January 6th, 2014 §
What a wonderfully evocative/apocalyptic name for this weather phenomenon affecting much of the U.S.! Central Virginia is being swirled into its embrace as I write. The temperature dropped 16 degrees in the last three hours, and the thermometer outside my kitchen window now reads 10 degrees at only 9:00 p.m.
This evening I turned on a red heat bulb in the chicken coop. As long as they have access to unfrozen water and plenty of food, chickens are just fine in low temperatures without supplemental heat—they snuggle close together on the roost and they are, after all, walking around wrapped in feather duvets. But with projected temperatures near zero with a wind chill warning, tonight I figured I would help them out a little bit by closing up their windows and heating their coop. It’s very rare that I use heat in the coop—in my climate it’s really not necessary.
If you’re considering heating a chicken coop with a light bulb, make sure the fixture is securely installed and not just precariously hanging. The risk of fire is too high otherwise. One of my friends burned down his garage when a light fixture he’d suspended over a broody box of chicks fell into their bedding. Imagine just how fast a wooden coop filled with pine shavings would go up in smoke should a lit heat bulb fall into the bedding. That would be one hell of a rotisserie!
I nailed my light fixture to a rafter and used cable clips to secure the extension cord that powers it to the walls, safe from being pulled down by either people and chickens. The set-up has worked great thus far, and even though I rarely use light or heat in the coop, it’s wonderful to have it there for these polar vortex situations! Which, by the way, and despite the howling winds, I am loving (from the warm coziness of my woodstove-heated snug little home). I have high hopes that all the ticks, squash bugs, harlequin bugs, bean beetles, etc. that plague my person, pets and garden will be totally obliterated in the next two days. A girl can dream!
September 20th, 2013 §
The chicks learned how to roost from their mother last night! Here they are when I opened the coop door this morning:
And here they are tonight around sundown, after a long day of free ranging:
Well, at least half of them absorbed the lesson…the other three are still bedding down by the door!
September 19th, 2013 §
Last weekend I cleaned out the chicken coop, a fairly onerous task that involves a tractor, snow shovel, air compressor, dust mask and goggles. Combine all those in your head with copious amounts of airborne chicken shit dust and pine shavings and you don’t need to see any photos.
The only reward for this task, other than the agrarian nerd pleasure I take in making a hefty deposit at the compost bank, is that once the coop has aired out for a day I get to fill it will two bales of clean pine shavings, scrub out the nest box, and return the bleached feeder and waterer to their chains, full of food, and well, water. It gives me no end of pleasure to make a beautiful, clean, and healthy home for all the creatures in my care. It’s something I remember from being a kid and having all sorts of pets that needed tending. It sure wasn’t pleasant to muck out the mouse cage, or the bird cage, or the fish tank. But once it was done the joy of seeing my animals in a fresh, clean home made all that dabbling in feces and urine pretty much worth it.
And today, I feel the same way. So I cleaned out the coop, and while I was at it I decided I was tired of the growing mess that was the broody coop in the garage. The six chicks were now chickens, and they made enough mess that the tray under their coop needed emptying every three days. And, in typical messy, wasteful chicken fashion, they’d spill their food out of the feeder, and it would fall under the screen only to incubate maggots. One day when I changed the pan it was so hot I couldn’t hold my hand to it—fermentation in action! Gross, right? So while the chicks were out ranging I broke down their coop and dragged it to the driveway, where I scrubbed it with hot water and bleach. And then I cleaned out my garage, vacuuming out feather dust and sweeping away spilled food and feathers.
These ready-made coops were some of the best purchases I’ve ever made. They were picked up by my dad, out of desperation, for $99 each on sale at Tractor Supply, on the day the guinea babies hatched and started running out of the dog crate in which they’d been born. It seemed like an awful amount of money at the time, but they’ve paid for themselves in the use I’ve gotten out of them. I’ve used these small coops for injured birds, to separate fighting hens, for broody coops, and to raise chicks. The materials and construction are pretty cheap, and I can’t imagine them as full-time homes for any animals, but they are great for the short periods in which I tend to use them. The design is good, and I really recommend them.
Once the broody coop was drying in the sun, I set up the “annex” of the big coop to house the chicks. This is the area you first enter when you open the coop, and where I normally store the chicken food and various supplies. It has only one window, so it gets much hotter in the summer than the larger part of the coop, which has two big windows for good airflow. But now that the temperature has dropped it would be fine for the chicks.
I spread pine shavings on the floor, nailed in a few roosts, and nailed up some chains to hold the feeder and waterer. Then it was all ready for the babies. Here you can see how the annex relates to the main coop. I figure it can’t hurt to have the older chickens getting used to the sounds of the chicks before I try to house them all together. It may stave off another bloody battle.
In their new home, the chicks were pretty unsure the first night. They kept trying to go back in the garage, where they’d been born. But I scooped them up and dumped them in their new home. Now, a few days later, they’ve figured out where the food is and are returning to the coop on their own in the evening. But there’s one problem: They don’t know how to roost.
I figure that because there wasn’t a roost in their broody coop, where they lived with their mother, they never got this important chicken lesson. For the last few nights I’ve checked on them in the night, and they’re sleeping like a pile of puppies, on the ground wedged in a corner. It’s kind of adorable except that it’s really not in a chicken’s nature to sleep in a pile past the young weeks of chickdom.
So just for an experiment, tonight I caught Dahlia and put her in with her babies. That’s her above, looking at her kids like, WTF, who are you? Then, like a proper chicken she jumped on the roost to sleep. I am hoping that she will have a talk with her children and teach them how to roost. I am not super concerned—after all, chicks that aren’t raised with broody hens eventually figure out how to roost. I am more curious than anything to see if Dahlia’s behavior can influence her chicks at such a late stage in their development.
Speaking of development, this morning I awoke to Calabrese crowing, followed by his young son Griz crowing in response. This went on for a while, back and forth. I am sure my neighbors love me!
September 17th, 2013 §
This is what the backside of the coop has looked like since late winter.
I’d thrown some netting up there when I decided to start free-ranging the chickens, and I wanted them to get used to being outside and coming and going through their chicken door before I let them totally loose. It worked, but since then this deer-netting and t-post pen has been used only to help capture the chickens to put them in the coop. Because the deer netting is plastic, I couldn’t weed-whack around it without destroying the netting, so the grass had grown up and through and sealed the net to the ground. Throw in a few tractor implements that I couldn’t move because the tractor was at my dad’s farm, and I had a real redneck mess and an eyesore that bothered me every time I looked at it.
But on Friday the tractor came back, so I could finally move the forks and buckets and get to work cleaning up this mess. I removed the t-posts and then started pulling up the netting. It was so grown in that I had to use my scissors to cut the grass away from the bottom edge of the net. Not really a fun job. But I got it all up and then mowed the area.
I couldn’t get my weed wacker started, so I had to cut the grass along the coop with scissors too. All this grass made for a nice tractor-bucket full of greens to juice the compost pile.
Then I had a clean slate to start setting up the dog kennel that’s leaning against the garage in the pictures above. I played around with a few configurations. Unfortunately I had two 10′ panels, and two panels that were only about 3.5′ wide. So a nice square pen wasn’t an option. Although the configuration I came up with bothers my sense of aesthetic order, the panels were free so I worked with what I had.
This was another one of the infinite jobs around here that would have taken two people about 20 minutes to do. But working alone I was at it for more than an hour, having to use shims and all sorts of other tricks to maneuver the panels upright and level so I could screw them together. And I totally torqued the tip of my thumb, trapping it between two panels while lifting them in to place.
But, injuries and annoyance aside, I got the pen up. I am living with it to see how I like it for a while, and if I decide it will stay I plan to dig some wire around the bottom so that I can have the chickens confined in there without worrying that they will be attacked. It’s not the most exciting or beautiful upgrade, but it’s an improvement that cost nothing but a few hour’s work and all sense of feeling in my left thumb.
August 6th, 2013 §
For the past week or so, the chicks’ new trick is to fly out of their broody coop when I open the lid to feed them or fill their water. At first they were shaky and tentative, but now they explode up the second the lid’s lifted, and fly from rim to rim, occasionally overshooting their landings and meeting the concrete garage floor. It’s cute, yes, but it makes a pretty ridiculous scene as I try to grab each chick and toss it back into the coop before another flies out before I can shut the lid. It makes me wish I still had the big garage brooder my dad put together for the guineas.
The only chick that has yet to fly out of the coop is the white Coronation Sussex. This bird is more stout than the others, which may be part of it, but I find it interesting that my homegrown barnyard mixes are more daring and precocious.
All these little flapping feathers definitely catch Tucker’s interest and provide a good training oportunity as I reinforce the concept that “the babies are to be protected, not eaten.” As you can imagine, this is a challenge for any dog, let alone one that I am asking to differentiate between unwelcome varmints and livestock. But I know he’s up to it, with constant reinforcement and vigilance on my part to help him succeed. Just after I took this photo my rooster and Cora started walking in the garage toward the coop. Tuck turned around and herded the older birds out the door. I would think this was a coincidence, except he did it each time the big birds tried to approach the broody coop. Very interesting.
The chicks, now four weeks old, have reached “the awkward stage.” Their baby down is quickly being replaced by prickly pin feathers, and their legs are now thick and scaley. But they are all healthy, and growing quickly thanks to their forays into the garden for free ranging. After having only raised chicks in a brooder, not with the help of the broody hen, I am noticing how much sturdier these chicks are. I attribute that to the more varied, natural diet they receive while free ranging, and to their being able to live a more natural chicken life, scratching in dirt and bug-hunting, much earlier than other chicks I’ve raised indoors.
As an unrelated aside, I just realized this is my 400th blog post at bonafidefarm.com. For some reason that number seems so big to me, and I am glad to have kept up with this journal for so long. I wonder if I will get to post #500 before getting fed up with country life?!
June 17th, 2013 §
Ever since April I’ve been hoping one of my hens would go broody and hatch some chicks. Why? Because baby chicks are some of the things that make life worth living, of course. That and I am seriously curious to see what kind of crosses would result from my Wheaten Ameraucana rooster over Black Copper Marans, Lavender Orpingtons, a Barred Olive Egger, and whatever mix Lilac and Iris are (Black Australorps and Mottled Java, according to their breeder).* Iris and Lilac are in their second year of lay, and it’s good to have younger pullets coming along to take over egg-laying duties. And finally, now that I am free-ranging the birds outside most days, I anticipate that at some point I will have predator loss and don’t want to be caught out with not enough laying hens to keep eggs in the fridge.
A broody hen is a wonderful creature because she manages all the care, feeding, and warming of young chicks. If you have ever raised chicks, you know that it’s a big, messy job to monitor their brooder temperature, clean up after them, keep them safe from drafts and predators, and make sure they get enough to drink and eat. So I told myself that the only way I would raise chicks this year was if a hen did all the work for me!
Last year Iris went unbreakably broody and I ended up giving her a clutch of fertile guinea eggs. She brooded them in a dog crate in the garage and hatched out and raised nine guineas. Here’s one at several weeks old, posing for its CraigsList portrait:
I got to watch the hatch and meet the still-damp keets, and it was one of the neatest days of my life. But this year, Iris has chosen to not do it again. Being trapped in a small cage with nine flighty, frantic, velociraptor-looking guinea keets was probably enough for her to sign off on motherhood forever. Not that I blame her—check out how those ravenous minidinosaurs are eying up their adopted mother’s toes while Iris pleads with her eyes for a Calgon moment.
The most time-tested way to induce broodiness in a hen is to let eggs accumulate in the nest box. When the hen feels a growing clutch beneath her, some hormone switches in her brain that tells her to buckle down and brood. She will remain on the nest, barely eating and drinking, and will often pull feathers out of her breast so that she can keep the eggs tucked right next to her bare skin.
For weeks now I’ve been letting eggs accumulate, rotating out the older ones after a day or two in order to keep some in the fridge. I also placed the infamous glass eggs in the nests to trick the hens in to thinking there were always eggs waiting for a mother. And finally, it started to look like a few of then hens were beginning to feel broody.
Oregano, my beautiful barred olive egger, was the first to show any sort of devotion. After she’d been on the nest about a week, I fixed up a broody coop in the garage and built her a cardboard brood nest. It’s best to have a hen incubate eggs and raise chicks in a quiet, private place away from the bustle of the main coop, where flock mates may see new babies as tasty hors d’oeuvres. I was waiting for nightfall to move her to her new home when one of my Black Copper Marans saw the nest was exposed and jumped up to sit on the eggs.
After dark, when I went to collect Oregano, the Black Copper Marans was still sitting tight on the eggs. One look and I got her message: She wanted a clutch of her own.
Oregano had assumed a broody position in the adjoining nest box. So I grabbed her and moved her and the eggs into the garage coop.
Oregano accepted her new nest and has stayed on it since Friday.
But the Black Copper Marans was still sitting on the glass eggs. And so I fixed up a second broody coop in the garage, built another cardboard next box, and last night moved her into a brood cage next to Oregano. So now I have two broody hens.
I have been saving out eggs for a week or so now, and when I get numbers I am satisfied with I will remove the glass and sacrificial eggs from under the hens and replace them with these fresh eggs. That way all embryos will start to develop at once, and all chicks will hatch at the same time. It’s a bit sad as the eggs are developing under Oregano, but their job really is to just “hold” the hen in a broody mindset until the more valuable eggs are introduced.
I wasn’t really planning on trying to raise two clutches, but at the end of the day it’s not such a bad thing. It means I can hatch more eggs, which is good as there is no way of knowing what the fertility rate is amongst my hens’ eggs. And, if one of the hens begins incubating and gives up, I could move the most valuable eggs to the other hen and have her take over. Thus, I am waiting until the same night to give both hens their eggs, and then we will see what happens! There is still a lot that can go wrong in the 21 days it takes to cook a chick, but I am having fun working with my broodies. If you’d like to know more, allow me to refer you to this excellent article by my favorite author on all things chicken, Harvey Ussery: Working with Broody Hens.
*A quick digression on chicken breeds and egg color: I have the right set-up to produce olive eggers, which, as their name suggests, lay olive colored eggs. To make a nice olive egger, you need a dark brown egg-laying breed (such as Black Copper Marans) mixed with a blue egg laying breed (Wheaten Ameraucana—my rooster). My Black Copper Marans don’t lay very dark eggs and I have no idea what sort of blue egg genetics my rooster carries, so I don’t suspect I will break any records with any pullets I hatch from that combination. But at the very least, I should end up with some sort of green egg, which is plenty exciting to me.
Now here is where it gets interesting. I have three eggs saved out from Oregano, my barred olive egger (the green eggs in the photo above). She does lay a very nice olive-colored egg, when she lays. By crossing her with Calabrese, and his blue egg genes, I may end up with a pullet that lays a really green egg, as opposed to an olive egg. But who knows, really? I have read about chicken genetics until I fell over from confusion and still am not sure what will happen. Mostly because I know nothing about the genetics of the birds I am starting with, other than their supposed breeds and what color eggs the hens lay now. And there’s always the possibility that I will hatch 100% cockerels and then the whole experiment is good for nothing but the freezer. And even if I do hatch pullets, it will be another year until they lay and who knows if I will even be in to chickens then!
January 25th, 2013 §
of the season. Up before sunrise yesterday for a very cold walk. It was six degrees here at 6:30 a.m. the previous morning. Winter has finally arrived, and I am straying from the wood stove only to fill the bird feeders and defrost the chicken water.
The neatest thing was seeing all the fox tracks in the snow. I haven’t seen a fox in ages and thought they’d ceded the yard to Tucker in their canine turf war. However, they left tons of evidence that they are very much still in residence. Here’s where they went under the chicken coop.
And poked around the clean out door, no doubt sniffing the delicious dinner sleepily roosting just out of reach.
And failing to gain entry, they hopped into the little run behind the coop to try their luck with that side!
But I have the nicest, tightest coop in the East, thanks to my dad and a heatwave construction blitz, so the fox had to look elsewhere for its meal.
It’s eighteen degrees and snowing again now, and looking downright wintery outside. It’s hard to believe that just a few days ago Tucker and I were enjoying 72-degree days and the sunrise at the beach!
