Blagger » Keeping chickens

Should we let sleeping hens lie?

Nik — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:50:26 +0000

One of our chickens loves the outdoor life even more than her sisters. We haven’t given her a name: she’s just one of four called ‘chicken’. Anyhow, every night when the other hens go up the ladder and bed down in the coop she goes up and beds down on it.

We head out there at ten to make sure they’re all safely on their perches and she’s invariably hunkered down on the roof. The only two times she’s gone in to sleep of her own accord was when it was raining. So we take her down and pop her inside with the others, to the tune of much squawking and flapping of wings.

But should we, and how much longer will it continue? We’re not closing the coop door at night at the moment as the sun is up earlier than we are, and the chickens rise with it. The last time we shut them in at night they greeted the 4am dawn with a terrible row that went on for three hours until we finally let them out. Keeping the door open solves that problem but clearly doesn’t encourage this little chook to head indoors to bed unless the weather is particularly bad.

So what do we do in the winter when it may be dry but freezing? We have to shut in the other hens then, so do we let her make up her own mind about heading indoors to sleep before the door is pulled to, or is she now so conditioned to us putting her in when the sun has gone down that she’s forgotten how to do it herself?

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Our little bruised chicken

Nik — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:45:56 +0000

The chickens are still not happy. One of them in particular. In short, the old chickens haven’t yet forgiven us for bringing home three newcomers. Rather than taking it out on us, though, they’re blaming the invaders.

Two of them are half way to being accepted, but one poor chook, the smallest of the three, is being pecked to bits. It’s lost the feathers from the middle of it’s tail, its wattles and one ankle are bleeding and now its face is turning blue as the bruises come out.

We’re trying all we can: we’re sectioning them off, shutting the old ones in early in the evenings, lifting the new ones out of the house when they take refuge… for that one poor little pecked chicken none of it seems to be working, and now I’m starting to worry that it’s not getting to eat or drink unless we’re standing beside it.

How can we teach it to peck back? Just once?

Our new hens are getting hen-pecked

Nik — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:37:29 +0000

The new chickens, poor things, are getting royally pecked to bits by the older members of the flock. They’ve spent the three days since their arrival hiding and perching, trying to keep out of the way of their tormentors.

Things came to a head today when one of them pushed itself so far under a log that it got wedged and couldn’t get out. I had to pick up the logs to free it, at which point four of the five older chickens all descended on it. In the excitement, big Bertha, the most vicious of our feathered ladies, accidentally laid an egg that clearly wasn’t ready to come out. The shell was all papery and it split open like a water bomb. The other chickens leapt in to gobble it up (one of them even slurping down the floppy shell like the skin of some custard) while the new ones beat a hasty retreat.

So I’ve removed the high perch and I’ve strung the raspberry netting across the compound, separating the new from the old but leaving it so they can still easily see each other.

It’s working so far. The new ones quickly realised they were safe and dug into a big trough of food like they’d not been fed for a week, while the old ones kept running into the netting, trying to get through and failing miserably. They kept on getting their combs caught.

They’ll still be sleeping together as we’ll be lifting the new hens into the coop at night, which hopefully means they’ll all get to know each other a bit better, but in all honesty, settling in these three is proving to be a lot more difficult than it was settling in the last three. Back then, I suppose, it was three new versus three old so the two sets were better matched. This time around it’s three new versus five old and the poor things are finding themselves seriously outnumbered.

Three new chickens join the flock

Nik — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 16:46:12 +0000

I didn’t think I’d be writing this again quite so soon, but we’ve added three new chickens to our flock. Another three Rhode Rangers, which have proved such a success for us. Poor things are out there now getting pecked as the flock of eight establishes itself a new pecking order.

Normally we’d shut them in the greenhouse for the day and then drop them into the coop when the rest of the hens had gone to bed, but there’s no chance of doing that now. The temperatures outside are pushing mid-thirties and it’s even higher in the greenhouse. Besides, it’s full of tomato plants.

So we’ve had to put them straight in the compound with the five established hens, who have quickly chased the incomers up onto the new high perch that I built the other day. They’re keeping them away from the food and water, so we’re periodically going in there and chaperoning them towards the drink. The poor things are parched and panting like they’ve just finished a marathon, as you can see in this video (sorry for the quality – I shot it on my phone).

We’re hoping that by morning they’ll have got to know each other a little better, but we’re prepared for a couple of weeks of pecking and squawking. That’s what it took last time, which we didn’t think was so bad.

We build the chickens a climbing frame

Nik — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 07:50:48 +0000

OK, so it’s not quite a climbing frame, but it does involve several different branches and a ladder, so it’s about as close as you’re going to get.

Our chickens have been doing so well lately. They’ve been laying like never before, and we decided they deserved more of a treat than just their daily portion of scraps.

We’ve had some long branches stacked behind the chicken compound for about a year now, having cut them from an oversized elm tree last year. They’re the perfect thickness to make a nice chunky perch for a chicken, and some of them are forked, so ideal as a support.

I picked the strongest of the forked pieces and cut it down to size so that after digging a little hole in the floor of the compound I could wedge it in between the floor and one of the roof struts, then secured the top with a single long nail. It wasn’t going anywhere.

Then I took another of the branches and laid it horizontally between the y-shaped join in the vertical branch and the lattice that they currently use to climb up when they want a better look down the garden. Again, I secured it with a couple of nails and then I tied yards of string around all of my joins to make sure they weren’t going anywhere.

It was surprisingly easy and all done in about half an hour, ready for testing by the chickens.

To say they loved it would be a bit of an exaggeration. To be honest I’m not sure they knew what to do with it, despite having a couple of similar perches much closer to the ground already. I’m hoping that after a few days of living with it they’ll get used to it, though, and head up there on their own.

Until then we’ll just keep lifting them.

Even our chickens are self-sufficient now

Nik — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 08:29:20 +0000

The chickens are more than paying their way now. We haven’t paid for chicken food out of our own pockets for a couple of months, which is another small step down the road to self-sufficiency.

Why? Because we’ve been selling our eggs. We have a good base of three customers who each buy half a dozen eggs a week. It doesn’t sound like much, does it, but with only five hens in our flock it’s all we can manage.

That chart at the top of the post shows how our egg production has grown this year. We’ve gone up from three hens (of whom two were productive) to five, all of whom are laying, and it’s paying off in more ways than one.

More interesting still is to compare what we’re getting this year with five hens to what our flock of three was laying through the first six months of 2009. The difference is pretty marked.

So, we’ve taken the decision to buy three more at the end of the month, and with a little stash of coins piled up on the kitchen windowsill from our egg sales, we probably won’t have to dig into our own pockets to pay for them, either. The chickens, quite apart from being cute and a nice addition to the garden, are now pure profit.

Of course, if they were smart they’d slow down on the laying, as the more they lay the more incentive there is for us to buy new hens with whom they’ll have to share their house, and we know from experience that they’re not exactly keen on new arrivals.

Margot the bow-legged chicken

Nik — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 07:30:22 +0000

One of our chickens is laying a double-yolker every day. It’s great for us, but I can’t believe it’s very comfortable for her, the poor thing. When you line them up against the regular eggs we’re getting they really stand out.

My suspicion is that the poor bow-legged bird is Margot as the eggs generally have a darker brown shell, which matches the colour of her ears. It certainly won’t be one of the Rhode Randers as they are still laying fairly small eggs, even in comparison to a regular hen’s egg, never mind a double-yolker.

Much as I wish she’d sort herself out, for her own comfort and well-being, part of me is secretly enjoying it as our scrambled eggs are wonderfully rich and yellow.

Barbara chicken falls off her perch

Nik — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:49:44 +0000

Poor old Barbara. One of our original three chickens, the world always did seem a big and frightening place to her. She spent a lot of time standing around and thinking, or hiding under the coop. We always said she would be the first among them to pop her clogs.

And so she has done.

In fairness, I think she’d been feeling ill for a little while. Whether it was the very cold winter that chilled her, or the arrival of the three new chickens that scared her, I don’t know, but in the last two weeks of her life she was quieter than ever, and often stood for hours at a time with her eyes closed while the rest of the chicken world went on around her.

About a month ago we had to do some serious bum cleaning on her, wiping her down and clipping away some of her feathers. We didn’t know at the time that that was often a sign that the end was nigh.

When the end did come, she just fell asleep.

And then she fell on her side.

Poor girl. Her legs were sticking out at a very awkward angle, but at least she looked peaceful.

The other chickens spent a bit of time looking for her after Rich took her out of the compound, going up and down their ladder to see if she was in the coop.

She wasn’t, of course.

I think they’re over it now, though. They probably don’t remember her, but we won’t forget her. She laid some lovely eggs, and so was so docile that she was a great introduction to chicken-keeping.

Is our chicken sunburned?

Nik — Wed, 05 May 2010 08:59:17 +0000

Has Gerry been spending too much time out in the sun? It looks like the poor thing has gone and got her comb burned. Normally a vivid pink, it’s started to peel, revealing new skin under the old.

The weather has taken a decidedly better turn these last few weeks (bank holiday weekend aside), so we took the tarpaulin off the top of their compound to give them more light. It should hopefully encourage them to sustain their currently excellent rate of egg laying.

They’re loving it. They spend hours laying out with their wings and legs stretched, soaking up the rays. Only trouble is, Gerry seems to have taken it too far, not that it seems to be troubling her.

There is one other possibility, which I think is quite unlikely, and that’s fowl pox virus. This is spread by mosquitos, of which we have already seen one indoors, perhaps from the river in the nature reserve. Either way, it isn’t serious, and likely to clear itself up over a few days.

Nonetheless, we’ll keep a close eye on her and the other hens to make sure it’s neither persistant nor infectious.

A monster month for eggs

Nik — Mon, 03 May 2010 10:21:56 +0000

April was an amazing month for eggs. In short: 120. We have never had so many in a single month before, and it was an increase of almost 100% over the previous month.

I didn’t do a count-up on here at the end of March, but it came to 67, which was respectable, considering three of our hens were only just maturing, while the other three were about half way through their laying careers, but by the end of April we were getting five eggs a day every day. Impressive indeed. That’s 35 eggs a week. Almost three dozen.

It takes us well beyond the 1100 eggs mark since we started counting in January last year. It was also the first month that we had more eggs than the same time last year.

Of course that’s too many eggs for us to eat on our own, so we have given some to one set of neighbours to say thank you for lending us a ladder, some to another set of neighbours to thank them for caring for the chooks while we were away one weekend, and of course some others to friends and family.

Even so, it looks like we’re going to have to put an eggs for sale sign on the gate post before too long.