Too Many Chickens!

(Broadcast 2/22/2103)

I feel the need to give an update on the sick chicken I spoke about a few weeks ago. Gentle listener, you will be happy to know that she is doing well. Her legs seem to be improving, and I am even getting quite skilled at getting her beak open to dump vitamins down it. So, it may have looked bleak a few weeks ago, but things have gotten decidedly sunnier.

However, there is one development that is less than stellar. In my original broadcast, I said that it was Henny Penny who was having the health issues. I said that based on the information I had at the time. Unfortunately, this was information that I had gotten from myself, and I appear to be unreliable. Or at the very least, I am best at telling chickens apart when they are standing next to each other. We had a brief period recently where the snow had melted enough that there were spots in the yard where the chickens could forage. I let them out, and it became apparent to me very quickly that both Barred Rocks were rather light colored, and neither of them was particularly bossy. This bothered me, so I went inside and looked at our patient in her quarantine. She seemed pretty dark, color-wise, and I then had the horrible realization that Henny Penny was as healthy as could be, and it was Boss Chicken who was actually the sick one. You may or may not realize that Boss Chicken is my favorite, pain though she may be. I know having a favorite is a sure way to bring about trouble, and here’s big trouble. Her demeanor when I first noticed she was sick was patently un-Boss Chicken-like (but of course, she was sick), and it was dark out, so I made the wrong identification. I am sorry to have mislead you all, but I wanted to come clean about this before I wound up on Oprah having to cry in front of the nation. Though, that seems like good publicity, so if you want to rat me out to Oprah, hey, go for it.

Henny Penny, not sick, but annoyed with the lack of privacy.

I have made my peace with the fact that my favorite is not well, but like I said, she seems to be improving. If there weren’t so much snow on the ground, I would be taking her out for physical therapy in the yard. However, right now she would mostly be working on tunneling skills, when walking should be the focus, so we’ll have to wait for a thaw. In the meantime, we got her a dog crate so she has more space, and I did provide her with a stuffed animal to keep her company. She mostly sits on it while squawking at a near-deafening volume. This is a chicken who was born to boss, and the stuffed animal just sits there and doesn’t follow any directions. I go in and visit as much as I can, but I do have to go to my job most days. I imagine calling in chicken is not smiled upon in my workplace, so for now she will have to amuse herself.

What a dull sidekick.

I had some people from the local 4-H group come by to show them the chickens and talk to them about potentially chicken-sitting if I need to leave town. While I gave them the run down on Boss Chicken, there was an egg in her crate. I mentioned that the vet said not to eat her eggs for a while, since she had to get the anti-inflammatories out of her system. I said I felt bad about wasting eggs, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them. The main 4-H guy suggested that I just feed them back to her. I have fed eggs to my chickens before, usually ones that crack because they froze. I’m getting less creeped out by this concept, but it still feels weird. The idea of just feeding her back her own eggs was both genius and sinister. When an egg is spread out over all the chickens, it’s like the firing squad all having blanks but one person. You don’t know who’s eating her own egg. I would totally know who was eating her own egg this time, but I went and did it anyway. She went absolutely bananas for it. I suppose the big thing was having a whole egg to herself instead of fighting five other chickens for it. I think I will get more comfortable with this as time goes on, but maybe not ever feel totally o.k. about it. When I went back in to check on her and her entire head was covered with scrambled egg, that didn’t help either.

I knew going into this chicken experiment that there would be ups and downs. There have been a lot of ups so far, so I guess I was due for a down. And even this down is looking sort of up lately. I’ll give her vitamins, keep an eye on her, and let her run around outside as soon as the snow clears, which I think will be August. Is this too much work to put into a chicken? Some people probably think so. These people don’t know what it’s like to look a chicken in her beady little eyes and realize, this thing is only even looking at me because I am holding a stale old piece of bread. That’s love.

So refreshing.

(Broadcast 2/15/2103)

Chickens, like most things in this world, tend to not listen to me. I have an o.k. time accepting this, since after all, they are chickens. They do give us eggs, and so I cut them a little slack about not following my instructions. But I think life would be easier for all of us if they’d just accept that I have a few ideas about things that might work.

Take for example, going into the coop at night. When we first moved the chickens into the coop, it was summertime, and quite nice in the evenings. I can understand why they might have wanted to hang out on the roost in the run. However, doing this at night also struck me as putting up a billboard advertising a chicken dinner to the local nocturnal carnivores. They were protected, but it seemed like good practice to get them sleeping indoors. So how do you do this? I did it by going out every night after dark and putting them in the coop by hand. The first night was the hardest. Not because I felt bad about doing it or anything, but because they had lined themselves up on the roost in order of alternating colors. Yellow chicken, black chicken, yellow chicken, black chicken, yellow chicken, black chicken. It was kind of adorable, but adorable does not trump safety, so I took a photo for posterity, then picked each of them up and put them in the coop. The next night, I did the same thing. The third night I only had to do it with four of them, as two had figured it out. Around this time, a friend told me I was wasting my time wrangling them and they would figure it out on their own. I have always felt that the chickens look to me as their god, and so I chose to be a benevolent and helpful one, and thus continued to show them the way. After about a week, they had it down. Their benevolent and helpful god smiled upon them.

Neat freaks.

This same god has really reached his breaking point with the laying baskets, though. When you start looking at coop designs, there are loads of coops with really beautiful nesting boxes. Many of these allow you to just pop open the top of the box and get your eggs without having to open the coop at all. They jut out of the coop on one side, and function like an egg vending machine (as much as the chickens do). I knew the limits of my carpentry skills though, and instead went the route of using 5 gallon buckets for nesting. I was also going for “easy to clean” over “nice looking,” as I had a pretty good idea at that point that chickens were going to befoul anything they come near. People speak highly of buckets, and they’re cheap. “Oh you just go into a bakery and ask for them, they give them away they have so many,” was the line I heard often. Well, as an introvert, sometimes paying $50 for that bucket without having to talk to a stranger is preferable to just waltzing in and asking for free buckets. The Bucket Situation started to look bleak, until I remembered my friend Karyn ran a cafe. I emailed her and she said yes, they had buckets, and boy would they like to get rid of some. She said whoever was working would be overjoyed to clear out some space. So, I worked myself up to it, and told the guy behind the counter Karyn said I could have some buckets. He got a huge smile on his face, and eagerly asked, “How many do you need? Please, take them!” I took a few, some for nesting and others for chicken feed storage, and we were in business.

The chickens seem unimpressed with both the buckets and the lengths I felt I had gone to get them. When they first started laying eggs, they did it wherever the urge struck. I had to crawl under the coop a few times, and even wound up using a golf club to reach some in the far corners under there, which is the most I have used a golf club in years. Eventually they decided to keep it in the coop, but not the buckets. I took plastic Easter eggs and filled them with dirt (for heft) and put them in the nesting buckets to give them a hint of how this should go down. No dice. I can’t put the chickens in the buckets like I did with the coop at night, since I’m usually not around when they decide to lay their eggs. Their preferred spot to lay is either between the two buckets, or next to the roost, which is all but unreachable to anyone who doesn’t have ridiculous monkey arms like myself, and even I sometimes have to really stretch to get them. I suppose as long as they have a spot they like, they can use it. They tend not to poop where they lay, so that’s good. Not until I started writing this did they show any signs of using the buckets, and then almost immediately 4 of them used one bucket. So, anything to make me look bad seems to be the system. And then I wrote that other line, and they went back to laying out in the open. Chickens, man.

Making a liar out of me.

The last problem I had was with getting them back into the run after letting them out in the yard. Boy do they love the yard, and I can’t blame them, but safety calls, and so they have to go back in after a while. I used to have what I called my “chicken stick,” which was the wooden rod from our closet. I would hang out with it while chicken-sitting, and I felt like a shepherd, or a wizard, or a guy with a big stick. When it was time to go back in, I would use the stick to steer them back towards the coop, and then funnel them into the door. I probably looked ridiculous, but it worked. Then I bought a bag of mealworms at the feed store as a treat. For the chickens. This has thoroughly changed the dynamics of our relationship. If they so much as hear the bag crinkle, they won’t leave my side. I’m like the Pied Piper of chickens. So now, I let them do their thing, and when it’s time to go back in, I get the worm bag and they chase me back to the coop, and then fight over the handful of worms I throw inside. I think I have finally found a language they speak. This doesn’t work for everyone, though. I tried bribing my son with these worms but his language is still a mystery. And definitely don’t throw a bunch of them at your boss while requesting a raise. I don’t think I can stress that enough. But you know, chickens don’t listen to me, I don’t see why you should.

Spiderman demonstrates the “chicken stick”/ignores my pleas to stop poking me with said chickenstick.

(Broadcast 2/8/2013)

I was looking forward to snow this year, which is very rare for me. It wasn’t so much that I was excited to go out in it, but I was very excited to see what sort of footprints turned up around the coop. I figured this would give me some sort of indication that all the measures I have taken to protect the chickens have been working. There are a lot of critters where we live, and they pretty much all agree that chicken is delicious. Not half a mile down the road is what amounts to a raccoon graveyard, which most people just call route 110. The raccoons don’t seem to have an easy time of making it across, but I know they’re out there. On a recent hike, my mother-in-law saw a fox hanging out fairly close to our house. You know when you walk by Subway and it’s like getting punched in the face with bread smell? This fox was close enough that if the wind blew the right way it would have been like that for him, but with chicken whiff. In my own travels I have seen weasels and fisher cats, both just a couple of houses down. But with the snow came no evidence of anything poking around the coop, except bunnies. I feel like I’m tempting fate by even bringing this up, but so far we have been lucky in terms of predators. This may change. I would imagine it will totally change. The word probably just hasn’t gotten out about the chickens yet.

Look both ways before crossing, please.

There’s a farmer on our street who has sheep and chickens, and he told me some stories about the things that have tried to eat his animals, and it got me pretty nervous. On the other hand, he also has so many animals that it must be like a neon sign for varmints. The smell of potential food permeates the air, and they descend upon his farm. I like to think that the aroma of big game down the road draws a lot of the fire away from us. It probably doesn’t work like this in reality, but this is how I sleep at night. Well that, and remembering that I set up an electric fence.

Do I feel like chicken tonight?

What you find out from reading about chicken predators is that often we worry about the wrong things. Sure, there are coyotes and weasels and snakes and possums and raccoons and maybe bobcats and definitely hawks and owls and I’m sure I’m forgetting some but they are all there just waiting to eat my ladies, but the number one killer of backyard chickens is dogs. We batten down the hatches expecting the big bad wolf to blow the coop down, and meanwhile Fido comes loping through like Genghis Khan. It’s definitely something to worry about. We do have dogs in the area, but the immediate ones are a small yappy one that’s usually tied to the porch across the street, and our next door neighbor’s labs. The labs do tend to wander into our yard from time to time, but they have never shown any interest in the livestock. When they appear, it’s almost always to leave us a present on the lawn. I’d rather that than them killing the chickens, and I like these neighbors, so I’m not going to sweat it too much. But what’s cause for alarm is the size of these gifts they leave us. Seriously, I’d say they’re human sized, but they’re bigger than that. Hills Like Brown Elephants. One day one was deposited at the end of the driveway, and my parents came to help out in the yard. I found my father standing in the road, staring at it, speechless. He turned to look at me, but still could only get it together enough to point at the monster and squeak out, “Who?” I pointed at the neighbor’s house. His eyes bulged out of his head, and I realized he now thought that a human had come over and done this. “No, no, the dogs,” I said. They don’t eat our chickens, but what DO they eat? I know the point of warning people about domestic dogs is that you don’t expect them to be as murderous they are, but I have a hard time shaking the idea that these guys aren’t actually killers, they just need a spot to go, and since I spend less time on my lawn than their owner, I’m the easy target.

“I think I’ll go next door and bestow unto them my feces.”

Predators are out there though, and I haven’t been doing this for very long, so I’m sure I’m experiencing some beginner’s luck. There was a hawk a while back that ate an entire family of wrens that had nested on the side of our house, and washed them down with a big helping of bunnies. This sort of thing is one of the reasons I like to be out with the chickens when they’re loose. I can only do so much, but at least I’m one more set of eyes on the sky. When they’re in the coop, my hope is that they’re secure, but animals can be crafty, or in some cases, just really strong. Two years ago there was a warning in town about some bear sightings. The wisdom about bear proofing your coop is that if a bear wants your chickens, a bear gets your chickens. That seems easy enough to prepare for. The rest of the time, I will stay vigilant. You can have my chickens when you pry them from my cold, dead hands, neighborhood dogs.

Body by chicken.

(thanks to vintageprintable.com for all the images)

(Broadcast February 1, 2013)

I came out one morning, and while hanging the chickens’ food under the coop, noticed that someone had laid an egg under there, in a hard to reach area. I took the stick I use to hang their food and tried to roll the egg towards me. I could only seem to get it to move to the side, and it rolled all the way across the ground, right into Henny Penny. Henny Penny? What was she doing under there? Well, it seems she spent the night under the coop in temperatures in the teens. My immediate worry was frostbite, but she seemed fine. But why was she under there? I reached in to pet her, and she tried to move, but one of her feet was balled up and she wouldn’t step on it. So that probably kept her from going up the steps into the coop at night. Not sure what else to do, I grabbed her, let the others out, and brought her inside.

The egg was back where Suzy Creamcheese is.

I set her up in a box with some pine shavings, food, and water. She ate fine, so that made me a little less worried about her overall health. The foot bothered me, though. I had heard of something called “bumblefoot,” and based on the name, this seemed like it might be something she had. Looking it up, it’s a common issue where chickens get little abrasions on their feet which get infected. Makes sense if they run around in dirt and rocks all day. How do you fix it? If it’s not too bad, one remedy I found was to rub hemorrhoid cream on it. We didn’t have this, and I dreaded having to go buy it. What’s worse, buying hemorrhoid cream, or buying hemorrhoid cream and saying, “This isn’t for me, it’s for a sick chicken?” I didn’t want to find out.
Luckily, we also had bag balm on hand (so to speak). That checked out as a suitable fix, so I greased up her feet and went to work.

With some more research, it seemed she didn’t show the classic signs of bumblefoot, so I ditched the bag balm, and made a vet appointment. I asked my son if he wanted to go with me, and his response was, “You’re taking a chicken to that place?” I told the people at the vet he said this, and they said, “You have no idea how many chickens we see. As a matter of fact, she’s in there with a duck right now.” So take that, snarky 4 year old.

The vet checked her over, and everything seemed good, except for the foot problem, obviously. The outlook there wasn’t so good either. The vet thought it was most likely Merek’s disease, which affects chickens’ legs, but the only way to test for this involves a dead chicken. Another problem with Merek’s is that there’s no cure, and it’s often fatal. We discussed the options and I went home with a sick chicken and some anti-inflammatory pain medicine to give her.

Henny Penny, a few weeks ago when her legs were good (center)

You may have had the experience of trying to give a cat a pill. This is frustrating and painful, usually for all involved. Let me now tell you how easy giving a cat a pill is compared to trying to medicate a chicken. With cats, there are ways to get their mouths open, even if you have to resort to prying. Chickens have a beak that is pretty secure. You need a professional safecracker to get that thing open. My safecracking skills are weak, but I somehow got the medicine in. Remarkably, she seemed a little better when I went to check on her later. She was standing up at least, which seemed like a step in the right direction.

My mother-in-law lives with us, and has to pass the chicken quarantine on the way to her room. She got involved in the rehab, and looked up an ailment that causes chicken foot and leg problems due to a need for riboflavin. How do you get riboflavin into a chicken? With liquid baby vitamins. Of course, this is an even bigger dropper than the one from the vet. I also have experience with getting vitamins into a baby, and as awful as that could be, again, it was easier than getting vitamins into a chicken. I somehow did it, and it seemed like she might even like this stuff. A couple days went by, and I swore she was looking better. She stood up a lot more, and even some of her fight came back. She’s gotten well enough that she has tried to escape the last few days when it’s been dropper time. So this all seems good. Without knowing for sure what the cause is, we can only hope to keep her comfortable. I think we have succeeded with this. If this is the end of the line, I know I’ve given her a life that would make a lot of chickens jealous, but I think she’s still got some time. She really does seem to be improving. She will have to be kept away from the other chickens in case it is Merek’s, but we’re going to get her a stuffed animal to keep her company. Or maybe a bunny. There’s probably room for a few more animals in here, right?