Rain and Chickens

January 26th, 2010


It has been raining off and on daily now for about 10 days here in Northern California. We definitely needed the rain and its good that a nice snowpack is building in the Sierras. The rough part has been the confinement indoors which definitely dampers my mood. With this confinement also has come the common cold, both of my children now have the sniffles. The one bright spot has been watching our vegetable seedlings grow. The plant stand has become a great area of fascination for the kids, I find them constantly peering into the seed start trays and provided commentary on the day to day changes of their progress. This alone is a great reason for you to start your veggies from seed if you have children.

The focus this year is a bit different from the past couple spring season here on the old farm. We purposely passed on the hatching and rearing of more fowl. Currently we have 15 chickens (all hens) which supply us with an excessive amount of eggs over the course of the year. On average most young hens will produce .5 eggs a day over the course of a year. During the spring and summer their laying activities will increase. So some quick math 7.5 x 365 = 2737.5 eggs a year, or 200 a month. Adult birds also require a lot of augmentation to their diets throughout the year. You have to grain them in the winter and the notion that a free range bird requires no additional nutritional requirements beyond grass is totally ludicrous. My feed bill throughout the year for the hens runs about $30 a month in the fall/winter and about $15 in the spring and summer months. So chickens are by no means economical. But they are great additions to ones home or farm. They are hysterical to watch, great for children to raise and understand the mechanics of life from.

There are also many pit falls to raising chicks or keeping your adult flock healthy. The concept of a small run for a flock is totally flawed. Confined spaces breed disease so its imperative to keep the roost clean and provide a large pasture setting for your flock. They do need free range space to be healthy, that stands for whether you have a couple hens or a flock. This space needs to be fenced and safe. Everyone loves chicken in nature, from your neighbors dogs (our neighbor’s dogs have killed 5 of our hens over the years) to foxes, skunks, raccoons, yots etc. You also need to make sure you keep your birds away from any poisons and fertilizers you may have laying around. They will eat just about anything, and possibly die from it. I lost 4 hens that flew over my fence into the veggie garden. I had a troublesome gopher and decided to bait it. They dug down into the gopher mound and consumed the bait I had just laid for him. Did I mention they are smart? They saw the poison pellets and thought “food”, well needless to say it was the last meal they ever ate.

Oh and any notions you got from watching Martha Stuart about letting your chickens run wild in your veggie garden…Chickens will decimate your veggie garden in a blink of an eye. They love to eat greens and any fruits you may have growing in your veggie beds. So make sure to keep your birds well fenced and away from your vegetable garden. If you don’t you will learn quickly that you should have.

But having young chicks around the place this season has been a bit of a sore spot for the kids. We did have a tremendous amount of fun the last couple years in the spring raising chicks. We learned a lot too. They learned about life and death quickly. The first year we were a bit green to the needs of baby chicks. Young birds are susceptible to a whole host of diseases. Many of which pass from hen to egg to chick, others can be spread via water or food. The first year I purchased 25 pullets from a hatchery. My first mistake was ordering the first part of the year. Hatcheries send day old pullets via airmail to your local US Postal Depot. Unfortunately that year it was unseasonably cold. The normal shipping process is to pack several chicks into a 4 section cardboard box. The thinking is that each of the 4 sections would hold up to 8 chicks each. The day old chicks would huddle together for warmth and have enough energy stored up internally to make the trip of up to 3 days in that little box. Well let me be the first to tell you the mortality factor this shipping process is high. Expect a death rate upon arrival of at least 5% to 10%. In my case we didn’t receive a call from the postal depot until late in the day. I made the mistake of telling the kids I was running out to fetch chicks. To my horror when I opened the box at the depot, 8 of the little guys were DOA. Either crushed by other chicks or could not get into the center of the pile to stay warm enough during the trip.

I nursed the remaining chicks back to health over the next couple weeks. Doesn’t matter how much of a tough guy you are either, you bond to the little shits quickly. So it was rough a few weeks into the game when I read on a couple back yard poultry sites that you should give chicks some greens from time to time including grass. Well let me tell right now, don’t feed them anything but sterile water and crumbles until they are at least 18 weeks old. I gave my first year chicks some grass off our lawn as suggested by a couple sites. Then spent the next couple weeks watching them die off one at a time for a horrible little poultry disease similar to Encephalitis. It pretty much nuked the part of their brains that allowed them motor control. A couple recovered a bit but have not been thrifty, eg poor egg layers. So out of 25, 8 were DOA, then I lost another 6 to that disease. The remaining 11 birds were fine until the neighbors dogs eat a couple. So we ended up getting a handful of chicks last year. Then we had a neighbor toss a hen over the fence that wasn’t ours to begin with so now we are at 15 birds.

Moral of the story, just go down and buy chicks from your local Tractor Supply or other feed and grain store. You will want pullet and not straight run if at all possible. Roosters will eventually get to aggressive to handle. The one I kept from my initial run, even through hand reared eventually attacked my 4 year old daughter. She went up to hand feed her favorite hen and he saw my daughter as a treat to the flock and attacked her. Scratcher her pretty good in the face and back, needless to say he was dead by sundown and in a pot of coq au vin shortly thereafter. You don’t need a rooster unless you plan on breeding birds. So save your kids the trauma of getting attacked and dispatch any young roosters you may get in your chicks. Trust me it’s the right thing to do. Be sure to eat him as well. They really are yummy if cooked low and slow.