Chickens come home to Roost…probably

I have now been a chicken husbander for over three weeks- a time frame I can measure in the number of times I have had to clean their house out. 

Cleaning their house is no small undertaking. 

The nice bus driver from Chichester who sold me the chickens- and everything else (and even left me the packet of cable ties, because he could see how much I liked them)- built the coop from some old pieces of chicken coop that he found in a skip, and some old pallets. It’s an impressive piece of ingenuity and recycling, but it is not a brilliant piece of carpentry, ergonomics or chicken centred design. The coop’s main flaw is that the only access to it, unless you are a chicken, is by taking off one of the roof panels. The nice bus driver was 6ft 3, so it wasn’t too tricky for him to lean down into it to retrieve eggs or clean it out. I am not 6ft 3 and I have to use a stepladder and a stool to climb into it to clean it. So you wont be surprised to learn that the three times I have completed the whole process, complete with spraying red mite spray around the coop, with me in it, has left a very clear impression.

The predicted egg tsunami has not overtaken us yet: for a couple of days last week they laid six eggs a day, but since then it has usually been 4 but sometimes 2. I’m not quite sure what makes the difference. Some eggs are smaller and some are white, but I’m not really sure who is laying eggs when. I suspect that there’s quite a few of them who are freeloading-but impossible to tell which.

Eggman

The main topic of chicken husbandry debate, round here, at the moment concerns the license they should be granted to wander about outside their enclosure.

I confess to being a constitutional liberal, attached, at quite a visceral level to the idea that all beings should be allowed to enjoy wandering about, as the fancy takes them, to the extent that this does not bring them into conflict with the wellbeing of others. I think that Karl, the busdriver and his wife, must have been similarly disposed because he described to me how the chickens had originally lived in an enclosure, but, with their wings unclipped, they had almost immediately taken themselves out of the enclosure and taken to roaming about as they pleased. Karl described how much he enjoyed watching them do this, in the summer. I love it too.

Poor Ben- who never signed up for 11 chickens…I think he thought we might get 4- does not feel quite the same. And in fact I cannot fault his reasoning. He says that unconstrained poultry will

1) Be eaten by the dog

I think the dog is probably too much of a wuss. I think he can feel that he should want to eat the chickens but I suspect he also has a sincere respect for their sharp beaks and scrabbly claws. Having said that, he has caught up with them a couple of times, and got a mouthful of feathers. He spends a lot of time staring at them and if he looks too interested we yell “ROLLO DON’T EAT THE CHICKENS!” which he finds confusing and worrying. I don't think he will eat the chickens. If I was a betting woman would bet money, that he won't eat them. Not an enormous amount of money though.

2) Be eaten by a fox

My friend Kay from whom we bought the house, says she lost chickens here, to foxes. When I described the current arrangement she suggested a kind of sweepstake on  how many I would lose before Christmas. John, next door keeps his chickens in a pen behind electric wire…but then he says he has never seen a fox. But perhaps that's because of the wire. 

The thing is, if I put up an electric fence, then I will have to clip the chickens' wings if I am to have any control over which side of it they are on, and surely they are more likely to be eaten by a fox if they can't fly up into a tree to escape from him. 

3)Go in the road

There's no counter argument to this one, it would just be bad.

4)Make the place look messy.

The place is messy anyway, so this one is definitely not a legitimate concern.

Like the scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptiors encircle the heroes..

Earlier in the week, John from next door, came round with one of the chickens, to say that they were hanging out in his garden, with his chickens. I rejected his kind offer to round them up and throw them over the fence, saying I had been told that they would bring themselves home when it got dark, which they did…all except for the black and gold one.

I spent an anxious night worried about all the various things that could have happened to her. She is the boss chicken, after all and she is very beautiful. She was not back by the time I left for work, but later that morning, Ben texted to say that she had gone to bed with John’s chickens and he had thrown her back when she had started squabbling with them in the morning. She seems to have been contented to stick to our side of the fence since, so it clearly wasn’t so much nicer over there…a relief, as I had begun to imagine how it might feel if the rest of the family, one by one, decided they preferred it next door.

I would be interested in your opinions- experienced chicken keepers amongst you and opinionated non experts- what do you think? Should I clip their wings and put up a fence to keep them in? Or should they be allowed the run of the place?

"Yes, we have eaten all the seedlings you planted"

Sinister interest in the guinea pigs' eyes...

Meet the Chickens

Group shot

There are two of these white chaps. Apparently a floppy comb (red bit on top of the head) is a sign of stress. Sadly they still appear to be a bit stressed today.

Ben with our first two eggs: We Are Now Chicken Keepers

This one with a hairdo is called a Silkie- there is another one in white with a blue (yes blue) face

One of the two Frizzles

Well, thank you to everybody who contributed to the Meet the Meat Crowdfunding effort. It was very exciting to make it past our target. I love the fact that everybody is involved now- even if you are only in it for the bacon/cake.

Obviously the headline act is the pigs but I have decided to hold off on them until the Christmas holidays for following three reasons

1) I am getting so much pleasure from looking at websites selling modular electric fencing

and I will no longer have any reason to do this once I have purchased the fencing- and purchasing fencing is definitely preliminary to owning pigs.

2) Whilst we did acquire a dog in July 2013 so we had started work on the accreditation process for being Countryside People, owning pigs is an Intermediate Level Countryside People activity. (Owning horses and riding about on them is Advanced Level and killing things on a horse you own and ride about on is Advanced Plus) The Basic Level activity, before Pig Keeping must surely be chicken keeping.

3)If I got pigs now then I would need to send them for slaughter in April/May. So they would have lived through the cold and dark of winter, and as soon as it started to be spring I would have to send them off. That seems a little mean.(Am I revealing that I am fundamentally unsuited to keeping animals for meat?) I want to be able to think the pigs lay in the sun, enjoying life, not shivering in frozen mud. (Not sure if pigs shiver)

So this half term, I put my mind to acquiring chickens.

Now, whilst I had made it to the crowd funding target, I had, in fact only managed it by making a pretty sizeable contribution. I had a lovely time looking at websites selling bijou chicken housing, and poultry fencing and other equipment, but I could see that I was going to have to come up with some kind of plan, if there was going to be any money left over for pigs.

And that is where Preloved came in. I went there initially in hopes of finding a second hand coop somewhere local but the reality was so much better: it turned out that there were a quite a few adverts, not just for coops, but for entire flocks with all the stuff thrown in. One of them offered the whole set up for £200 under a sad picture of some cross looking chickens staring through wire- described as "bought by mistake". 

I replied to an advert offering 11 chickens and a house and asked the lady if she would sell us everything. She was a bit surprised, she had been expecting to parcel them out in bits, but eventually after a bit of consultation on both sides we struck a deal on the whole thing, chickens, coop, bags of food, drinkers, food hoppers: all of it...and she sent her husband Karl and his pal Dan round to set it up with me on Saturday afternoon.

It was a real pleasure to spend the afternoon with Karl learning all about the birds he was handing over and profiting from his superior fencing expertise. ("I just nail stuff together and if it stays then that's job done") He introduced me to the world of cable ties: a revelation. 

He and his wife had acquired the chickens whilst living in a tied cottage on a farm. They had recently moved to housing association property where the chickens took up more than half the tiny garden, and they were worried that they were miserable. Karl said that he felt confident that they were going to be happy in our garden, which was much more what they were used to.

There are 11 chickens.

Two Frizzles- which look frizzled- with all their feathers all fluffed up. They must be much less effectively insulated than the others. They are also much younger than the rest of the flock and apparently they had to be sprayed with special bad tasting anti-peck stuff to stop the others from bullying them, when they first arrived. They hang out together. 

Two silkies- a brown one and a white one. They have weird quiffs and they look particularly dinosaury. The white one has a pale blue face. 

There is a Black one with gold feathers around her neck. Apparently she is the boss.

There are two white ones and they are the only ones whose combs (weird red bits on their heads) are floppy- which is apparently a sign of stress. I am not sure why they are finding life particularly stressful. I have put some anti-stress drops in their water, but they are still flopping.

The other 4 are all brown- apparently legbars. They only have tiny combs, so they may be stressed too, like the white ones, but because I can't tell I'm not going to worry about it.

We have had at least two eggs everyday- today there were four. Karl said that they wouldn't start laying for a while because they would be getting used to their new home, so it's very exciting that they are laying.

Apparently you can expect an egg a day from young birds, like these..which is potentially 77 eggs a week. Which is a truly appalling prospect.

For now, though, I am thoroughly enjoying being a chicken keeper. I have even discovered a number (like 4 or 5) of chicken keeping podcasts..updated weekly...

I will update you next week, when hopefully the chicken sponsors will have given them some names.

Please do ask questions and make comments: keen to share! So keen!