I order my chickens on the internet, like the settlers used to do

Over on my friend and neighbor's HenCam.com (which is a fantastic resource for all things chicken-keeping related, and voted one of the internet's best time-sinks by Country Living and BBC or some such), I shared some thoughts on what we're doing about our flock of chickens this year, and why. 

Since it is a natural follow on to my last post, I thought I'd reproduce it here as well. 

How many new chicks to get this year has been the topic of much conversation at our house lately – we’ve just put in our spring order (chicks arrive in April). The primary purposes of our flock are to 1) provide a living lesson in business and the care of animals for the children (they sell the eggs) and 2) to keep me amused.

Whether you're an old hand at chicken-keeping, or just thinking about getting a couple of birds for the first time - knowing why you're getting them should certainly be an important part of your breed selection. 

With our goals in mind, I always am looking for: a) a steady supply of eggs, and b) a good variety of hens (both egg & feather color). 

I’ve got a no [boys/feathered feet/feathered heads] rule, just because I’m a low maintenance (i.e. “lazy”) kind of chicken farmer. (Roosters make noise that annoy me/the neighbors. Feathered feet and the crazy feathered-headgear birds like Polish hens are high maintenance in care/trimming to keep healthy that I'm not willing to invest time in).  

I’ve also generally shied away from bantam (think: miniature chickens) breeds because I feel bad about the kids selling smaller eggs.

To maintain a flock of around 25 reasonably productive hens, I’ve found that we need to order/replenish about 5-10 hens a year.

Predators generally account for about 2/3rds of our loss (hawks, raccoons, possums, fisher cats) (but mostly hawks), which is just part of the life and risk that comes with free-range chicken keeping.  Plus: while we have been lucky/careful enough to avoid any other serious issues, we always lose a couple per year to other natural causes (egg bound, cancer, etc). 

Then there was the rooster that showed up in last year’s order. He ended up on the dinner table (see the “no boys” rule above).

Chickens can live to be 15+ years old with a luck and a (more than) a bit of care, and our oldest hens are about 4 years old. But they start to slow down in laying after a while, and because of their vulnerabilty to anything with a beak, claw or teeth and their tendency to go from perfectly healthy to death's door with very few indicators, the numbers of backyard chickens that make it into the 5+ age range are definitely a minority. We've also always been pretty pragmatic about our hens: they're not pets; they're production livestock. So with the rare exception that displayed a bit more personality, we take very few extraordinary measures to extend the lives of our birds. (e.g. none  of them have ever been crated for a trip to our veterinarian). 

This year, the Critter and I settled on 10-ish as the magic number. I have bought small lots of pullets (young hens just about ready to start laying) from local(-ish) folks (my bride’s preference), but I was looking for a little more variety this order. And I kind of like getting them as chicks. The kids love that part of the process. However, this limits the places I can order or buy the hens to a very few sellers unless I find someone to share an order.  I figured I’d go ahead and try MyPetChicken.com – I’ve heard mixed reviews, and the cost/chicken is relatively high, but they do offer vaccinated chicks and have a respectable selection, so I’m willing to give it a try.

I think we’ve had around 15 different breeds at this point. I don’t like to have just 1 of any bird generally, so that was a factor as well. We spent some time talking about which chickens had been our favorite and why, and which we were willing to try out and ended up with the following:

• (2) Silver spangled Hamburgs (we just lost our last one to natural causes a couple of weeks ago. We’ve had 5 or 6 over the years. They’re not very friendly – they don’t even socialize well with other chickens – but they are pretty to look at.
• (1) Rhode Island Red (great bird, but a little dominant, as you mentioned)
• (1) Australorp (Always try and keep a few of these in the flock)
• (1) white Plymouth Rock (we haven’t had an all-white hen in a couple of years. This was a special request from the Critter. We’ve got another RIR, so this will be the only ‘single’ in the flock)
• (2) silver Lakenvelder (We’ve never had these before, and selected them just because they looked pretty in the catalog)

For the first time, I’ve also ordered a couple of Golden Sebright bantam hens. We’ll keep back the smaller eggs for our own consumption, and I thought it’d be fun to mix it up a bit.

This will take us up to 30 birds total, but I’m planning to re-design and build an expanded coop this summer. Plus, my experience is that you lose up to 10-15% of chicks in the first 6-9 months (they get sick/die after shipping issues, or they're bred weak, or other random chicken issues). Combine with expected attrition of the current flock, and this should keep our numbers relatively steady on average, and the birds happy. 

By the way, introducing new birds to an existing flock is a bit of a trick. (We lost a couple of adolescent hens to bullying from the older girls before we got the hang of it). Terry's got a good reference with some ideas here. I'll post our method (which has consistently worked for the last 3 batches of new birds) later in the spring. 

Snow hens

From time to time, people ask me how well the chickens do in the colder weather. I worried a lot about this as well the first couple of winters. Until someone pointed out to me that chickens have survived a few thousand years of domestication, winters and all, without too much effort. 

They do tend to slow down in the winter, but that's as much about having fewer hours of daylight to get out and scratch for interesting tidbits as anything. As you can see, while ther sun is out, our hens take maximum advantage to soak up the rays. 

These are all 3rd generation birds of our flock, less than 2 years old. (The second one from the left is a Speckled Sussex and the others are all various shades of Araucana, which lay pale green, olive or blue eggs). The older birds tend to be a little slower to make their way out into the snow, and stay back in the more sheltered areas. 

The biggest issue with snow is that it covers up all that lovely dirt for scratching and the hens can get a little bored (which can lead to some issues - more on that below). This year, I planned ahead a bit more and rather than having to go out and clear the snow away by shovel, I created a wind & snow barrier around part of their coop to give them an easy place to get out and stretch their legs. Just a simple structure of stacked hay bales does the trick.

Added bonus, the little vermin that naturally seek out the hay bales to nest cozily through the winter provide an interesting diversion for the hens. 

About the only real challenge in the winter months is keeping their drinking water from freezing. Fortunately, I ran electricity out to the coop a few years ago, which allows me to put a low voltage heater under their water supply, designed to keep things liquid and accessible (available at pretty much any feed store). 

This also allowed me to put in an overhead light on a timer. Hens want between 12-16 hours of daylight for consistent laying (depending on the breed). Clearly not going to happen without artificial intervention during the colder months of the year.  There's still some slowdown, but generally, they keep going right through the winter months.  Just don't leave the eggs out too long, or they will freeze and crack.

I'll admit to one other concession - I put a red heat lamp in the coop during the darkest months of the year as well. Partly for the heat (although they really don't need it). But also the boredom of cooped up hens (Ha! "cooped up") can lead to pecking. And if they draw blood, they'll keep at it until it causes a real problem. The red lamp disguises any red they might see, and minimizes that kind of issue. 

This really shouldn't be too much of a problem, as long as your hens have ready access to the outside and something interesting to do. Like kids, they just get up to trouble if they're left without a better and more constructive distraction. 

This speckled Sussex is one of the friendliest (i.e. dumbest) birds in my flock. She's also one of the prettiest.

There may be a correlation between these facts. 

So there you go. Hens are really pretty easy to keep all year round, in even the colder parts of the country, with very little special preparation.. And seeing a pretty girl like this out pecking and hunting for interesting tidbits all fluffed up to keep herself warm will keep you entertained about as long as you can stand still in the snow yourself. 

You've cockled your last doo, little friend

We have added several chickens to the flock this year, to replace our natural losses. One batch of 10 or so I got back in spring, splitting a large order with a local friend and chicken guru. The kids and I love getting the baby chicks each spring, and watching them quickly turn from balls of yellow-ish fluff to gangly young pterodactyl-chickens (teenagers of all species seem to max out on The Awkward) to pretty young birds, strutting about. My Bride, on the other hand, would just as soon skip the several months of non-productive growing up it takes before they start laying eggs (usually about 20 weeks or so), and is always after me just to buy pre-grown hens (which I did as well this year, adding 4 or 5 auracanas, who lay pretty pastel green and blue eggs. How very Martha of me.) 

We always order 'hens only'. Our birds are there for the eggs, and I am just as happy to get my young ones from the internet mail order (just like the Settlers used to do) rather than hatching them from scratch ourselves. Because the Critter is the one doing the majority of the bird-caring, I'd also just as soon not have an aggressive male bird in amongst the girls, protecting his feathered harem. And I KNOW our neighbors are happy to do without the noise.

So, no boys. That's the rule. 

Except that it's really damned hard to tell those little baby balls of cheep-cheep fluff apart sometimes. And every once in a while, one slips through unnoticed. A few weeks ago while I was down visiting the run, one of my pretty little hens stretched out its neck and gave a somewhat timid 'cock-a-doodle-doo.'  I did a double take. It was one of the young ones, and slightly bigger than the others of that lot, with a somewhat glossier tail, but no tell-tale spurs developing (cocks have great big sharp toenails sticking out of the side of their foot), and really, maybe this hen was just a little butch? We always get a lot of different breeds, so it's a bit hard to tell what it's "supposed" to look like by comparison. I pulled it aside, and explained the "no-boys" rule, and suggested that if it wanted to thrive at our place it had better try to lay an egg real quick, or at least get better at making like Tom Hanks in Bosom Buddies.  

A couple of weeks later, though, and there was no mistaking it. Our little 'girl' had hit a growth spurt and now towered over the hens around him. He was shooting out all the long, glossy male plumage, and crowing regularly throughout the day. I knew it had to go. 

One of our local friends told me she 'knows a guy who takes care of these things'. He's an immigrant who finds our American grocery store chicken to be bland and puny, and is always glad to help take a rooster off your hands. I had my Bride drop her a line, and let him know that we had a problem that he could help us take care of. He's like the Cleaner. But for chickens. 

As it happens, my in-laws are in town, staying with us. My mother-in-law, smiling, suggested that we "should take care of it ourselves."

This tiny, adorable, loving, devoutly-Catholic grandmother to my children got an almost bouncy gleam in her eye, and started sharpening our biggest knives, humming to herself. Knives so large we that don't ever pull them out of the boxes they came in, because we are saving them for when we have to butcher a mastadon. 

In a fit of "let's make like the Settlers," I nodded, and agreed that I would do this together with my mother-in-law. We would kill the rooster ourselves, clean him and cook him, and take our home-chicken-raising experience over that next hump.  

Seriously. You wouldn't know that this woman had it in her, would you? 

I researched the best ways to kill a chicken on the internet in preparation. (NOTE: Unless you really need to know how to kill a chicken, I recommend you do NOT google 'how to kill a chicken'. YouTube. Really? Yikes.)

The old "whack off its head and let it flop around" is apparently one of the least desirable ways (despite the stories).  The most efficient is to quickly nick the jugular and let it bleed out peacefully, but this takes a level of surgical knowledge of chicken anatomy that I feared was beyond my skills. The most common way for people that do this a lot apparently involves dangling the chicken upside down through an open tipped cone. I'm fresh out of open tipped cones. For the really advanced, I found something called "The English Method," just popping the head right off the neck with your bare hands. I got a little queasy even contemplating this. I certainly wasn't brave enough to attempt it. 

So back to the "Big knife. Whack off the head" for me. I figured I could at least keep it quick, if I couldn't be elegant. 

This morning, we threw a big pot of water on to boil (to scald the chicken and make the feathers easier to pluck), while my brain tried to tell my stomach to man up and quit whinging about what we were about to try and do. 

"You have to pray before you kill the bird," my mother-in-law said. 

Dear Jesus. Please don't let me chop off my own fingers.

Amen.

I went into the pen and caught our young rooster. He squawked a bit, but most of my birds settle down pretty quick once you're holding them. I had tossed in some cracked corn and freshly pulled weeds for the hens to peck at just before I pulled the roo out, to give them some kind of distraction. Chickens really don't care that much - they'll peck at their own dead if they have the chance, without qualm, but I felt better for trying to give them something to keep them busy. I would totally suck as a Settler. 

Between us, we stretched the roo out, and my mother-in-law plucked a few feathers away from its neck. He didn't mind this a bit. For the record, I did actually help. I just was also taking pictures, so you don't see my participation so much in the photographic evidence.

My mother-in-law had the trick of nicking the jugular without the whole head-whackery, and before you knew it and with very little fuss, it was all over. 

My Bride (who had disappeared with the Boy down to the Fire Station for the duration) suggested that we cook a normal grocery-store chicken along with our bird, and do a side-by-side taste test comparison. Sure, lady... not so keen on the messy killing part, but when it comes to the cooking & eating part, you're just FULL of suggestions, aren't you??

So I popped off to the store to pick up an average whole chicken. (Strategically, I did this while the plucking & icky inside cleaning was going on. My mother didn't raise no fool.) 

Voila. One typical store-bought chicken. 

I love how it says it's ALL NATURAL. Good thing I didn't slip up and get one of those PARTIALLY ARTIFICIAL chickens. I hate when that happens. 

I don't know how young a bird is to qualify as a "Young Chicken." And whether this would also qualify as a "spring chicken." But I know ours was 5 months old, and born in the spring. So it was as close of a comparison as I was going to find. 

We decided to roast both the birds with very little seasoning. Salt & pepper only. A bit of chopped celery and roughly diced onion stuffed inside the cavity to give it just a touch of aroma. Roast equally and lay out side by side, served with rice and creamed corn fresh from the market again today. 

We all gathered around eagerly to render judgement. 

First observation: our bird was a little on the scrawny side. 

That's our roo on the left, there. The critter announced at the table that she had named him "Joey." No, I don't know where that came from. But she said it around a mouth full of crispy skin, so I guess it was ok. 

Our bird was young (5 months or so), and not fattened up for eating in any way. There are chickens you raise for meat, and chickens you raise for eggs. Rhode Island Reds are a kind of good all-rounder breed, but ours hadn't really matured quite enough to have a big breast. Plus, all our birds are free-ranging, so they tend to get a bit more excercise than most grocery store birds. 

Side by side, out roo was definitely a bit less tender than the grocery store chicken. But the flavor difference was surprisingly intense. Our freshly culled bird tasted much more like - well - chicken. It was simply delicious. As good as the bought chicken was, the flavor of our rooster was like we had distilled chicken essence into every scrap of the meat. 

I totally get what the Chicken Cleaner was talking about. 

Even the Boy got into it, although he was a little bit sad to learn that 'his' rooster wouldn't be crowing any more. He was a bit philisophical about how much he enjoyed the 'cock-a-doodle-doo' as he munched on a drumstick.  

Hopefully, this isn't something we'll have to do too often (our hens are all valued for their eggs, far more than the $7 it costs me to buy a chicken at the store). But I wasn't going to let a single scrap of this one go to waste. After we finished sitting around, patting our full bellies contentedly, I stuck the scraps and carcass in the pot along with a few vegetables.  

Come winter, we'll enjoy our roo again in the form of a delicious country chicken soup.