Too Many Chickens!

(Broadcast 4/5/2013)

Are you taking any vitamin supplements? I worry about you, dear listener, and want to be sure that you’re getting all the nutrition you need. Sometimes we don’t get all the necessary nutrients through our food. Even chickens can use a little help every now and then. The days were getting longer, but egg production seemed to be tapering off. Some of the eggs that were getting produced were kind of pale, and the shells felt a little thin when I cracked them. Something wasn’t right, and I had a feeling I knew what it was.

It wasn’t quite this bad.

Even though I feed them a complete layer feed, I suspected the chickens needed a little extra calcium. This is fairly common. They can get it a couple of different ways. You can give them a supplement, usually made from ground-up oyster shells, or you can grind up their own egg shells and, wait for it, feed them back to the chickens. So you can feed them back the whole egg, if you are so inclined. I was somewhat tempted to try this, but I had to go to the feed store anyway, so buying the calcium seemed easier. To prepare the egg shells to go back into the chickens, you need to bake them, and our stove is broken. Even if it wasn’t, I was a little unsure of what sort of smell this might produce. Who knows, maybe it smells nice. But at the time, it was too cold to open any windows if it stank, and since I couldn’t open any windows I was pretty sure it was going to stink. I’ll try it when we have a new stove and the weather is nice, and report any olfactory disturbances. But for the immediate problem I bought some oyster shell fragments.

Gnaw on this, chickens!

The way I’d read to administer these fragments was to leave them out where the chickens can pick at them as they see fit. This sounded to me like you needed a dedicated container to put them in. What should I use? A regular feeder seemed too big, a chick feeder could get knocked over by full-grown birds, and I had no idea what it should look like, so DIY seemed out. I asked the guy at the store, “How do I give these to the chickens?” He looked at me for a minute, and then said, “You throw them on the ground.” So while perhaps a little embarrassed, I left there with more money in my pocket than expected.

The problem I ran into with throwing them on the ground is that if I open the run and throw something in, it’s usually a treat, so they went nuts and started fighting over the shells when I first threw them in. But then the next day they all laid eggs, after several days of only getting 3 eggs, so maybe they all needed calcium? To try to keep them from eating it if they didn’t need to, I would dump a pile of the chips on the ground before I let them out. That cut out the thrill of eating gifts from the master. They continued to eat them all, but egg production was back at capacity, so I stopped worrying.

Or I did until I came home and saw only two chickens walking around in the run. There were others in there, but they weren’t standing up. Why not? Had I given them calcium poisoning? Is there such a thing as calcium poisoning? Did something get in there and eat their legs? What had I done? I hustled over to the run and they all stood up and ran to the door and clucked to be let out. Oh right. Sometimes chickens just like to sit in the dirt.

I got a small bag of calcium chips, which had no seal, so I dumped it all into a plastic bag and left it on the table with some of my other chicken devices. Now, I’ve never seen an enormous bag of crack before, but if I had, I have a feeling it would look exactly like this Ziploc bag of oyster shell chunks. I should probably move it away from the window, but I suppose if I leave it there and the cops show up, I’ll know the pizza guy ratted me out.

I hope I don’t dump the wrong one in the coop.

The last thing about these chips is that they get kind of dusty. They’re sort of made of chalk, so that makes sense. One morning I had forgotten to put any in the run, so I grabbed my bag and a cup of chips, and thought, “I’ll put my bag in the car, and then give the chickens the calcium.” This was my fatal mistake. I put down my bag, and in doing so put my hand with the cup down enough that half the chips fell out onto the seat. My car is three months old, and has black upholstery. Now my car is three months old and has a gray passenger seat. Oh well. That makes it unique, right? Sure it does. Chicken customizing! I’ll be sure to work that angle when it’s time to trade it in.

(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.

(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?