Our Pet Chickens

We have carried out most of our original plan to bring the started hens over to my parents' place to add to their flock. They'll be selling eggs soon.

For a few different reasons, we decided to keep three hens here at our place. Two of them are very, very friendly and curious. They run toward you when you come outside and follow you around to see what you're doing. And they talk to you. More like warble loudly. It's so funny. The third is very docile. She used to let the kids pet her - not so much anymore. But they're the three that my kids are attached to. Oh, who am I kidding - we're all attached to Miss Curious, at least. That's the name of the most sociable one. She explores everything and is unafraid to strike out on her own without the other chickens. And she is the most like a puppy with the way she follows us around.

The other two are Georgie (we used to call her "the second curious hen", but she needed a name) and Dovey (the submissive one).

It's fun to have them around and not have to be worried about the rooster.

When I put straw down on our strawberry patch, they were in heaven. They like to scratch anything loose like mulch. So even though they'd been walking around on the strawberry plants right before that and should have known that there were no bugs or anything else tasty to eat there, they were powerfully driven by their instincts to scratch in the straw and try to find things to eat.

What I Have Learned About Roosters

When we started having problems with our rooster being aggressive, I thought we might be able to curb his bad behavior. Well, I hoped. When it kept going and got worse, I started researching.

You know what? Mainstream sources of farm-related information are not interested in roosters. If you search extension-service information and animal science departments of universities, you will find almost nothing. Really, all I ever found was that veterinarians can surgically remove the spurs from a rooster. That's it. Maybe I missed something. But it appears that conventional, official, mainstream advice now is "Don't keep a rooster." But yet I know of many people who keep (or have tried to keep) a rooster. There are two others we can hear from our house. My parents had one for a while. My co-worker has one. A former classmate has one. People do this. Apparently we are way out there, man. Totally alternative. Crunchy.

So, without the university/extension sources I wanted, my best sources of "published" information were Internet discussion groups for people who raise chickens. Read enough on those and you get the general wisdom. (Um, yeah, I suppose there are books. I do work in a library. But there again, I figured I'd be getting one person's opinion rather than study-based information from an organization. But, no, I didn't really look.)

So, from my experience and that of other regular folks who've shared theirs, here's what I've learned about roosters:

1. They can be sweet as anything when they're young. Once testosterone starts up, all bets are off.

2. Some roosters are nice and gentle. Some are mean and aggressive. They just are the way they are. You're not going to change that.

3. To increase your odds of a mild-tempered rooster, you need to get one from a line of mild-tempered roosters. Don't be surprised if your accidental rooster in a group of supposedly female chicks is aggressive. He wasn't bred for gentleness.

4. You cannot make an aggressive rooster stop being aggressive. You can make him see you, individually, as higher up in the pecking order and stop attacking you. But just because he respects you -- that doesn't stop him from attacking your wife, your children, your visitors, your puppy....

5. To stop a rooster from attacking you, you can pick him up and hold him firmly until he stops fighting. Or you can hold him down on the ground. (Uh, wear leather gloves and other protective gear. We did not try these methods ourselves, so I cannot tell you exactly what happens.) Or you can kick him or hit him with a stick. Yes, I know that sounds cruel. It feels cruel (well, if you're a wuss like me). But when you are literally under attack by a male bird who is protecting his hens or who is hoping to dominate you through violence (hey, this is nature), you will do what you have to to protect yourself or your kids. (And maybe you'll cry later. Or maybe that's just me.)

6. Once you have proven to the rooster that you are the boss with the above methods, he probably will leave you alone. But each person who wants him to stop attacking them has to take him on individually. Do you want your 5-year-old giving that a try?

7. Sometimes you have to throw in the towel. A farm animal is a farm animal, and you don't want chicks from an aggressive rooster, anyway. Those males will likely be the same. So if the benefit of the rooster isn't worth the trouble he gives your family, you've got to make a hard decision. Some of us believe in giving an animal a good life and a quick death, and then, as a friend of mine said, "repurposing" a resource.

Pullet Eggs

We've started getting eggs! Here's a picture of the first one I found:



The hen pushed the hay out of the corner of the coop and lined the spot with a few feathers, then laid the egg there. So then my husband and son got to work building nesting boxes! The hens mostly use those, but usually one egg a day is just laying out on the chicken coop floor. That can't be a very good mother hen, at least not yet.

Pullet eggs start out smaller than a normal egg. I should have taken a picture of the teeniest one we found. I wasn't even able to use it, because the membrane inside was so tough that it wouldn't break without shattering the shell. I decided a teaspoonful of egg probably wasn't enough to fight over.

At first there was one a day. We've worked up to usually four a day now, with ten young hens laying.



They are still mostly small eggs. We've gotten two that were like typical large eggs, but the one I've used had a double yolk; that makes an egg larger.

I've used them only once in baking, because it's hard to figure out exactly how many to use. I did measure a large egg in a liquid measuring cup so that I could approximate the volume when using the pullet eggs for cookies.

We're going to be bringing most of the hens over to my parents' soon, where they were always intended to go. But we're going to keep three hens, which theoretically will give you about 2 eggs a day on average, according to a chicken book I looked at. We've got a light on a timer in the coop now to encourage them to keep laying even though the days are getting shorter.

Those little eggs make cute, miniature fried eggs. Normally I can fit three large eggs in my frying pan, but on this day it held five:



The yolks are so orange from all the fresh greens the chickens are eating (and my red tomatoes, those darn birds). The pancake batter and chocolate chip cookie dough I made lately were deeply golden.

The Lost Hen

One of the hens is missing. She didn't come to the coop Friday night. It had been raining in the evening, so we thought she might have gone under some kind of shelter and not wanted to venture back to the coop once it was dark. So my husband and I went looking for her. We even brought our son out, since he tries to chase the chickens out of the woods and knows where they usually go. But we couldn't find her anywhere. A predator must have gotten her.

It wouldn't surprise me if it were the chicken we call the Lost Hen. There's one that loses track of the group. All twelve don't stick together all day, but they tend to stick together in small groups. The rooster usually has five or six hens with him; that seems to be all he can handle.

In any case, this hen loses track of the others. She realizes she's alone and starts crying. Once I heard this terrible chicken-wailing outside my window. I looked out and this hen was warbling with her beak open. Then she ran to the garden. Then after a few seconds, she ran back to our house, all the while making a racket. So I went out and said, "Let's go find the others." I persuaded her to follow me to the coop where, lo and behold, there were a half a dozen hens. Girl, don't you think you could have checked there first?

So that's not a bright chicken. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine a coyote could notice her if she got lost in the woods. I just hope that she didn't lead a coyote to discover that this is a great place to find tasty chicken.

Early Morning Rooster

Our rooster has learned to crow. I missed his first attempts, partly because I'm a great sleeper. But now he crows all the time. He crows in the morning while it's still dark. He crows around the time the sun comes up. And randomly throughout the day he crows. Sometimes he does it while he's standing right outside our open living room window, and that's a little startling. But it's cute.

I'm not much for getting up and outside early, but whenever I do on a beautiful morning, I'm glad I did.



Before school started I needed to get outside before it was too late, to let the chickens out. Now I just let them out as we're walking down the driveway to catch the bus.



Mr. Rooster used to be the nicest chicken of the bunch. He'd come up to us and coo like a dove and let us pet him and even pick him up. Then he got less sociable. Then he started flapping his wings at us when we'd approach. Okay, no big deal. He wants to show he's big and tough, but he knows we're the boss. We've always given the chickens a tap on the head or back if they tried to peck us to let them know we're higher up in the pecking order.

Well, now Mr. Rooster's mature enough to breed, and he's just started acting like he's thinking about a coup. He acted funny with my husband just yesterday. Then today he bit me hard on the foot for no reason; the chickens do peck if you have something interesting on your body, like a ring or a paint splatter, but they don't normally otherwise. I have a red mark on the top of my foot now. Usually their pecks don't really hurt, they just surprise me. This was different. So I ran at him and tried to give him a kick, but he is fast. I think the most important thing is to chase him and make him run away, because he does that to the hens. So the current plan is to be prepared that he could be agressive and do something each time to show that we are still, in fact, at the top of the pecking order. Carry a big stick, perhaps. These chickens are afraid of big sticks despite the fact they've never been hit by one.



Mr. Rooster is so beautiful; my photos don't do him justice. And he is too much of an individual for us to want to eat him. So we want to keep him. It would be neat to have a hen actually hatch chicks (although I know getting that to happen can be highly challenging). And someone I know has a barred rock rooster with a nice temperament. It is possible. I hope we can keep him in line.

Hand-crafted Hay Bales

We planted our orchard in an alfalfa field. The alfalfa between the trees remains. But you can't drive a tractor and baler between the trees. And we needed some bedding for our chickens, having nothing else without purchasing it.

So my husband borrowed a weed cutter from his brother and has been cutting it by hand. It's like swinging a golf club.



Then he and the kids have raked it up and hauled it in the wheelbarrow. We had a hay pile most of the time while we had many chickens. But now we don't need so much bedding with just a dozen chickens in the coop. So my husband wanted to make litte rectangular bales somehow to store the extra.

He invented a manual haybaler:



It's a hinged frame made from scraps we had lying around. He and the kids would pack lots of hay into it, and he'd hold the kids' hands while they jumped up and down to pack it. They thought it was fun. Then my husband would tie twine around the bales and dump them out.

So now we have a few haybales stacked for sometime later when we need some bedding.



We'll probably just mow the hay with the lawnmower for the rest of the season since we shouldn't need it.

Chicken Chores

Our days of intensive chicken-care chores are over. Every morning and every evening we've been spending about 45 minutes feeding, watering, replacing bedding, and letting the chickens out/putting them in/adjusting their windows.



First, we would get their feeders out - no easy task when they flock around your every step and bite you when you reach for their feeders. Then we would clean out the feeders, then fill them.



Then we had to get them back in, which was the craziest time of all. I've told you that we had to fake them out, pretending to set them in one place, then quickly setting them somewhere else so that chickens weren't underneath.

Once they were fed, it was time to clean and fill the waterers. They like to roost on them.



Then, if necessary and if we had enough time, we'd put down fresh hay for bedding.

Boy, I sound like I'm complaining! Really, it was a good experience. We've wanted to have animals, and it was good for the kids. But this was new for us, and I am feeling glad that now there are just a dozen future layers here - they'll be a breeze to take care of.

Today was butchering day. And a friend of mine said not to post pics, but...

I'll just show you our good set-up, nothing gory.



A plucker is an awesome thing. I wouldn't want to butcher chickens without one. Ours, so luckily, is borrowed from a relative. If you get your water to dip the dead chickens into to just the right temperature, most of the feathers come off with the plucker. It also pays to have a heater going outside for the water. We had a turkey fryer base (again borrowed) powered by a 30-pound propane tank, topped with a stock pot of water. We also had a hand-held propane torch for singeing off the pin feathers. These optional things make butchering much easier.

But it was still an all-day job for 4 adults and 3 children, with an additional adult later in the day. We're so tired. But I'm proud of my kids toughing it out; I was so squeamish as a kid that I'd hide in the house and just heat the water. Mine were a little troubled ahead of time, but they were fine with it when it was happening. And they did their parts of the labor, for the most part.

And now we have a freezer full of chickens.



They aren't all ours - we're just storing some of them for right now. But we've almost 2 dozen chickens for ourselves to eat throughout the coming year.

Will it be worth it in the end? I don't yet know how the costs came out. But it is nice to know how your meat was raised.

Chicken Progress

They're getting bigger!



Our Cornish crosses are getting pretty big. We've been rationing their feed for a while, but they grow so rapidly. We'll be ready to butcher the roosters pretty soon.

Oh, and the rationing. It makes them crazy. Chickens that are bred for being meat birds will eat until they get too fat and die. Some of ours have apparently already died of heart attacks; they were fine one moment, then keeled over the next. It happens to these kinds of chickens. So we ration their feed to slow their growth a bit. But then they're so hungry from being on a diet that they mob us when we go in at feeding time. I've taken to wearing pants and gloves, because they'll bite me when I go to grab the feeders or set down full ones. We have to fake them out when we set the full feeders down, too, because they'll run into a big group underneath where we go to set the feeders. So I lean one way with it, then when they all rush there, I quickly set it down somewhere else. These chickens have had all the sense bred out of them.

The Barred Rocks, on the other hand, have much better instincts.



They're more interested in going outside than the others, although most of both kinds have come around to the idea. They all were chicken about going outside in our new run at first. (Ha, ha, but I suppose that kind of thing gave rise to the expression.) Now the Barred Rocks tend to hurry out first, and they really like to graze and forage. But some of the others do, too. And the kids like to feed them pieces of alfalfa and grass.



Do you see the black chicken that's lighter than the others? We ended up with a rooster among the layers. That must happen fairly often, because my parents ended up with one among their Orpington layers last year, too. What's funny is that this rooster is the nicest chicken in the bunch. Now, he's pretty much a baby still, because the barred rocks are more natural and they grow more slowly. He could still get mean and aggressive. But so far he's friendly; he comes near us and lets us pet him and pick him up. The hens are very skittish.

A Bird on the Boot

Whenever I go into the chicken coop, one of the chicks hops onto my boot.



Now, I can't be sure if it's always the same one, because they look so much alike. But it's always a small one, so it might be.

For the first several days that we had the chicks, my youngest child kept feeding them out of her hand. She noticed that it was often a small one that came to eat out of her hand, and she decided it was always the same one. It's hard to know.

But now this chick keeps hopping on my boot and either looking up at me or pecking at my boots. The spots are interesting to them; they're always looking for something interesting to eat. But this chick has also hopped up and pecked my knee when I've crouched down, and it's tried to hop up to peck me when I'm standing, too!

I'm not sure if it thinks I'm bringing it food or if it thinks I AM food.

If it keeps this up when it gets bigger, I'm going to have a problem. I'm counting on it getting fat and lazy, as is typical for this breed.

They Grow Up So Fast

We've had our chicks for about a week and a half now. So they're probably 13-15 days old. They are not so cute anymore! They are losing their fuzz and growing awkward feathers. Their feet are huge.

They are, however, still very entertaining to watch.

We actually had them in a small wooden box in our garage at first.



Then after about a week, we moved them into the (basically) completed chicken coop.



It was so nice in there before we moved them in, I wanted to just hang out in there. I wish I had smellovision to share with you how marvelous it smelled! New wood and fresh hay and grass.



The chicks love it in there.



There's so much room for them to run around - and they literally do, wings flapping. They also sometimes run AT each other, chests out, and jump at each other with their claws! Then they stand there eye to eye until one ducks down and walks away. It's amazing to me that they are already that aggressive. Clearly they're establishing the pecking order.

A Big Day

So what would you guess we're building?



Maybe a concession stand?

A produce stand?

Does this give you any clues?



It's a chicken coop.




We got chicks today!



Am I lucky or what? I love chicks. They don't stay cute very long, but while they do, oh, are they sweet. My kids were thrilled that, for the first time in their lives, we actually got to bring chicks home with us, not just look at them in the store.



We got 87 of them.



75 are for meat: 25 for us, 25 for my parents, and 25 for my brother-in-law and his family. 12 are to expand my parents' egg-laying crew. Those are the black ones.

Yes, we've butchered chickens before. My parents raised a bunch last summer and we helped with the butchering. And we've occasionally chased their chickens into the coop at night. So we're not completely clueless about what we're getting into. But it will still be an adventure.

Good Eggs

I buy eggs from my parents, who have free-range chickens: beautiful Buff Orpingtons.

The best eggs in the world are farm-fresh from chickens that have eaten a natural, varied diet. Especially when the weather is warm and they're eating green things and insects, the eggs have so much flavor.

Two of my kids had never eaten an entire fried egg in their lives. They thought they were yucky. The first time they tried the free-range eggs with dark yellow yolks, they loved them and cleaned their plates. Fresh eggs also fry and poach much more neatly, so they look nicer, too.