Tag: chicken pens

Posted on by

We have baby chicks…

…but Mrs. Hen didn’t hatch them.  I found a broken egg on Sunday, and another one broken yesterday.  The eggs were well past 21 days incubation by then, and after scouring the Internet and asking anyone I could, I determined that the eggs were dead.  I don’t know why they died after living long enough to make a fully formed chick with feathers, but I have a few ideas.
1.  Chicken ineptitude.  Broodiness has been bred out of hens so that they have forgotten all their maternal instincts.   Although this hen sat faithfully on the eggs, perhaps she forgot to turn them enough or forgot to heat and cool them properly.
2.  SC’s heat wave.  See number 1.  For the first two weeks, SC’s early August weather was relatively cool.  If anyone is reading this who lives in a cool climate, you will think I am insane, but 85 or even 88 degrees F feels rather fall-like.  88 degrees, plus heat from the chicken body, shouldn’t exceed 100 degrees or so.  As I understand things, 99 degrees and 60% humidity is ideal for hatching chicken eggs.  Over the past week or so our air temperatures and humidity have gotten near this number.  My chicken house is in direct sun and the nesting boxes have a western exposure, so on hot afternoons I imagine the temperature under the eggs could easily exceed 99 degrees.  A broody who knows what she’s doing should be able to regulate the temperature, but maybe my chicken didn’t know how.
So yesterday my girls and I went to Sal’s Ol’ Timey Feed and Seed in Columbia, near my home, and picked out five Americana chicks.  We had all decided we wanted to have chicks.  I hoped the broody would accept them, but when I presented one to her under very close supervision, after removing her from the nest containing the dead eggs, she wasn’t interested.
Well, she was interested, and she even made some of the “churring” noises mother hens make to the babies, but then she went back to preening her feathers and trying to escape the new enclosure.

I was afraid to trust her with the babies.  And, I was afraid I couldn’t keep them safe in this rickety chicken tractor shack into which I would have had to put them if she wasn’t completely invested in caring for them.  So, the chicks are now living on the back screened porch which is, we pray, fortified against snake incursions.

Mrs. Hen and her companion have been banished to the chicken tractor with no access to nests. Without access to nesting material, they should forget about being broody in a week or so.  They spend their time trying to escape the chicken tractor; Mrs. Hen gave me quite a start this morning when I went out to check on her because she had vanished!  There were no signs of a struggle and, most importantly, no feathers (no chicken dies without feathers flying everywhere) and so I found her back in the chicken house sitting on a nest.  She had managed to push the wire aside and escape.  I put her back in the chicken tractor and fixed the hole with zip-ties.

Sal tells me that her Old English Game birds hatch out chicks regularly even in the heat.  Perhaps I will get some of them and try again one day.  We would love to see mama bird and her babies.  Maybe one of these new chicks will turn out to be a rooster and we will have our own fertile eggs.  For now, we will enjoy these babies.

Posted on by

The Easter Egg Hunt was Early This Year Thanks to Chicken Antics

One of my Americana hens decided
she wants to be a mama.  Lacking a
rooster husband, she will not be able to fulfill her dream, but her chicken
brain does not realize this minor detail will prevent motherhood.  Her desires led us on an early Easter
egg hunt for her beautiful blue-green eggs. 


She stopped laying eggs during the fall, but in mid-January,
I saw her sitting on the nest inside the coop,  and I planned to check on her later to see if she
had laid an egg.  She let me know about her
egg-laying success with a cacophony of cackling that went on so long I checked on her to
make sure she was okay.  Unlike the
peaceful clucking depicted in children’s books, this was a cackle, a “BA-aaaCK!”
which she repeated for five or ten minutes until she was sure all the other chickens
knew about her egg.
I keep them inside a portable fence, made of electrified netting, that I move regularly.  I don’t let them free range because of the threat of predators and the mess they create.

My chicken was proud of her egg, so proud that on subsequent
days, she flew out of the pen by flapping her way from the roof of the house
across the fence and away from the other chickens to roam the yard to find
places to lay her eggs.   My daughters
came looking for me, yelling, “There’s a chicken under the playhouse!”  Because of the low clearance under the
structure, we couldn’t get her out, and I told them she’d leave when she was
ready to leave.  I looked for eggs, and
couldn’t see any under there.  For weeks,
this hen got out of the pen nearly every day. 
 I should have trimmed her wings
but I never managed to find the time to clip the flight feathers, which does
not hurt the chicken, to keep her from flying over the fence.
One reason I don’t let my chickens freely range is that they make a mess of the flowerbeds

After yet another escape a few weeks ago, I looked under the
playhouse and saw a cache of eggs.  At
first, I thought there were five or so, but as I removed them, I kept seeing
more eggs.  Eventually I removed 13 eggs
from under the playhouse, making it the most exciting egg hunt I have ever
attended.  My daughters enjoyed seeing
the enlarging pile of eggs, colored a perfect Easter egg blue.
Some of the eggs I nestled among the blooming thrift as if hidden for Easter

When chickens decide to go “broody,” or decide they want to
hatch some babies, they collect eggs in a nest until they believe they have
enough, and then they sit on the eggs for the several weeks it takes to hatch
the eggs.  My hen hadn’t accumulated
enough eggs to suit her, apparently, because she left the nest to return to her
house after she laid the eggs.


It doesn’t matter to the hen if there is a rooster or not,
but of course the eggs won’t hatch unless a rooster fertilizes them.  Maybe, when my girls are old enough to escape
an angry rooster, we’ll get one.  Seeing
the life cycle would be interesting.


Everyone wants to know if we ate the eggs.  We tested their freshness by putting them in
a glass of water; if they sink, they are fresh, and if they float, they are not
fresh.  All the eggs sank, and we are eating
them.  It was winter when this happened,
and although we’ve had some cold nights we have had plenty of days in the
sixties and seventies. 


Eggs are designed to hatch, and the chicken won’t sit on
them regularly until she’s accumulated a pile of sufficient number, so the eggs
from which chickens hatch under natural circumstances may have sat in their
Mama’s nest for weeks before she began to incubate them.  In modern agriculture, where farmers ship
eggs across the country by tractor-trailer, constant refrigeration is
necessary.

My hen is now back inside her pen with the other chickens.  I enlarged the pen and moved the house away
from the fence, and she seems content.  I
remove all the eggs every day; she’s less likely to try to have more babies
than if she were able to keep eggs in a nest. 
 Of course, with chickens, you
just never know what they will do next. 
The escaped chicken, returned home and dust-bathing
Posted on by

How Many Roosting Chicken Does it Take…

…to break the top out of an apple tree?  Did you guess three?  You are correct.  I just have to learn the hard way about chickens.  I have never been around birds, besides wild birds, before I began keeping chickens, and I have been having a difficult time understanding how they operate. 

After the fiasco of the wing feather trimming and being injured by the chicken scratching my eyelid,  I thought I had reached an understanding with the chickens:  I won’t try to catch them in the daytime, and when I come for them in the evening just before sunset, they will behave. 

The dogs, cats, and cattle I have been around have either been tame or else guided by their stomachs.  Cows will follow a bucket, and can even be trained to come when called.  Dogs and cats of course will come to you, at least when they feel like it.  

On Saturday, I needed to move the chickens and their house below the garden so they could have fresh pasture.  Just before dusk, I released them and moved their house and fence below the garden from its previous home above the garden, which was out of their line of sight from the old location.  They saw me move it, but were not interested in following me.  I tried to shoo them down there, I tried to catch them, and I even enlisted the help of my husband.  We managed to catch four of them, but the other five were ran wildly around the orchard.  Not wanting to terrify them, we decided to leave them alone until dark.

The chickens in their yard, enclosed by portable electronet fencing

I went outside several times, but they remained elusive.  Meanwhile, they managed to fly up high enough into my apple trees to peck at and knock off a couple of apples, which they chased around and played with as if they were balls.  Finally, when it was becoming dark enough that I was afraid I’d lose them in the shrubbery and would have to use a flashlight to find them, I came outside and heard loud squawking.

Three chickens were attempting to roost in my two-year-old dwarf apple tree, and they succeeded in breaking the central leader branch out of the top of the tree.  The poor branch is no more than 1/2 inch in diameter, and is not meant to bear the weight of any creature.  It snapped, and this frightened the chickens.  I managed to catch a couple of them, and to stuff them into the cat carrier I use for chicken transportation.  I didn’t realize another of the escaped chickens had taken refuge in the carrier until I stuffed her flock-mates in on top of her.  I plucked another one from the mantle of our outside fireplace, where she had decided to sleep, and finally, at almost my bedtime, all the chickens were in their new, clean yard and pen.

I have made a new bargain with the chickens.  I will not try to catch them except in the late evening, like our other bargain.  And, I will not move their house out of their line of sight from the original location without keeping them inside it during the moving process, even though that is difficult.  It bewilders the little chicken brain to have to work so hard to find her house.

Posted on by

My Chickens Flew the Coop!

Last night, I moved the chickens back into the chicken tractor while they were drowsy.  They didn’t fuss, and no one scratched me.  This morning, I let them out of the chicken tractor into their movable yard enclosed by electrified netting.  They walked around a little, and then two, first an Americana and then a Barred Rock, took off from the ground and flew over the netting.

At first, they tried, in a panic, to get back in with their sisters.  But the sisters decided that freedom looked like fun, and quickly, five more flew over the fence.  While I stood there with, I am sure, my mouth hanging open in shock, the first seven explored the woods.  The other two remaining chickens wanted freedom too, and, as I admitted defeat, I let down part of the fence so they could get out and the others could get back in. 

There is nothing I can do to catch them in the daylight, and as this happened at 7:30 AM, they have a long day of free-ranging ahead.  They will probably return to the pen because it is, after all, where their food and water is located.  In the meantime, I imagine my plants will have chicken-pecked holes in them again, and my patio will be covered with chicken poo.  I believe a wing-trimming is in the works.

Posted on by

Moving Chickens Can Be Dangerous

I am not known for my gracefulness, and sometimes, in my exuberance to accomplish tasks, I become clumsier than usual.  My husband remains confused as to whether I poked myself in both eyes with the same stick, or whether I poked myself in the eye with two different sticks (for the record, it was the same eye, same day, with two different sticks, and I did it while clearing some land for my garden).  Nothing terrible has happened to me, though, and I am not a daredevil.  I’m just a little careless.
And sometimes, the injury is not really my fault, although in this case, perhaps I should have known better.  This morning, my daughter and I moved my nine chickens to what I hope is the “Fort Knox” of chicken pens from their chicken tractor.  Electric netted fencing encloses the chicken tractor so they can forage during the day.  We built the pen and run to house the chickens when are unable to provide daily care for the chickens.  I hope we made it sturdy enough, by burying the wire fencing to deter digging animals, entirely enclosing the run in wire, and attaching the chicken house to the run, that no one has to be there to open and close the chickens in the house at night. 

The new chicken pen.  My father harvested the trees for the cedar 4x4s from his land and had them milled for us.  He and I did most of the construction of the pen, and he dug most of the postholes.  Scott, my husband, built the chicken house.

We have neither named the chickens nor made pets of them, because someday we might eat them, but in so doing we have not tamed them and some are wild.  Some people have chickens as pets, and I think that’s fine.  I already have two dachshunds that have turned out to be very expensive to care for, although wonderful, pets, and I don’t need any more pets.  If I’m going to eat chicken meat from the store, I think I should be willing to eat chicken meat from chickens I raise.  At this point, all this is theoretical, and I might not be able to stomach eating the chickens, but it sounds like a good plan.
This morning I went to the chicken tractor with a cat carrier and, as I could catch them, put them in the carrier, took them to the pen, and released them.  Finally, I was down to two Americanas, and of course, they were the two wildest birds.  I caught one without incident, but the other one escaped the chicken tractor and was loose in the pen.  As I grabbed for her, she flew in my face, with claws outstretched, and scratched my eyelid.  Thank God for reflexes, because I closed my eye in time to avoid scratches to my eye itself.  My eyelid bled awhile, and it is bruised, so I can imagine a scratch to my eyeball would have required medical care.   

I didn’t know hens behaved so aggressively.  I know the poor creature was scared, because all animals are afraid of the unknown.  Books on chickens say to move them at night, when they are asleep, but I did not want to climb into the cramped chicken tractor, on the poop-covered ground, and carry them through the woods to their new home in the darkness.  Next time, maybe I should wait until dusk to move them, when they will be drowsier, and maybe I should wear safety goggles and gloves just in case. 

And my husband and I both hope my eyelid heals enough for me to cover it with makeup when we go out to dinner for our wedding anniversary.  On many occasions, after a day of gardening, I have began to dress for an evening out and have realized that I can’t possibly wear that cute summer dress I planned to wear because my legs are so scratched I look like I’ve been in a briar patch.