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!
No comments:
Post a Comment