Too Many Chickens!

(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.

(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)