Tag: escaped chickens

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The latest batch of pigs will be ready in May (ish)

When I didn’t have as much actual farming to do, I definitely posted more stories on my blog.

Posting on Facebook or Instagram is certainly faster for me, but I want to keep up with the website too.  And homeschool two children, drive the other one to private school, teach Sunday School, and generally be a mother and a wife.  Whew! But I do try.

Christmas vacation gave me some time to make seed orders, make planting plans for the spring and summer, so, I hope, I am not wondering why I can’t manage to have a steady supply of cut flowers and why I don’t have space open for the next crop.

Spring will bring flowers, farmers markets, and pork.  I expect to finish these pigs in May (ish) and you may place a deposit for preorder through my online store.  For details about how much meat to expect, final cost, and other information please visit this page.

The pigs came to the farm in early December, and they are enjoying life in the woods and on the pasture.  My oldest daughter has always been my livestock helper because, well, she is the oldest and the biggest.  At 14, she can now even help me lift heavy things.

One night as she was working frantically on a project for one of her classes, the pigs got out.  We have a driveway alarm so that we have some advance warning that someone is coming down the driveway, and my 5 year old loves to announce the identity of the new arrival.

We heard it go off about 5:20 PM, conveniently just before sunset on a day when temperatures hadn’t gotten out of the 30s and rain was expected.  My son heard the alarm, and yelled, “It’s probably Amazon!” as he scampered to the door to seek the identity of the new arrival.  He has taken pride in carrying in the delivery boxes and enjoys talking to the drivers during this past year of COVID.

Instead of bringing in a box, he yelled, “It’s the pigs!”

The notification that “The animals are out!” is information no farmer enjoys hearing.  My family had cattle, and I remember many calls from the neighbors over the years and the glum pronouncement that, “The cows are out,” from my father, which meant that everyone available was needed to quickly rectify the situation and to keep the cows off of the road.  Whatever else was going on in the house was abandoned until the cows were restored to their pasture.

These pigs didn’t know me well yet, and didn’t associate me with food, and I knew getting them back into the fence would be trickier than the recapture of the pig that strolled down the driveway on Easter morning, 2020, when we, dressed in Easter clothes as if we were actually going to church instead of watching it on TV, were preparing to sit down to watch the service and I got another announcement from the children of an unexpected visitor.  I was able to lead that pig back to her home with a scoop of food while still wearing a dress.

This time was much more difficult.

As to why the escaped, let me say it was entirely my fault and a comedy of errors in not securing the fencing and pen correctly.

I tried to lure them pigs back into the pen with food, but they scattered in all directions when I got too close, including through my flower field, towards the neighbor’s house, and in the direction of the road, although the road is a good distance from the pig pasture and they never got too close.  I am not an athlete and competitive sports has never interested me.  Six pigs running at full speed towards the road motivates me to run faster in ways a race with a human never has.

I asked my husband for help, and I determined that pig-catching was going to require at least three people: one to gently herd the pigs in the direction I wanted them to go  (me), one to hold up the fence (Ella, the 14 year old), and one to turn the electric fence off and on (Scott).  Clara wasn’t home and Luke, the 5 year old, was left to fend for himself in the house.  I told Ella that pig-catching was currently more important than schoolwork.

I remembered numerous farm situations in my childhood I hadn’t thought of in years: family members placed strategically around an area and my father giving instructions that were to be obeyed immediately without question.  Scott and Ella, for a time, questioned my commands (which weren’t always completely correct), but shouting questions across 100 feet of woods in the dark and the rain is highly inefficient.  When pigs are loose, someone needs to be in charge, and as I was the only one present with much animal-herding experience, I needed to be the one in charge.  I informed them that pig-herding called for “Obey first, ask questions later.”

Ella has learned over the years how to help me herd chickens back into the fence by walking slowly towards them, silently, raising her arms in the air, making sure to not crowd them and scare them to make them scatter.  These skills are much more effective with any sort of animal than shouting and running.

However, although now the pigs will follow me anywhere like a pack of dogs,  these pigs didn’t know me (associate me with food) yet, they were scared, and they weren’t sure exactly where they were supposed to go.  The were still in the training pen when they escaped, and their escape introduced them for the first time to the wonders of fresh grass, acorns, and plenty of room to run.  They had no motivation to go back into the pen.

After running across the field a few times (I quickly shed my heaviest coat) after the pigs, I gave up on getting them back into the pen and began trying to complete the repair of the electric fence around the whole pasture.  This involved an hour or so of me wearing my son’s camping headlamp while twisting and cutting wire with fingers numb to the cold.  I had at least done most of the repairs earlier in the week–removed trees and limbs from the fence, tightened most of the wire, and rearranged the fencing around the pen.  I intended to let the pigs out in the next couple of days anyway.

I ran through the woods, attempting to get ahead of the pigs to head them off so they would veer into the fence, while Ella stood by to raise and lower the wire and Scott turned the electricity to the fence off and on.  I stepped in stump holes and tripped over vines, but miraculously didn’t seriously injure myself.

Eventually, we got them sorted back in the fence, and I will make sure to not repeat that comedy of errors next time…although that was a great workout!

I expect these pigs to finish in May-ish.  I have them available for pre-order through my online store.  Non-refundable deposits are $50 for half a hog and $100 for a whole hog.  Please visit this page on my website for details about how much meat to expect and final cost.  If you have any further questions, please call me at 803.465.6666 or email me at onehubcapfarm@gmail.com.

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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
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Nothing Starts the Day off Right…

…like looking out the back door and seeing a chicken stroll across the driveway.  I moved them to greener pastures yesterday, but apparently the wings I trimmed about six weeks ago have grown back sufficiently to allow them to fly over the fence in search of even better food. Achieving another developmental milestone, Ella, 5, helped me catch those it was possible to catch, and helped hold the wings out for me to trim them.  Presently, seven of the nine are back in the pen, and the other two, which were too wild to catch, were decorating the porch of my husband’s newly built Man Shed with their droppings. 

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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.

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The Wing Clipping Was Not Successful!

Chickens do not belong on the patio: the patio became a favorite playing spot for the chickens,
 and that’s why we got the electrified netting. 

My kind neighbors came to my house yesterday at dusk and helped me clip the chicken’s wings, and I paid them for their troubles with a head of broccoli fresh from my garden. Although they were supposed to be docile at dusk, we still had to chase some of them, but we accomplished the task without bloodshed or trauma to the chickens. After straightening out their rumpled feathers, they climbed to their perches and settled in for the night. I thought my chicken-chasing days were behind me. I have chased many cows in my life, but no chickens until the past month or so. Chasing cows is much easier than chasing chickens, although at least when I chase chickens I don’t have to worry about them turning around and trampling me.

This morning, I released them from their house, and watched them peck contentedly at the new grass in the yard for a few minutes. I filled their water, and turned to go into the house, relieved that I would not have to worry about them. As I walked away, two chickens flew over the fence as easily as they did yesterday, and two more followed them. All of them followed me towards the house as if they thought I wanted some chicken company for breakfast.  At least the other five are apparently unable to fly well enough to scale the fence. Those escaped four have been destroying my flowerbeds all day, and they didn’t even have the courtesy to kill the first Japanese beetle of the season I presented them, but instead allowed it to fly away after pecking at it a few times.

At first, I did not give them water in hopes they would return home, but because the temperature is at least 95 degrees outside, I eventually took them some water. I didn’t take them any food though. Lack of food for a day won’t kill them, and I hope hunger will bring them back to their house. Of course, they might find too much tasty food in my flowerbeds to worry about their feed. Tonight at dusk, my husband and I will catch them again, and give them a super-short wing trim.

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