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.

I contacted my town paper about Too Many Chickens!, and they put me on the front page! Those of you not in the area, can read the whole article here.

(From the Friday, January 25th broadcast of Garden Guys Green Revolution Radio)

My mom used to constantly ask us about my son’s milestones. She’s a teacher, so she can’t help it. “Is he sitting up?” “Is he talking?” “Is he potty trained?” “Is he potty trained?” “Is he potty trained?” Potty training was the big one, and once that was out of the way, she seemed to turn her attention to the chickens.

“Any eggs yet?” became the question I knew was always coming. Early on I could explain that the chickens needed to reach a certain number of weeks of being alive before they could start laying eggs. This bought me a couple of weeks. Once we crossed that threshold, I had less to deflect with. I suppose I could have gone out and squeezed a chicken to see if an egg came out, but I had a good feeling it didn’t work like that. At the end of the day I’d still be eggless, and would have cranky chickens.

We got the chickens in June, when they were one week old. The general thought is that chickens start laying at around 19 weeks. Based on this, I was expecting eggs in October, but October came and went. No egg o’lanterns. Surely they were coming in November, right? Nope. No Thanksgiving omelettes.

Notice there are no eggs in the picture.

I knew there was a lesson here about letting things come when they were ready. This is nature, and it does things on its own schedule. There was probably also a lesson here to not let my mother’s constant questioning influence my feelings about letting things come when they were ready. But I was very excited for the eggs to come, and any questions about it added to my anxiety. And really, where were they? “They will lay when they are ready,” said the internet. “It’s going to be at least six months before you get an egg,” said my mother in law. Who was right?

With December came six months. I went out one night, and as is my silly ritual, after I shut the coop door, I looked in the window and said, “nighty-night, chickens.” Unlike every other night, there, in the back of the coop, sat a small brown egg. I’m a little embarrassed to say that I audibly gasped, but not so embarrassed to not tell you about it. Composing myself, I brought it inside and showed it to everyone in the house, triumphant. There was plenty of excitement in the room, since my family had also felt the pressure of The Egg Question. While admiring its eggy goodness, my son said, “I think maybe there’s a baby chicken in there.” So then it became time to explain what role roosters play in this whole endeavor. An anxiety door does not close without opening an anxiety window.

Oh, and that egg? I ate it, and it was good. Not just good, but goooooood. I had been hearing a lot about how much different backyard eggs were from the ones in the store, and this egg was everything they said it would be. The yolk had a brightness to its color like I had never seen. The texture when cooked was hearty and robust, and the shell even seemed tougher than store bought eggs. I later read that store bought eggs are generally about a month old, whereas this one was hot off the presses, so to speak. I might eat a store bought egg again, if I had to, but I hope I don’t have to.

You will never see a carton with just one egg on our counter these days.

Chickens generally lay one egg a day, but in the winter months, they tend to lay less, due to there being less sunlight. We have six chickens, so that’s a half dozen eggs a day at full capacity. That’s a lot of eggs. And the chickens didn’t seem to get the memo that they were supposed to tone it down in the winter. They were firing on all cylinders, and the eggs were piling up. Too many chickens = too many eggs. We knew this was going to happen, but thought we were going to ease into it. No one said we’d go from no eggs to piles of them so quickly. We ate what we could, and I started mentioning to people at work that I might be bringing eggs in. This was met with much more excitement than if I had said I was bringing in extra zucchini. That market is glutted. And you know what, the chickens love zucchini, so I can bring free work zucchini home and feed it to the chickens, who make more eggs, which I then bring into work. Circle of life! Or something.

Another magic quality of backyard eggs is that they supposedly have less cholesterol and more vitamins than store bought eggs, thanks to the varied diet backyard chickens tend to get. Ours get all sorts of vegetable scraps, all the bugs they can catch, and regular chicken food. I’m not sure how I can test the vitamin content, but after my next physical, I’ll let you know about the cholesterol. Even if it’s through the roof, it’s a delicious roof to go through.

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