Purpledawn writes:
I want to have some chickens in my yard. How hard is it to keep the chickens in the yard? [...] Any tips, suggestions on getting started?
Let me start by telling you I am a relative beginner myself, when it comes to keeping chickens, although I have learned a lot since I started. Here's the story, I hope you can get someting out of it.
About a year and a half ago, my girl friend and I bought a house out in the country. The previous owner had four chickens roaming about. He was moving to a place where he could no longer keep the chickens, so we agreed they would stay. When we moved into the house a couple of months afterwards, one chicken had been dispatched to chicken heaven by a bird of prey.
In our first spring there, one of the three remaining chickens started brooding. The eggs it sat on were of course not fertilised, so it would be to no avail. But I work for a firm that has its main office in an old mansion with some privately owned buildings around it where people live. These people have chickens. So I asked them if I could have some fertilised eggs. They gave me two - they had no more - and I put them under my brooding chicken. Sure enough, three weeks later, we heard high pitched sounds coming from under the chicken. The next day we saw the chicks, a black one and a yellow one.
Now comes a bit of a sad part. Having no experience with chickens, we took no precautions against what happened next. The yellow chick saw its 'mother' drinking from a small water basin, and young chicks copy their mother in everything. But the chick couldn't reach over the edge, so it jumped over it. It then fell into the water and couldn't get out anymore. This happened out of our sight, so we only found it when it was too late. The black chick grew up into a healthy young cockerel. But when it was about six months old, another bird of prey paid us a visit and we were back to square one.
Last spring, I asked those same people for some eggs again - this time they gave me six - and I put them under the same chicken again, when it started brooding. Three weeks later, we had five healthy chicks - one egg had failed to hatch. Those chicks survive until this day, they are now about eleven weeks old. One of them is certainly a cockerel, another one we are not entirely sure about, but it looks like it's a cockerel as well, and the other three are very probably hens. They are Cochins, by the way, and they are all buff coloured. Cochins have a lot of feathers on their legs, right up to their toes, so it looks rather as if they are wearing trousers. It's very funny to see them running.
Since they were hatched here, they think of it as home. (The first weeks, they were practically glued to 'mum' anyway.) I didn't want to buy chickens, because you have to lock them up the first period of time, to make them stay. Besides, there would undoubtedly be some animosity between the old residents and the newcomers, and we didn't want all that. So hatching them was the ideal way of getting more chickens.
The point of telling you all this is that I have no experience with starting to keep chickens by getting them from elsewhere. They didn't move in with us after all, we moved in with them.
But as to keeping them once they are at home, well, for us, it isn't hard at all. All we do is throw them a few handfuls of seeds every morning and afternoon, fill up a bowl of special chicken feed and a (safe!) container of water. I've also made some modifications to their night pen. Since we have foxes in the neighbourhood, I always lock the pen for the night. But, especially in the weekends, I don't want to get up early to let them out again. So I made a construction with a trip board and a weight connected to a small door, and now they can open it themselves. It works! It's a bit like a trap mechanism, only this 'trap' sets them free instead of catching them. All I have to do in the evening, when they are all in, is set the trap.
Until recently, the young ones slept in the nest they were hatched in, which was a small enclosure with a flat roof on it. Lately, they had taken to sitting
on the roof, instead of under it. Apparently, they wanted to move up on the ladder of life. So I removed the nest and put some wooden beams in their place, about a few square inches thick, at about the height of the former roof. They immmediately got the idea and now they sit there every night.
Since there was actually only one really suitable ready made place for the old ones to lay their eggs, sometimes, when it was occupied by one of them, the other ones went off to lay somewhere in the garden. Our garden is rather large, so you can imagine that I have spent quite some time finding the damned eggs. So, a short while ago, with the young chickens in mind, who will start laying soon, I have built some nests inside the pen, nice small enclosures - the way I'm told chickens like it - with straw on the floor and an artifical egg in them, to get them in the right mood. The very next day after I finished the nests, they laid their eggs in them, can you believe it? I've made a slanted roof on the nests this time, so there will be no sitting - and, more importantly, no
shitting - on the roof.
If you make these beams for them to sit on at night, make sure you don't put them all at the same height, because the seniors will want to sit higher. Also make sure there is enough fresh air - but no draft! - where they sit. I don't think cold is a problem, unless you happen on a nuclear winter, in which case you have other problems to worry about.
I don't know much about races, so I can't help you there. So, what more can I tell you? Nothing much, really. If you start keeping chickens, let me know how you fare.
This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 22-Jul-2005 03:44 PM
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