Caring for the Chooks

For the last few months my main reason for getting out of bed in a timely fashion is to unlock the hen house and give the birds a feed. I have fussed about and decided to buy leg rings for them all so that I could tell them apart. This worked in some ways but not in others. For one, I found it impossible to tell the birds apart when they were running through long grass because I couldn't see their legs, but I found that if I could check which ones were which when I could eyeball their tags I soon learned their faces and colouring. They now all have names, even if they are mostly named after the randomly assigned coloured rings which I put on their legs in the dark while they slept.

My runty little chicken, named "Blondie" lost her siblings because her mother is a very slack broody, but she was successfully fostered into a brood of her cousins (the "Pippits") and it turns out that all four of them have survived and thrived and appear to be females (so we don't have to eat them). "Princess" who was laying next to the fence, hatched one chick on the first of April, but being the southern hemisphere, it died in a cold snap. I bought 6 Barred Rock roosters and 4 of them have survived to 19 weeks, while the other 2 (not having a mum or rooster to look after them) were picked off by a kahu (native hawk).

Alexander named the biggest Barred Rock, "Joey". "Joey" will be kept for breeding and his siblings are destined for the table. His largest brother has just gone through a growth spurt and surpassed him in size and will make a welcome midwinter roast.

In mid May our alpha rooster ("Garden Rooster") was taken to by "Booster", his brother and wore the worst of it. He couldn't open one eye and was quite scratched up. We had been trying to decide which of the roosters we were going to cull and our decision was made for us. I called a friend in Palmerston North who kindly came out and showed me how to break a bird's neck. We scalded it, plucked it and he kindly decapitated and gutted it for me. I cooked the meat off the bones, shredded it, and made a chicken vegetable soup, as the bird was so stringy that cooking it dry would have made it inedible. As it was he made quite a toothsome meal and my 8-year-old half-sister-in-law who had helped raise him was quite happy to have second helpings.

A few weeks ago I added another roosting perch to the hen house to give the birds a little more room. This afternoon I mucked out the hen house, which has been left for so long that the mulch at the bottom of the straw had thoroughly composted. I think if I were organising the living area for the chickens myself I would keep it cleaner than this. I had some help from my father-in-law's partner who removed the old, half rotten drawers that had been put in once-upon-a-year as nest boxes and have since been collecting a healthy layer of guano.

Most of the birds seem healthy and happy except for one who had unsightly lumps on her feet. I looked it up some time ago and found someone saying that old birds sometimes just get these deformities, but "Fleur" has recently been hiding in the hen house and not coming out when all the others are foraging. I brought her inside this evening and had a proper go at cleaning out the gunk that had collected in the huge deformities on her feet. I got a plug the size of a small marble out of one foot and a similar amount of mass out of the other foot. Each foot had a huge hole on the bottom that extended into a huge lump on top of the foot. Now these have been cleaned and disinfected and her feet have been covered so no dirt gets in while she heals, hopefully she will feel a bit better.

I have been considering a bunch of options for trying out my carpentry skills. I would like to make the chooks a dust bath, with a roof to keep the wet off, and possibly with some kind of catchment so I can collect run-off water so I don't need to lug watering cans from the house out to the chook house. My main inhibition is the lack of materials, but I am saving up my pocket money.

My other project is to build another small hen house so I can separate the flock for breeding. My father-in-law recently introduced 5 ex-battery hens to the flock and the plan is to have "Booster" breeding with the battery girls, and "Joey" breeding with the rest of the flock who are mostly the other rooster's siblings, nieces, and granddaughters. This should hopefully mean stronger chicks and more interesting looking offspring.

Now all I have to do is count my pennies and start looking at borrowing some power-tools... unless I want to get very proficient with a handsaw!

Rescuing our baby chicken

We've just moved to a lifestyle block, owned by my husband's father, in Awahuri, New Zealand. There are chickens here and I have taken up the responsibility of feeding them, which feels pretty much like jumping into farming at the shallow end.

We have a couple of Khaki Campbell ducks, a guinea fowl, and about 9 Rhode Island Red chickens free ranging, and one of the hens was looking after four chicks when we got here. When we moved we brought two cats with us, so we thought it prudent to lock the brood in an old rabbit hutch that had been used as a chicken tractor for previous chicks by the owners of the property.

We recently had torrential rain from the tail end of tropical cyclone Wilma. Unfortunately a couple of the chicks managed to jump out of the nest box and did not know how to jump back in, so when I went to check on them I found two prone and lifeless looking bodies in the grass.

I picked them both up and one of them moved a leg so I bustled them inside and held them against my body for warmth. The bigger chick twitched his leg a bit and then expired, but the smaller chick started to open her beak and within an hour had warmed up, and fluffed up enough for me to return her to her mother.

Unfortunately, because I was too slack to fuss about in the rain, I didn't fix up a step for her so when I checked on her later the next day I found her in the rain, lying prone and limp in the grass again. She hadn't been there long though, as I had fed the chickens no more than half an hour earlier. I managed to warm her back up to conscious once more, and returned her to her mother, and added a brick to the box so she could jump back into the box. That was a learning experience.

All was well for about a week but one of her siblings mysteriously went missing and it became obvious that she was not being cared for by her mother. Her remaining sibling seemed to be getting all the food and she spent much of her time hiding in the grass or under the edge of the wooden frame, out of the nest box. She was so weak that even with the step I had added she could not climb into the box so I decided to bring her inside.

Since the warm wet weather we have had an abundance of flies now and she is enjoying feasting on them as I catch them for her. She is growing stronger by the day. It is still unclear whether she will make it to fully grown. Our oldest boy, Alexander, is loving having a cute baby chicken in the house. We have assumed that she is female but she hasn't actually been sexed so it may turn out that if we can get her to size, and she is a "he", then he will end up on the dinner table. This may be one of those traumatic growth experiences that small children endure. Only time will tell.

I have a friend in Feilding who has recently acquired an incubator and she is keen to go halves on any chickens if I can collect a clutch of eggs. I've been told that there is every likelihood that all the eggs the chooks are laying are fertile but currently we have one hen with three chicks, another with one (and the one I have inside), one who is laying flimsy shelled eggs in the nest box in the hen house and then standing on them and smashing them *sigh*, and one hen who has the rooster watch over her while she lays her eggs in a depression in the ground next to a corrugated iron fence... which is hardly a great place to sit on them.

Today Captain got a bunch of books from the library on keeping ducks and chickens. We are learning as we go!