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.