Well, the chickens seem to have calmed right down. The old and new flocks are still not integrating, but I do believe the pecking and squabbling has all but come to an end. Even Gabrielle, who was suffering the brunt of it, seems to be more or less off the hook now.

Proof of that fact is that she is finally putting herself to bed every night, so all we’re having to do is head out and shut up the pop hole after dark, rather than retrieve her from the roof of the coop and slip her in among the other chickens.

Considering we’ve had them less than a week I think that’s fairly impressive.

This could be just a lull, though. Our first three chickens didn’t develop any kind of pecking order until they started to mature and grew their combs. That’s when they start laying eggs. By my reckoning our new birds are still six or seven weeks off that, so in a couple of months things may be very different.

For the time being, then, we’re going to enjoy the relative peace and calm, and keep a close eye on proceedings.

Related posts:

1. We’re getting some new chickens
2. How cosy is a chicken coop?
3. Chicken nibbles

The new chickens are not getting quite the beating I was expecting. Despite the fact that we are keeping our three new and three old hens together in the same compound they are still acting as two separate flocks, but nonetheless the pecking and squabbling has almost come to an end.

Each group is being mutually ignorant of the other.

Sundown is still a little bit problematic. On the second night, which was the first on which they put themselves to bed, we found one chicken half out of the pop hole, with its head in the hen house and its bum on the ladder. Another was roosting on one of the wheels of the coop, and the third was on the coop’s roof. Last night – second night – things were better with two of the new chickens making it into the coop with the three old ones. Gabrielle, though, still went and put herself up on the coop roof, tucking her feet underneath her to keep them warm.

I’m hoping that tonight we’ll get a full house. Literally.

I don’t know what goes on in there over night, but the new ones are still getting herded into the nest box by the time we open them up the next morning.

Either way, so far it’s been a lot easier to integrate three new hens into the flock than I’d expected. Long may it continue.

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1. Introducing new chickens to our flock
2. How cosy is a chicken coop?
3. Peace has broken out in the coop

Our new chickens are here! We picked them up yesterday afternoon and brought them home in a cat basket. I’m ashamed to say it, but we have already fallen in love with one of them and, despite the fact that we insisted we weren’t going to give any of them names, she has one.

We settled on three Rhode Rangers in the end, largely because we used to keep them on the farm when I was a kid, but also because they’re good layers. They should average 320 eggs each in their first year, so the three of them combined will more than pay for themselves with close to 1000 eggs between now and next spring.

A Rhode Ranger chicken

The breeder had suggested three Black Rocks instead, and they’d all been caught and caged ready for our arrival, so we did end up leaving them there (and feeling a bit mean about having done so). I’m glad we did, though. These ones are so much prettier.

We kept them in the greenhouse all afternoon (it’s still cold, so they didn’t overheat) and then put them into the coop last night when the three other birds had gone to bed, sitting them on bars by the door. By this morning, when we opened them up, the new ones had been corralled into the nest box and the other hens had taken up the whole of the rest of the coop. The old hens flew down into the compound as usual and then stood looking up menacingly from the bottom of the ladder as the new ones gingerly looked out.

Gabrielle chicken

As we expected the newbies are getting fairly savagely pecked by our three existing hens.The one we gave a name to – Gabrielle, on account of her dodgy eye – came out of the coop this morning with blood on her comb, and this afternoon she has some on her beak. Things are improving, though, as the day goes on, and at least the new ones aren’t hiding under the hen house all the time any more (they would have been hiding in it had we not closed the door).

The fighting will continue as they work out who is top chicken, but I’m hoping that it won’t go on for much more than a few days. Fortunately we’re both working from home tomorrow, so we can keep an eye on them from the window, but I suspect it’s going to be a bit fraught.

Nik and Gabrielle chicken

Related posts:

1. The new chickens are settling in
2. January 2010 egg count shows how our chickens are declining
3. We’re getting some new chickens

Our poor chickens. They don’t know what’s coming. We’ve arranged to pick up three new birds tomorrow to add to our little home flock, effectively doubling the number of hens in our garden. I suspect we’re going to have a bumpy few days as they settle in and work out who is top chick.

Of course, we’re not getting rid of Gerry, Barbara and Margo just because three newcomers are on the way. After a disappointing winter it looks like they’re starting to show more interest in laying eggs, and pretty much since the start of March we’ve had two eggs a day, every day. They’re still not up to full speed, but it’s an improvement. February was another terrible month, of just 29 eggs – the same as January this year and significantly less than February last year.

February egg count

I think we’re going to have to keep a close eye on all six birds when the new ones arrive as it is pretty much inevitable that there will be some pecking and bullying as they try and establish a new pecking order (that’s where the phrase comes from).

We’re probably going to get three Black Rock, and we’re not going to give them names this time around.

We learned our mistake last time: chickens are poultry, not pets.

Related posts:

1. January 2010 egg count shows how our chickens are declining
2. Introducing new chickens to our flock
3. Peace has broken out in the coop

Now and then our hens lay us a soft egg. Most often it takes them by surprise and drops out in the middle of the night when they’re perched on the roosting bars.

When that happens, the shell is soft enough for it to slip straight through the roosting bars and into the litter trays so we don’t find it until we clean them out at the weekend. Today, though, whoever laid the defunct egg managed to do it in the nest, so it landed safely and had nowhere to run away to. That meant we could pick it up.

We’ve never held one before, and I can tell you now it’s a curious thing. The skin is rubbery and very pliable. So much so that you can safely squeeze it with your fingers and it feels like a balloon full of water. The actual surface is rubbery and powdery.

The rubbery soft egg can be squeezed

On this one there is also some evidence of the egg not having formed properly inside the hen, leaving one end wrinkled and creased.

Fortunately it’s not something to be overly worried about as it’s a fairly rare occurrence in our little flock, but we’ll certainly be keeping our eyes out for any more.

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1. Introducing new chickens to our flock
2. Scrambled eggs
3. January 2010 egg count shows how our chickens are declining

I‘ve counted up the eggs our chickens laid in January. All in, there were 29, which is an improvement on December when we got only 25. Here’s hoping for a better February.

29 eggs, bought in the shops, would have cost about £8.20 (at £1.70 for half a dozen free range) so the hens have paid for themselves, but still it’s not a great number.

When we’ve had a few more months of this year I’ll go back to drawing up the graphs I did last year to show how their laying is progressing through the seasons, but with only one month to count there’s not much point just now. Instead, here’s a comparison between 2009’s egg count for January, when our birds were around six months old, and 2010’s January count, when they were about 18 months.

Number of eggs laid by three hens in January 2009 and January 2010

It isn’t great, is it. We got about a third the number of eggs this January just gone that we did in January last year.

Or, to put it into context, one hen last year could have laid about the same as all three combined managed in the same month this year.

I think we should expect a similar decrease month on month for every direct comparison we make between 2009 and 2010.

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1. We’re getting some new chickens
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3. The final egg count for 2009

Reading up some more on chickens, body heat and so on after yesterday’s experiments with thermometers in the coop, I’ve found an interesting story about British experiments involving chickens, bombs and the Cold War.

Basically, the UK wanted to be able to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in northern Germany that would be detonated in the event of an advance by Soviet forces. That’s not to say it wanted to do it – just that it wanted to be able to. The idea was that they could be buried by some agent or other, who would then leave the scene as the devices ticked down to destruction, about eight days later (or when tampered with, whichever was sooner).

The trouble was, if you wanted to plant your bombs in the winter the timer became unreliable in the cold weather, and so a way needed to be found to keep them warm on the inside. The long and the short of it was that they discounted the idea of heavy insulation in favour of a chicken.

The poor bird would be shut inside the bomb with enough food and air to keep it going for eight days, during which its body heat would be just enough to keep the bomb from seizing up in the cold.

The project was codenamed Blue Peacock. Unfortunately that wasn’t because they also considered putting a peacock in the device, which would have been a great flamboyant twist – it was just a follow on from another bomb called the Blue Danube.

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1. How cosy is a chicken coop?
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3. Eden Project chicken coops

How cosy is a chicken coop? Not very, it would seem. And there was I kidding myself that when we closed the door on our Omlet Eglu Cube the three of them would bunch up together and generate a little sauna for themselves.

Well, the revelation came this week when I bought a little wireless temperature sensor online. Very cheap for what it was – about £8 – so I wasn’t too worried about putting it out in the coop to see how warm the chickens’ collective body heat actually managed to keep their house.

On the first night, as I shut them up, the gauge was reading 4.9 degrees Celsius (40.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Four hours later – midnight – it read 5.4 Celsius (41.7 Fahrenheit). They’d hardly be sweltering, would they. Last night, the last time I looked at it, it had got down to -1.1 Celsius, and I suspect would have gone lower before morning.

Poor things – in nature they’re jungle animals, not backyard pets for the northern hemisphere.

What we don’t know, of course, is what the temperature would have been had the door been left open all night. For all we know it could have been a good three or four degrees lower, in which case the difference is greater than we think.

Still, at least that explains why they don’t seem to care about standing around in the run through all weathers, as long as they don’t get wet.

I’m guessing most of the heat is trapped by their feathers and doesn’t get out into the house at all, and certainly you can feel it when you put your hand under a wing. Either way, this could well be why they’re laying so few eggs right now.

I wouldn’t want to get my bum out and squeeze out an egg in this weather, either.

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1. The new chickens are settling in
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3. The chicken bomb in our garden

We love our Omlet Eglu Cube, and so do our chickens. It’s easy to maintain, easy to clean, and looks great. We chose it precisely because it is a low maintenance way to raise hens, and because nobody offered anything like it.

Until now.

The Eden Project has started selling a range of self-sufficiency products through its online shop, including a couple of plastic chicken houses. They come in two sizes – small, for two birds and medium for four – and their biggest plus-point is their environmental credentials: they’re recycled.

Entirely.

The plastic shells are the melted down and reformed remains of old computers, food containers and so on and, because of plastic’s epoch-defining longevity, should last… well, a lifetime.

The only thing that puts us off is the look. To our eyes they’re more than a little like a rolling-lid communal bin you might find behind a block of flats.

If you can get past the looks, though, they’re a cheap introduction to chicken keeping, with the cheapest two-hen model undercutting Omlet’s entry level ‘Go’ by around £70.

The medium house, which will provide a home for four hens (and is thus more directly comparable to the Go), costs £279 plus £12 delivery. None of those prices include the optional £99 run, though, which to our mind is essential for the safety of your hens.

* Delivery charges quoted are to our local area – Essex.

The Eden Project hen houses have clever rotating openings on the sides to let you regulate the ventilation, which is a feature missing from the Eglu Cube, where the vents are a fixed part of the moulding. They also have a ramp for entering and leaving the coop, in contrast to the Cube’s ladder, which even after 18 months of living in it still causes our hens some concern.

So, is it worth foregoing the looks and paying a little more for an environmentally conscious option? The answer is probably yes, and we’d love to try one out to see how it stacks up against the market leader.

We do love our Eglu, though.

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The chickens love their kitchen scraps, but they make a terrible mess. Like a dog with a rat, if we don’t cut it all up (or send it through the blender) they shake everything they pick up to try and make it smaller.

That’s fine, except that when half of it goes flying off across the run and they’ve eaten the bit in their mouth they seem to forget about the rest and leave it lying around. Sometimes for hours.

So we’ve bought them this new feeder, which has little bars that they need to put their heads between to get to the food. Hopefully it should stop them scattering it all around like confetti as any shaking and flinging will be contained within the feeder. It should mean we have less chance of a mouse invasion.

It’s early days, and they were a bit reluctant at first, but after some practice runs with a handful of corn in the bottom of it they’ve got over their initial trepidation.

At £8 all in, including postage, it was an eBay bargain. And brand new, too.

Barbara with the new feeder

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1. Introducing new chickens to our flock
2. We’re getting some new chickens
3. The chickens and their cold