Too Many Chickens!

(Broadcast 3/29/13)

Dear listeners, we’ve been talking about chickens for a while now, and I feel like we know each other. I’m finally comfortable enough to have this discussion with you.

Any new creature that enters your life brings with it its own unique forms of poop. When my wife and I first got a dog, we would delightedly email or call each other to report his bowel habits. “He’s been eating rocks again. It looks like cookie dough ice cream,” I’d say. Then we’d laugh hysterically about how we HAD to talk about poop. It was for his health. The dog walker notebook became a daily log of hilarity.

How’s YOUR health?

Kids are the same way. Not that the dog walker is chronicling the poops of children, though I suppose it’s possible. But poop is a window into the inner workings of little creatures who can’t tell you when they feel bad. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes they have a blowout in a restaurant so bad that it shoots out the back of their pants. Not that I know about this. I wasn’t so easy to gross out to begin with (unless you count the time my dad rented Blood Feast to watch while we ate Thanksgiving dinner), and having a kid has made me so numb to bodily horrors that I sometimes think I could eat a sandwich while changing a diaper and not be bothered. It would be hard in terms of not having enough hands, but not as much in terms of yucko. I have read that revulsion to bodily functions is a manifestation of a fear of one’s mortality. I must be ready to die.

So the chickens came into a home where poop is just something that happens. Chickens mix it up by actually expelling something that is both pee and poop, in a way. It’s like poop in form, but pee in chemistry. Luckily, when they are cute little chicks, their poops are also very cute. What makes it even better is that when they’re really small, they do a little dance before it happens. One day I walked in, and one of our chicks stuck her wings out and started wiggling her butt, and I thought, “She’s practicing laying an egg, how adorable,” and then a turd shot out. “Oh,” I said. I then came to enjoy catching the poop-egg dance, because it was still very cute, and at this point, it didn’t really smell at all, and was so small as to not really be a big deal.

“Oh man, there’s a line for the ladies’ room.”

However, there comes a time when a child’s poop goes from weird scrambled egg thing to a smaller version of adult dung, which, while lesser in size, packs all the stink of its larger counterpart. I knew this was bound to happen to with the chickens some day. And when it did happen, I was leaning over the brooder. That whole “pee in the poop” thing makes it smell nice and ammonia-y. I had smelled this smell before. One time my friend’s boss took us out to dinner in Chinatown. As we were leaving the restaurant, there was one of those old-timey shop scales in the trash on the curb. “I can’t believe they’re throwing that out,” I said. I grabbed it and threw it in the trunk of my car. When I got into the car, I smelled something awful. “Man, something stinks around here,” I said.

“Oh God,” said my friend’s boss. “It’s chicken crap. Your gloves. It’s chicken crap.” I smelled my gloves to confirm her accusations. I should not have done that. The scale came from a butcher, and was covered in chicken leavings. Some of the very same chicken leavings that were now on my gloves. I could at least wash those. The scale got hidden in the bushes in front of my friend’s apartment building. So anyway, in large doses, this is not a good smell.

In small doses it’s not so hot either, but it’s manageable.

The world’s smelliest scale

If you keep on top of coop cleanliness, it’s not that big a deal. Each morning I cover last night’s “productions” with some new pine shavings, and then once a week I clean it all out. What I take out of the coop goes into a pile to mellow out for a while. Chicken poop is a fantastic fertilizer, but it seems it’s even too potent for nature at first. After about a year it’s ready to go into the garden. So I have a regular compost pile, and a dedicated chicken one. I haven’t even had the chickens for a year at this point, so I won’t be using their “handiwork” in the garden this summer, but soon enough they’ll be helping us with food that isn’t eggs.

Scraps & Craps was a failed cop show in 1980.

Another angle to all this is that as the chickens grow, so do the poops. Sometimes I’d think the birds got bigger, but it can be hard to tell. I’m not out there with a measuring tape charting their growth, and sometimes a size change sneaks up on you. But then I’d open the coop, and it would be obvious. A small growth in outer size can sometimes make a large change intestinally. It makes me very glad that people chart their children’s growth by height and not other means. You really don’t want to look in the closet and find that measurement written on the door jamb. Or maybe you do. Just keep me out of it.

(Broadcast 3/22/13)

Ladies and gentlemen, step right up and hear a tale about a chicken that would not leave the nesting box and the miracle that restored her to normal chickenhood. Yes indeed, you or someone you know and possibly love may have also had a chicken that would not go about her daily business due to a possibly unfounded desire to hatch an egg that will not hatch. Don Quixote had his windmills, Ahab had his whale, roosterless chickens have their eggs. For one full week this chicken of mine sat on unfertilized eggs clinging to the vain hope that if she tried hard enough and believed in herself she could overcome the obvious obstacles to her success, but let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there is a point at which belief in one’s self crosses over into delusion and this chicken crossed that line miles ago and never even looked back. I may have mentioned that I don’t have a rooster, and so these eggs were unfertilized and you know what that means. If you don’t, you may want to do some research and come back later, because you’re missing a key point of what I’m talking about.

No loitering.

For the rest of you, I’ll tell you that when a chicken gets it into her head that she’s going to hatch an egg she is going to hatch that egg even if that egg isn’t going to hatch. From a keeping your chickens alive standpoint, this will not do. Chickens need to eat and feel fulfilled in their work, so I was able to obtain a device that set this chicken back on the road to sanity and going around doing regular chicken stuff with satisfying payoffs.

Ladies and gentlemen (or however you identify, I do not wish to discriminate with this message), you or someone you know or possibly love may have such a device already in their home. You see, ladies and gentlemen, my mother used to have a cockatiel. Not a cockatoo, that’s a different thing. She’s out of the cockatiel as a pet business and so for years her birdcage has lain dormant. When I expressed to my mother my need to take this broody chicken away from the source of her temptation and put her into some sort of solitary confinement until she saw the light my mother said to me, “Son, I believe I have just the thing, if you think you can fit a chicken in there.” I looked at the bird cage and I said, “By gum, mother, if I can’t fit a chicken in there, I don’t know what I can do with one.” It had a dish for food and a dish for water built right in, and a perfectly chicken sized door. So I put that chicken in there, and I said, “Chicken demons, begone.” The first thing this chicken did, and this is in keeping with accounts that I have read, was produce the largest, smelliest, nastiest stool I have ever seen come out of an animal, and I once lived in an all boy dormitory, but I believe, ladies and gentlemen (or other), that this was in fact the demons leaving her body. And I’ll tell you what, one day later she was cured. I went in and this chicken that refused to stand up, as it would mean an egg was not being covered, was standing up and clucking, and was that same old chicken I remembered from about a week prior. I returned her to the coop where the other chickens were totally cool about acting like she hadn’t been weird for a little while and everyone was happy, cue the inspirational music, and roll credits.

In solitary.

Now, ladies and gentlemen (etc.), I have to tell you that a day and a half or so of keeping a chicken away from the nest is a pretty fast cure from what I have read. Some people will say three days, some may say a week, lord help you if they say more, but I know that I was able to deliver this chicken away from broodiness with what can only be described as “the quickness.” As they say on the internet YMMV – your mileage may vary. But I can tell you should you experience broodiness yourself, that your mother’s used cockatiel cage is just the thing you need to set that bird back to righteousness. Not available in stores . . . or actually they are, but they’re pretty expensive, that’s why I’m saying go used. I provide this information as a public service because I like you, dear listeners, now go out there into the world and share what you know with the keepers of the broody chickens and tell them Erik P. Kraft sent you. They won’t know who that is, but if you say it enough maybe it will begin to make sense. Do try this at home – the chicken you save may be your own.

Catching up on gossip.

(Broadcast 3/15/2013)

We had just gotten back from a trip to New York City, (where, by the way, everyone was totally thrilled to hear tales of chickenry) and the first thing I did when getting home was say hello to the chickens. A kid from the local 4-H group had looked after them while we were gone, so I knew they’d be fine, but I had missed them. I stuck my head in to say goodnight, and as is my habit since Boss Chicken got sick and spent a night outside, I counted them to make sure they were all there. With Boss Chicken in quarantine, there should be 5 on the roost. I counted 4. I counted again. Still 4. Third time’s the charm, right? Not if you were counting these same chickens. I was about to look under the coop, fearing a repeat of the Boss Chicken Incident, when I noticed a small head sticking out of one of the nesting buckets. There was the missing Mandrell Sister, but what was going on? Immediately I thought I had come home to another sick chicken, but since she was in the nesting bucket, I quickly changed my mind to thinking that she may have gone broody. Sure enough, she was sitting on a bunch of eggs. I removed her from the bucket, and she remained puffed out and squat, and was making a very weird noise. The best way I can think to describe it would be “power cooing.” It was like a coo put on repeat and sped up. This was weird, but I decided to not freak out, and instead put her back in the bucket, since that’s where she wanted to be. I then turned to the internet.

Took away the decoys, just to remove any temptation.

It seems there are a lot of different ways to snap a hen out of being broody, or, as some people put it “break a broody hen,” which sounds a lot harsher. The most natural way would be to get some fertilized eggs for her to hatch. When the eggs hatch, she stops being broody. I suppose I could talk to the farmer down the street about buying some fertilized eggs, but you may have noticed that I call this “Too Many Chickens!” not “I Think There Must Be Ways To Get More Chickens,” so I am going to hold off on this one for now. Not that I wouldn’t like to have baby chicks running around, but I can’t do this every time a hen goes broody, or we’ll fill up the coop post haste. This is my first encounter with broodiness, but in my reading I’m finding that Buff Orpingtons get broody a lot, and we have three of them. I could double or triple the size of the flock before summer is over.

Unhatchable, due to lack of rooster.

Another method of beating broodiness is to dunk the hen in cold water. This seems somewhere between trying to prove the chicken is a witch, and waterboarding. Neither suits my tastes. I think it works on a similar principle as scaring away hiccups, but it’s still pretty chilly at night around here, so I’m not too thrilled about leaving a soggy hen out in the cold. You also may be familiar with the saying, “madder than a wet hen,” and I’m not sure I want to see just how mad that is. Since we have a good amount of snow still, I did try putting her in a snowbank while gathering the eggs. The dunk technique seems to work on the idea that you need to lower the bird’s body temperature, and snow seemed better than dunking. It did seem to convince her to go out into the run to eat, but at night she was right back in the bucket. What’s interesting is that everyone seems to have heard of the water dunk method, but I didn’t read any accounts in which it actually worked.

Mixing it up by sitting between the two nesting buckets.

The technique that best fits my lifestyle would be to take her away from the bucket and put her somewhere she has no opportunity to nest, like a dog crate, or an unused rabbit hutch. I could do this, except Boss Chicken is already convalescing in our dog crate. I don’t think putting them both in there is a good idea, but I may have to figure out some way to isolate her for a few days to see if it can do the trick. I may have to just put her in a box and see what happens. Substitutions don’t always work though, as evidenced by my failure when using snow instead of a bucket of water. Chickens want the real deal.

Es Occupado.

There’s nothing wrong with this behavior, it’s actually totally natural. My worry is that she might not ever come out of it if there are no eggs that will hatch. When a hen gets broody, they don’t leave the nest, so they don’t eat or get water. It takes three weeks to hatch an egg, so after that, they may start to fade away from malnutrition. I don’t want that to happen, so the best plan would be to make this stop. How to do this remains the issue, but I have muddled my way along this far, I’m sure I can do a little more muddling, even without waterboarding anyone. Or at least not any chickens.

(Broadcast 3/8/2103 while riding in a car on the Merritt Parkway)

You’ve probably figured out that I will do a lot for my chickens. If you remember, when I thought Boss Chicken had bumblefoot, I was ready to go to the store to buy hemorrhoid ointment to rub on her feet, if that’s what it took. Sorry, embarrassment, I’ve got an injured chicken at home. I don’t know why butt ailments are so embarrassing, but they are. But I was willing to put myself through the terror of buying butt medicine when my butt was fine for this chicken. In fact, maybe I even would have thrown some adult diapers into the purchase just to say, “Hey cashier, nothing good’s going on down there!” Luckily, it didn’t come to that, so cashiers of America, be thankful.
That might be the most extreme example of what I might have had to do in terms of chicken husbandry, but like any pet, sometimes you find yourself in a position where you are doing something you never would have imagined even a short time prior. I personally had never even thought about the term “chicken physical therapy” until I found myself with a chicken that, well, probably could do with some physical therapy. Yeah, I’m not really sure what this entails either, but I gave it a shot. We finally have had enough warm-ish days that the driveway was ice-free, and so I decided Boss Chicken could do with some fresh air and a chance to stretch her legs. I put her down on the ground outside, and her mood was immediately better. Her loud squawks became gentle coos, she seemed to really enjoy eating snow, and she was looking around at the yard as though it had all been a distant memory. This was great. What wasn’t great was that she seemed pretty content to not move around much. Come on, chicken, walk around, it’s for your own good. When she did try to walk, it didn’t go as well as I had hoped, but I think this is mostly thanks to us having a gravel driveway, which was tough for her to get decent footing on with her leg issues. Inside on the cement floor, she can get around pretty good, when she wants to. I didn’t press the issue too much, since this was her first time back out since I discovered her illness, so I figured I should just let her enjoy it, and we could get down to the hard work of recovery another time. She was probably an easy target for anything other than some sort of large, carnivorous slug, so I stayed close, taking my eye off her only to throw the occasional snowball over the swingset, where my son was playing. She didn’t like that much, but I think she’s gotten pretty uptight from being inside for so long. No horseplay!

Am I supposed to do something?

I’ve already touched on the creepiness I feel at feeding chickens their own eggs, and I can report that it’s not getting that much easier. I think what’s preventing me from letting it become a normal thing is the zeal with which they eat them. If they were just cool about it, I’d be fine, but they totally lose it. It’s like when you see footage of big sales and everyone is tripping all over each other to get to the junk first. Except imagine those people eating themselves, and they are all chickens. Maybe that’s not the right image, but you get the idea. Excitement bordering on psychosis. It could be worse, though. A friend of mine mentioned that you can also feed them cooked chicken, and they’ll go even more bonkers for it. I’m not even cooking chicken for myself, so if they want it, they’ll have to take a trip to see the Colonel, and I’m not driving.

Don’t tell them I microwave the eggs.

I’m sure everyone has interests that they allow themselves to get a little carried away with, just because they enjoy them so much. As long as no one’s getting hurt, I think it’s important to have something you care about. I will give you a suggestion though. Depending on what this interest is, think about what internet searches you do, and who else may be using your computer. Recently I had to look something up at work that started with the letter B, and the first suggestion that autofill put in was “butt pecking.” When the chickens were small, there was a bit of this going on, and I was worried it would result in injuries, so I looked it up. Everything was fine, save for my search history. Now imagine if my boss had been looking over my shoulder. Could I have explained my way out of this? Most likely. Is that a conversation I want to have? Maybe, but probably not with my boss. With you? Yeah, I’ll talk to you about butt pecking.

No butts, just eggs.

(Broadcast 3/1/2013)

There is a certain question that people will ask when they find out I have chickens. Well, actually, there are two. The first is usually, “Can I have some eggs?” Depending on who asks, the answer is sometimes yes, but I don’t give these out to just anyone. The other question is usually something along the lines of, “Who’s going to kill them?” This is a pretty terrible question, for a number of reasons. If you’ve listened to me talk about chickens before, I think you’re aware of the lengths I have gone to to keep my birds alive. I hope you at least aren’t going to ask me this, but let’s explore this question.

An obvious answer would be that if I kill them, then I don’t have any eggs. The main thing everyone gets excited about is the eggs. No chickens, no eggs. I get a lot of my food from the grocery store. Would I blow up the grocery store? No. Maybe that’s an extreme analogy, but you need to think about the supply chain here. Say I did want to kill and eat the chickens. (I assume they think I am going to kill them to eat them, or else I need to worry about the people I come into contact with). I can get one or two meals out of one chicken, and then I need a new chicken. Or I can keep getting eggs every day for years, and eat those. I’ve got a pretty good deal going where for very little money I get about a half dozen eggs a day. The cost of eggs vs. the cost of chicken feed is not even a question. Eggs are not cheap, and the ones that want you to think they treat the chickens well are even more expensive. I know my chickens are treated well. And maybe I wouldn’t be buying several dozen eggs a week, but when I have them, I don’t need to eat them. I once saw a post on the internet that said, “Never underestimate what you can trade eggs for.” Sometimes it’s just good will, sometimes it’s something more tangible, but eggs, especially home raised eggs, have a definite value.

I’m rich!

A larger aspect to why this question upsets me is that I am a vegetarian, and try not to kill anything. We even have a catch and release policy towards bugs in our house. (The mosquitoes the size of small bats that inhabit our area are the notable exceptions). My reasons for this decision are complicated and personal, but a big part of it has to do with not wanting animals to die on my behalf. I don’t wear a scarlet letter V on my shirt, and I generally keep my beliefs to myself, so people probably have no reason to suspect I don’t eat meat. It still seems an invasive thing to ask.

A face only a mother could eat.

Taking this line of questioning a little further, someone even once asked me if I’m going to kill them once they stop laying eggs. I think this person must be the type who on the first date talks about what it’s going to be like after the two of you are married. Hold on a minute! You only just found out I have chickens, and now you’re already years in the future speculating about their fertility and what it means to me? Let’s back up a bit. If we look at this solely in terms of what the job of these chickens is, I’ll remind you that we got them to eat the ticks in the yard. That is their first purpose. Eggs are a nice perk, but even after they stop laying, they will still be be able to wander around eating ticks. I’m not going to fire someone because they used to make coffee in the morning when they got into the office, but then stopped. And if we killed everything that outlived its usefulness, we’d have no Congress. (*rim shot*) But these chickens are also our pets, and we don’t kill our pets. The cats haven’t caught a single mouse, but we allow them to live, the least we can do is extend that lax attitude towards job performance to the chickens.

Itchy yet?

I actually think some of it may have to do with people just not having much exposure to chickens outside of the grocery store or drive-thru. You don’t think of chickens as a pet-style animal until you meet them and see that they have as distinct personalities as any cat or dog. And it’s true, chickens are generally thought of as a food animal, so I get the reasoning, even if I don’t like it. But please people, we’re trying to have a society here. Let’s have a little tact. The answer is no one is going to kill them. And since you asked, no, you can’t have any eggs.