings retrofitted to keep animals. The options of animals to study were nearly endless--from red foxes and coyotes to squirrel monkeys to crested screamers and emus. I was initially disappointed to be assigned to work in the chicken building, but it ultimately turned out to be a good fit. I grew to enjoy their quirky personalities and mostly-programmed behaviors and also began to appreciate their incredible variety and genetic plasticity--second only to that of dogs.

The chickens seemed to be a special love of Prof’s and he had amassed quite a collection. I learned about the various breeds, fed and watered them every day before classes while school was in session, cleaned their pens on the weekends, and worked on a research project of my own involving rumpless (really!) bantams.

So all through my college years and beyond, I had it in the back of my mind that someday when I was settled, I’d get chickens of my own. The last time I saw Prof in 1991, while I was still living in an apartment, he told me he had chickens for me when I was ready. Fast forward to 1996, and I finally got a house in the country. The chickens have been put off for a long time. There is no infrastructure here, and I had visions of getting a large flock of bantams. I couldn’t afford a big shed and am not handy enough to envision building one from scratch.

Over the years, I have seen chickens roaming around the neighborhood and admired them at fairs. I’d think for awhile about getting some, and then put the thought away. The tipping point finally came last month when our “sustainable operations” newsletter at work was sent out. It had a big article about how backyard chickens are now all the rage with lots of links to websites offering pre-fab coops. I thought, “Wow, now I can really do it.” and also “If I don’t do it now, I probably never will.” So I finally made up my mind. I also modified my original idea of a large bantam flock to three large dual-purpose hens while I see how it all works out.

Another issue, which I imagine will be my biggest problem, is that I have allowed my property to revert to a more natural, wild state with the intention of attracting wildlife. It worked and they are here, even more so this year with the fields across the road coming out of the conservation reserve program and going to soybeans. If it eats chickens, I have seen or heard it here. Coyotes? I heard them howling right behind my house last month. Red and gray foxes? I’ve seen them both in the yard. Ditto weasels, raccoons, possums, red-tailed (chicken) hawks, great-horned owls, the neighbor’s pit bull, and my resident skunks. Philosophically, I believe the place belongs to them (except for the pit bull)--I have welcomed them after all, so I do not envision waiting in the chicken yard at night and shooting coyotes. So my answer is to construct the chicken facilities with security in mind.

I searched the web for coop options and had nearly settled on a “hen hoop,” a sort of mobile Quanset hut with attached pen that can be moved around the yard. The idea is still attractive, especially since most of my yard trees are ash and will need to come down when they succumb to the emerald ash borer, probably within the next 5 years. A movable coop would be handy to allow the tree removal equipment room to maneuver. But the hoops are breathtakingly expensive for the square footage you get, and a short journey up the road resulted in a larger shed-type Amish-built coop for a third less money.

So now the Chicken Castle is here (embarrassingly large for the three hens it will hold) and the next step is to construct a small predator-proof run--the “inner compound” where the hens can stay if I will not be home in time to close up the coop by dark. My boyfriend Steve has designed this and we started putting it together last night. I plan to put up an “outer perimeter” of electric poultry netting powered by a solar charger. This, for now, is the best I can do.