ingrid

The coop is looking pretty nice.  The girls (chicken variety) and I are gearing up for a week or so of elementary school visits.  I sent a cute little flier to the teachers at a nearby school advertising our willingness to host students.  I figured that what with being walking distance from school, we were the perfect end-of-the-year field trip.  And chickens are a perfect study in social groups, sustainability, and compost, not to mention how pretty and funny they are.  I can think of  a million art and writing activities for chickens, (FOR kids, I mean, WITH chickens).  So far we have two classes slated to make the visit.  I only wish that it wasn’t so wet and dreary out.  Nothing like a rainy day to bring the gross elements out in a chicken run… I am talking about wet poop sitting in the mud of course.  Oh well.  I will just throw some straw around and hope that covers it a bit.

I didn’t do many art projects this week, but I did finish the board of glory— a ceramic chicken for each hen (and the one rooster) who has passed through our yard.  How many are up there?  11!  All of them have their names stamped on the side and an attempt at depicting their size and coloring.  This is a quickie project, so the results were sort of a mixed bag.  Some glazes were right on and others left something to be desired.  The important thing for me at this point is that I have caught up.  Now if no one dies or we don’t add any new hens, I can relax for awhile.

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We were chosen!  We were chosen!  We were BAWCK BAK! chosen for the Tour de Coops July 26th, 2010!  Y’all come see us.  We intend to be the nicest stop on the 29 coop Portland tour.

Hugs & Pecks,

Rita

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The weather is better and MOST of our chickens are looking much healthier and happier… all except the dead one that is.  We lost a chicken last night.  Dear sweet Bella (white one in the middle) had been acting sort of strange during the day.  I noticed her standing in a weird spot in the run.  I have a hard time quantifying what was so weird about this “weird spot” because there isn’t anything truly odd about where she was standing, but it is just not a place that my chickens regularly choose to hang out.  Does that make sense?  Anyway, she was standing there sort of nodding off and I thought, “That’s odd…” but left her there as it was sort of nap time and I was tired myself.  (Did you know that chickens nap during the day?  They are tired just at the same time I am tired!  Another reason why I like them!) When I returned to put the chickens in before leaving for a dinner party, she was sprawled out on the ground, twisting her head around and frankly not looking good.  It was apparent to me that she was certainly going to die and there wasn’t much that I might do about it.  I took her inside the house and inspected her body, gave her some water, and put her in a box full of clean hay.  There was nothing wrong with her body besides the seeming paralysis, greeny poop and messy vent.  I thought for about a minute about running a finger up in there to check for an egg that she couldn’t pass, but I mistakenly thought that I had gathered an egg from her that very day, so I didn’t bother.  Today when I got another tiny white and pointy egg in the nestbox it became clear— I had been matching this egg with the wrong chicken.  Even with this information, it seems unlikely that she had egg-bind.  The twisting head part makes the illness seem more nervous system related…. which is sort of a problem.

Bella was dead in the box by the morning of course.  Meanwhile, I was worried about possible disease that might bring the whole flock down.  I have this chicken manual that is THE REFERENCE for poultry keepers everywhere.  Unfortunately, it is written more for a serious operation than for a layperson like myself.  Most of the diagnosis for disease is only evident with an autopsy, and although I did spend about 5 minutes thinking, “Now I would bet I could cut this girl open and check if white deposits are on her liver!”, I think that maybe this sort of real science is not me.  I don’t even have a scalpel in the house anyway.  And the last time I cut anything open was high school science class.

So instead of picking up the hacksaw, I decided to scrub out the henhouse with bleach and water, pressure wash the roosts and make sure any infected poop was out of there.  This done, I settled in to check out the rest of the flock and saw…..nothing.  Everyone seems fine, healthy even.  Rosey fat foot is looking better, nearly normal actually.  Everyone looks plump and shiny with nice red combs and wattles.  And they are laying like a  henhouse on fire.  We are getting about 6 eggs a day.

The kids are sort of strangely unaffected.  They vacillate between being sad and asking if they can get another chicken… or maybe three!  Francis did have a 2 minute meltdown where she cried quite enthusiastically.  I don’t know how to respond to this sometimes as in these moments I feel the kids watching me, ready to follow my lead.  I don’t want to make a misstep in times like this.  Although I too am sad, I know that animals dying is just sort of part of life.  It is what happens when we choose this husbandry.  It is confusing in a different way from when people are sick.  You can’t ask the chicken what it needs, how it feels, if it wants a drink of water.  When I saw how Bella was acting, I knew that she would die.  There was nothing that I could do except make her comfortable and check back to see when the dying happened.  They live, they die.  We live, we die.  We are kind of powerless, aren’t we?

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If you are now singing, “But! – it’s poetry in motion
And when she turned her eyes to me” (Doo doo doo doo deweee! ), then I know that you are my kind of person, or at least my age.

Annnnnyway, I am getting all scientific around here.  I decided that I would keep track of my chickens’ egg laying habits, in order to answer that burning question–”How many eggs do you get?”.  Needless to say, no one is really asking for a week-by-week break down, and yet, isn’t this interesting?  And what exactly is going on Wednesdays?

For the month of March, our chickens laid 131 eggs.  That is 29 eggs a week.  Now I am wondering, where have they all gone?  We do eat a lot of eggs around here, and what with baking (Brad does that!), and the kids liking hard-boiled eggs, I suppose it is possible that we go through that many.  More likely is that we gave some away here and there and I just can’t quite remember it.  Anyway, many are the eggs in our household, and this being despite the rainy weather and despite my leaving the chickens in a lot lately.

The girls know that there is a lot of good stuff to eat out in the yard, so they tend to cluster near the door whenever they see someone approach.

If you too have a lot of eggs, here is what you do with them—make a puffed oven pancake.  You can easily find the recipe on-line.  There are a million variations, but the basic ingredients are eggs, milk, flour and butter plus a cast iron skillet.  I don’t believe in using sugar, dividing eggs or doing anything fancy.  Those basic ingredients make the most awesome breakfast.  I don’t think you can go wrong.

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I don’t know what it has been lately, but I seem to have run into a rash of chicken health issues.  First, I find a gross chunky thing EMBEDDED in Rita’s waddle.  Truly, I couldn’t figure out if it was a dead tick, a pock of some sort, or a rock.  I had to remove it with tweezers, which was gross, gross, gross.  Even though I have good motor skills for small work and still hands, I could never quite be a surgeon because I am still sort of squeamish.  The yuck factor was high on this job.  It sort of looked like petrified chicken crap, but the skin had grown around it leaving a pinky sized hole when I removed the object.  I smeared bag balm all over the wound and let the poor terrified bird go.  (Hilariously, this is exactly how I treat wounds in my own children).

Next I thought I would inspect all the chickens to see if any others had weirdo growths.  That was when I noticed that Rosey’s left leg was swollen and gross looking.

The chicken health handbook was full of dire warnings of possible disease– e coli infections, infectious bird flu, skin scales that would never really go away, lameness that would bring certain death to the entire flock.  I couldn’t figure out which one of the awful things it could be, or if it is just an inflammation of the joint from an injury that will heal in time.  The Poultry Farmer book from my grandfather was no help.  That is aimed at an entire farm of poultry, so you can imagine what it has to say about anything involving injury—cull the bird!  (That is just a nice way of saying “kill her before you have to find out what is actually wrong”).  The chicken looked and acted fine, so there was to be no culling here.  I sat with her and soaked her leg in salt water.  It seemed dumb, but made me feel like I was doing something.  I also looked for signs of bumblefoot.  Didn’t see any, but I also couldn’t find anything that said if the chicken could have swelling with no outward signs of trauma.  (If you know, please comment).  My conclusion is that she has a swollen joint because of an injury.  We have somewhat high roosts and the silly girls barrel off those at high speed when they think we’re bringing snacks.  She could have gotten hurt jumping down.  We’ll be watching her to see if she worsens.

I hope everyone is well and free of gross disease in your world.

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I’m getting organized.  Scientific even.  I bought a white board at SCRAP and nailed it to the wall in the chicken coop to keep track of number of eggs per day.  I am even sort of trying to track who is laying what.  So far the results are dismal.  It seems that we are getting three eggs a day from the same three chickens–Rita, Hasty, and Evelyn.  Hmmmm.  That would mean that Agnes and Rosey aren’t laying at all (old ladies), Hildy is on sabbatical (I don’t know what her excuse is as she is only 1 1/2, Bella is molting, and Frankie is just a lazy, good-for-nothing chicken, eating a lot and not pulling her weight, sort of like Inez except that Inez is not a chicken.  (I don’t know when I decided that it was funny to joke about babies not doing their part, but it still cracks me up.  It seems to be the only acceptable way to talk trash about a baby.)  Frankie, like Inez, might just be too young as she was hatched at the end of June last year.  It is hard to tell with chickens who reach laying age right as the days are short and the rest of the flock is not laying anyway.

Evelyn might well be my hardest worker around here.

She is laying almost every day.  This last week she popped out this MASSIVE egg.  It was the second of its kind to be presented by this lady.  When I told Brad that it was a double yoker, he was unduly surprised.  ”Those are real?” he said.  Of course they are real!  Even though he had heard about them all his life, because he had never seen one, he didn’t really believe they were real.  Weird denial of reality is what I call that.  I hear that the sun is made of gas, and you know what?  I believe it.

This is a comparison photo:  normal egg from Hasty, giHUGIC egg from Evelyn.  This worries me a bit actually.  It is fairly common for chickens who produce these huge suckers to get egg bind, a condition where the egg literally gets STUCK inside them.  A friend on our street lost a chicken to egg bind lately.  I am freaked out that I might have to reach up in a chicken and break an egg to get it out if this were to occur with one of our hens.  Here is hoping it doesn’t.  A friend of a friend also told me that she gave her hen a warm bath when she had egg bind.  The egg came right out.  Hmmm.  I guess I like baths.  I’ve never had one with a chicken though.

More photos to impress and (in the case of Anne) disgust?

Ahh yes!  Look at those old lady hands!  (It was because I was working with clay all day; I got a lot of terra cotta stuck in the cracks in my hands.)

We need to hurry up and come up with a use for this egg as it does not fit in the carton.  Really.

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I learned a lot about chickens this year, but perhaps the best thing I learned that I will put to use in the future is how to integrate new chickens into a home flock.

First of all, there are chicken psychologists out there who will tell you all about their special methods for integrating new birds with minimal trauma.  It involves quarantining the bird, holding the bird a lot, bonding with the bird, and then introducing slowly visually before the other birds have a chance to peck the new bird’s guts out.  Meanwhile you, the owner, stand near the new bird and say “NO!” firmly whenever another bird tries to flay it.  You are suppose to be like the head bird or something and your word goes.  That is bullshit.  Or at least, I tried that and it didn’t seem to work so great.  My new bird at this time last year, Hildy, was quickly cowed and attacked and pecked so much that she was featherless across her back most of last year.  Here is what I did wrong.

First of all, I only introduced one bird at a time.  Mistake.  One new bird quickly becomes an obvious target for EVERYONE ELSE.  Because the old birds are not so bright, it is much better to introduce 3 or so birds to them so that they can not easily distinguish whom to jump.  It is also much more exhausting for them to try to attack every newcomer when there are just so many of them!

Last year I introduced my one bird into the henhouse that everyone was comfortable in.  They already knew their roosting spots and weren’t eager to shove over for a newcomer.  This year, I took the hens out of their old spot and shoved them into their new house at the same time as I introduce the four new hens.  Everyone was bewildered!  No one could get up the focus or presence of mind to attack anyone else!  If I had not been moving the hens anyway, I could have accomplished the same thing by putting the hens somewhere weird for a night and half a day (like our shed) before reintroducing them to their hen house.  This is sort of a solitary confinement thing, and could also be accomplished by separating the hens out into cardboard boxes for the night— each bird thinks they are out of the flock and therefore doesn’t really know their place/is ready to reestablish pecking order.  Or maybe put them in the weird spot, lock them out of the chicken run for the day while the new hens roamed around in there and then let them go back in at twilight while the new hens were already down to roost.  Ah hah!  Chicken psychology.

Birds of a feather do sort of flock together.  Our old hens hang out near each other while the new ones prefer each other’s company, but our new hens and old hens all seem to be getting along.  No one is missing feathers or looking harassed like Hildy was last year.  Thus, my new methods for chicken introduction and Hildy with her new feathers makes the list for THE BEST!

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Remember that song from “Les Mis”?  Well, I guess it is nothing like that.

As I mentioned in my last post, I got new hens.  They are all on the young side, but I think this was the way to go rather than waiting to hatch my own or buy chicks in the spring.  Hatching my own was a lot of work and not super successful (remember Helmut?).  Starting with chicks just takes a long time.  They aren’t ready to lay until about 5 months old, so it would be mid summer before I saw more eggs.  These hens are all about 4-8 months old, so they will be laying right away.

It was quite the hilarious operation.  I drove out to Lloyd Center mid day to meet a guy in a very back parking lot.  He had a pick up full of cages and was doling out hens here and there.  While I visited, two other women drove up and collected their city chickens.  It was like a drug deal with no drugs!

Here are my new chickens!

Bella is on the left (she’s a Delaware) and Rita on the right (New Hampshire Red).  Francis named Bella after a song from Strega Nona by Tomi di Paola about the moon.  She pronounces it with a Spanish accent and I say it with an Italian one, but we both know who we are talking about.

This is Evelyn.  I don’t know what she is.  The farmer didn’t know what she was either.  He mumbled something about Macon cross blah blah blah… I had actually asked for an australorpe, but I saw her and was stunned at her green/black/red feathers.  She is so gorgeous.

Much to Francis’ chagrin, Brad has named this chicken Hasty.  Hasty was a sort of joke suggestion for Francis’ middle name.  In the running for Francis’s middle name was also “Bacon” and “Aufterheide”.  This is how we came up with baby names for our children: we suggested ridiculous names until we found something good.  Then again, this is also  how we got “Zephyr”.

The “old” girls are also looking quite good I’d say.  Their molt is done and they look shiny and fat.  Hildy especially looks great right now (golden laced wyandotte).  Her feathers finally grew in (after nasty Agnes pulled them out).

Frankie is maturing nicely.  She is still pretty high-strung.  I still can not catch her easily, and she is by no means my favorite chicken, but she is healthy and will most likely be a good layer.  She is either a barred rock or a dominique.  I can’t tell the difference.

This time around I was careful to get hens that are contrasting in patterns and colors.   Now I have a hen house full of jewels.  Aren’t they pretty?

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No, I’m kidding.  I actually applied for a license to keep more than 3 chickens within city limits and I got inspected today.  Being a sort of nervous, want-to-do-good-paranoid-about-getting-in-trouble sort of person, my heart just about went through the roof when I saw the pickup (with lights–but not on of course) pull up in front of our house.  And of COURSE the chicken door was open because Francis did the chores this morning and the kids can’t seem to go in the door without letting chickens get out.  That is a no-no in the city.  If you have chickens wandering around your yard, you are suppose to be with them, which I obviously wasn’t as I answered the door for the inspections guy.  We didn’t have time to put them in again because we were super late for school.  Luckily for us, it is cold as hell around here and even with the door to the fenced area open, the chickens were huddled together in the coop.  I hurriedly confessed that we let them out accidentally this morning and that I knew I wasn’t suppose to.  ”No problem,” Mr. Super Nice Inspector said.  ”We are pretty laid back as long as we can’t hear or smell them when approaching the property”.

The inspection was great though.  The guy was completely nice, not upset that I had EIGHT chickens (by the way, did I mention that I now have EIGHT chickens?!  That is for another post.), and quite complimentary about my coop.  He said that I obviously had room for more and I should just let them know if I want to get more.  No thanks, I said.  Even I know when enough is enough.  He also said that he could tell that I take care of them, that the area is clean and looks free of stink or rats, and that he is glad that I have names for all of them.  That is a sign that I care for my chickens well.  So, all in all, a really good experience, and I should get my license within the week.

It is interesting to me that the City of Portland is fine with chickens, and my hometown of Sheridan is not.  I have my theories that people in Sheridan, being country people, are only familiar with TONS of chickens so they have no real idea of the miniscule sound and smell present with less than 10 chickens.  When they think “chickens”, they think of fifty chickens, or one hundred and fifty chickens.  The Sheridan Sun recently quoted a city counselor as saying that a neighborhood with chickens would be “unlivable”, which is about the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard, especially as I live on a block with more chickens than people.

Did I mention that I love Portland, Oregon?

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Your new home?

So, it isn’t completely finished, but as the rains seem to be coming in ernest, we moved the chickens into their new home.  Sure, we need to use a chair rather than a nice sliding bolt to keep the door closed, and yes, there is a sheet of metal covering a place where chicken wire should be, but other than that, the house is perfect.  Isn’t it way, super, totally cute?  Don’t look at that storage hatch that is not on hinges yet (yeah, the one leaning against the front of the shed).  And yes, you do see places missing sheet metal… we’ll get to that.  Just look at the overall cuteness factor.  My dad did a great job designing and doing most of the work finishing this chicken mansion.

Not only do the chickens have about 10 times the space as before, they now have a completely fenced outside area that is tall enough for us humans to access without stooping.  We have hay bale storage inside the coop and chicken feed bin storage outside.  The chickens have their own access door on the front there as well as two operating windows for the summer time.  Awesome.

Inside I sort of hacked together three roosts and an access rail for the nesting boxes.  Zephyr is leaning on it and it didn’t break yet, so we might be in business.  The two Francis-es are bonding here: Francie is holding Frankie.

chicken-approved

Rather than the one measly nesting box that we had in the previous coop, we have four luxurious boxes!  I know that most of the chicken books say that one box per four chickens is fine, but that was not my experience.  Don’t believe them!  We had so many problems with not enough boxes.

As a child, my family lived for a summer in what later became a chicken coop.  It was slightly bigger than this shack, but not much!  My parents were building our house in Sheridan up in the woods and we were living in a rental in Willamina.  My mother hated the rental and hated living in town, so off we went to a 10 by 12 shed where my older sister and I slept in narrow bunks nailed to the wall and my parents slept on the floor on a roll out cot with (the then) baby, Kendall.  We had an outdoor “kitchen” comprised of a coleman stove and some storage shelves and boxes.  We sat on sawed logs and had a campfire many nights.  We had an outhouse, and got washed up in a concrete utility sink filled from a hose (yes, it was cold!).  On the way to the outhouse one night, I got within 10 feet of two bobcats, which was the last time I saw those in the woods.  Although I was pretty young, living in “the chicken shed” was among the best memories of my life!

My only regret with our new chicken coop was that we couldn’t find a night to sleep out in it before the chickens moved in.  The kids really wanted to, and I thought that would be so much fun, but unfortunately the chickens needed it more than we did, so no sleeping out.

I am pretty pleased with this place though.  Thanks Dad.

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