Chicken Update

 As I too often do, this post has been sitting in my drafts folder for much too long.  So a Friday night with the kids in bed seems like a good night to finally finish this one.  A while ago I realized that my my post categories were heavy on the recipes and light on the other three categories.  So lately I've been trying to at least add to those other three categories.  Finally it is time to talk about the feathered friends at our house--technically our backyard.

If you didn't already know, our family happily cares for a backyard flock of eight egg laying hens.  We've been in the backyard chicken coop club for 18 months now and are entering our second winter with our feathered girls.  When we started this adventure, I never thought we'd enjoy it as much as we do.  And I never thought caring for chickens could be so easy until we started doing it ourselves.  Raising our hens has been an endeavor our whole family has enjoyed.  And yes, we have names for all 8 of them: Rosa, Elvira, Eleanor, Miss Scarlett, Irene, Pattie, Sam and Ella. 

I took the picture above a few months ago, but it tells a couple of stories.   For one, there's a chicken on our back step meaning our girls free range.  They sort of demanded it this spring and summer.  When the spring flowers started blooming and temperatures went up, we noticed the chickens were also "awakening" from their "winter survival mode".  We have two sets of 4 chickens--the older/original 4 (about 3 years old) and the younger 4 (about 18 months old).  So the younger 4 started laying eggs for the first time last fall.  That made them full grown hens.  During the winter, we figured they just all put up with each other and concentrated on the basics: eating, drinking, sleeping, laying eggs, and staying warm.  But when spring rolled around the younger 4 tried to improve their pecking order status.  Two of them were especially aggressive and were pecking one of the older girls (Eleanor) so much that they would sometimes draw blood.  They basically harassed her and bullied her so much she wouldn't leave the nest unless a more dominant chicken came into lay.  She was pretty miserable and it was dangerous for her to be with these aggressive ones.  So we started letting them roam around in the backyard.  That seemed to help them get along.  Eleanor had more room to spread out and get away from the aggressive ones.  And all the chickens have learned to stay fairly close to the house and seem to enjoy being out and about.

I also set up a temporary coop area to separate the chickens at night and when we weren't home to let them free range in the backyard.  Originally it was an isolation booth for the two naughty, aggressive chickens.  But they had to be re-entered to the group because they started turning on each other!  (My vote is that they are a crazy breed.)  Eventually we put Eleanor in the isolation coop and she LOVED it.  She quit hiding and started strutting with confidence and laying again.

I wasn't sure how things would go as summer turned to fall, because I new the isolation coop wouldn't be adequate for winter.  Fortunately, they are all getting along again and in the same coop together, and they did it all on their own.  Whew!  That turned out much easier than I thought.

The other story to tell that the picture above reminds me of, is a recent one.  Ever since he could sit up in a bumbo seat, the little babe has enjoyed watching the chickens out the back window.  But recently, he must have been paying attention to a book his sister was reading aloud.  In it there was a line about chickens saying "cluck, cluck".  Then the next morning, our little babe was looking out the windows at the chickens and all on his own said, "cluck, cluck".  What a smart kid! 

This summer I had a to learn a few veterinarian skills too.  One day out of the blue, I notice Rosa, our Rhode Island Red pictured below, was not acting her usual "top of the pecking order" self.  She was not strutting around the yard as usual, but had slowly made her way from the coop to the back door with a stop at the kiddie pool for some water.  She just didn't act right and then I noticed her floppy comb.  So I called a friend in Oregon who has had chickens for a long time and has some amazing self taught veterinarian skills.  She's my own personal chicken whisperer!  She gave me some dosage suggestions for a livestock antibiotic regimen.  Now I do realize that we're talking about a sick chicken here.  But don't worry, I wouldn't have actually taken her to a vet.  I just figured if there was something simple or a a home remedy that I could try to hopefully keep her healthy and prevent something "small" from causing a larger problem, then why not?  And since it was a bit of a mystery to me, I didn't want apathy and  inaction to result in the whole flock getting whatever she had and then having 8 chickens croak. 

Fortunately, she quickly showed signs of improvement and after about a week was acting more normal again.  I'm just glad we didn't have some crazy epidemic spread and kill the whole flock.  Ugh!  That would have been a big mess to deal with.

Since my last chicken update several months ago, we also had a pretty size able egg pecking dealt with quite a few pecked or broken eggs and even a few signs that an occasional egg had been nearly completely devoured.  Even though egg production was fairly prolific, the pecking problem was frustrating.  Fixing this problem is sometimes impossible, but we attempted it with a new set of ceramic eggs.  The idea is to collect the real eggs as quickly as possible and leave behind the ceramic egg in the nest.  So if anyone gets any ideas about pecking an egg, they will peck the ceramic one and it won't feel good on their beak.  If they do this enough times, the idea is that they'll learn to not peck eggs.  Fortunately, this worked for our chickens and they eventually quit pecking.  But it's an ongoing battle that we have to regularly keep up with.  We try to pop a ceramic egg into the nest every now and then just to keep them on their toes.  Don't want any of them to get away with ruining yummy eggs!

And then there's Miss Scarlettt.  She has been peculiar this past summer and fall.   She went on an egg laying hiatus for about 5 months.  She is our green egg layer, so it's always easy to know when she's layed or not.

At the beginning of the summer, Miss Scarlett actually laid an egg that had no shell around the inner membrane.  And if that wasn't strange enough, she laid it by our grill when she was out free ranging in the yard.  Weird.  Here's a photo of the shell-less egg.  It had a greenish color to it just like her eggs.  And you can see how the outer layer is so thin you can see the color of the yolk. 

 

The most recent chicken news is that they are all finally back to laying eggs again after a three month long molting phase that significantly slowed them down.  At the beginning of November we actually had an entire week and a half of with not eggs laid.  But since then, we've gotten close to two dozen eggs and three of them have come from Miss Scarlett.  Quite surprising since we had thought her 5 month laying hiatus meant she was about done being a laying hen and was possibly ready to become a fryer hen.  More eggs are always welcome.

Now, winter is definitely here in SE Alaska and I feel pretty good about how we've winterized the chicken coop this year.  Hopefully we'll continue to have some fun stories and memories from having our own backyard coop.  And hey the fresh eggs aren't too shabby. :)