Into the coop

Sep2

Just over a year after coming home, one of the rescue ladies from the battery farm died, so this has necessitated more birds for the hen house.

I went back to Hens4Pets to get two hybrid birds, a Magpie (black) and an Amber (white). When they asked what I was looking for, I just said “not brown.” It’s good to have birds you can easily disambiguate.

They’ve been with me a couple of weeks now, settling in. The pecking order is very clear and the old ex battery Attila the Hen is not letting the new birds eat from the feeders, just the corn on the ground. This is when I’m standing there, anyway. Given that all of the food is going, the new birds must be able to manage to eat some of it when Attila is not looking.

The new ladies in the coop reminded me of some common chicken behaviour that the battery birds have never learnt to do. They dig through the ground. They fly up to the perches. They dust-bathe. Attila just doesn’t do those things. I’d forgotten that was odd.

On the whole the ex-battery hens have not been great. They haven’t laid well. The eggs they have provided have had extremely thin shells. Towards the end I’d resorted to paying for eggs and chicken feed, and that’s not how it’s supposed to work.

Attila is not laying, but the new black chicken is very consistent and provides a tiny egg every day.

(eating leftover pomegranate from pudding club.)

Look how overgrown the coop is now compared to when it was built five years ago!

Bring back ma girls!

May1

New additions for the hen house – Tallulah and Attila the Hen – who come to me from the British Hen Welfare Trust, who rehome chickens from battery farms when they come to the end of commercial viability.

BHWT are very well organised – you sign up online, phone them to have a quick chat, and book into pick up some hens. I needed two – the minimum you can have – to add to my existing lone hen, Perry. There’s masses of information on their website and it’s well worth having a read through all of it at an early stage.

On the day, pickup was fast and competent. They gave a guideline arrival time by surname within a whole afternoon, had people on the road to tell me where to park and checked my pet carrier was suitable on my way in. They guided me to sign in, sent me around the corner, and I was back in my car with my new birds in… literally under two minutes.

The girls are not in best condition. They have a lot of feathers missing and nasty floppy pale combs on top of their head. They are supposed to be red and a lot tighter. They are a heat dissipation method for the birds, and they grow large in their cages where they are kept warm.

The feathers are either missing or sparse in large chunks – the birds look almost skeletal!

But apparently both the combs and the feathers will start to sort themselves out reasonably quickly and the girls will be almost normal within a few months.

I had great plans for segregating the coop and finding ways of keeping the new hens separate. I have a large 2m cubed walk in run, an Eglu Classic hen house and half of an Eglu run which is covered from rain. My plan had been to fence off a portion of the run using Omlet fence/netting, and let the new birds live in there for a while, sleeping in the cat carrier they came home in.

This plan lasted about an hour. Perry, the existing chicken, at first was just curious at the new girls, but when I went back later, she had managed to tunnel in under the fence but get stuck inside the fenced off area. The new girls were stuck in a corner at the opposite end. So I lifted the fence to let Perry out, secured the bottom of it more with tent pegs, and went away to give them a further bit of time.

There was lots of shouting from all sides, without any actual pecking…

Interestingly, in their minimally feathered state, you can see their tails move in sync with their throats when they are shouting and crowing.

The next hour I went back to find Perry roosting on a perch over the fenced off area – she’d managed to fly over the fence – and one of Tallulah or Attila had flown out of the fenced area to perch on a rod. That was a surprise – I didn’t realise they had enough feathers to be able to fly.

At that point I had to give up. The fence was more of a danger than a help! I removed it for bedtime and let the girls get on the best they could.

When I went down this morning, the new girls had found the chicken house and were in there. Not sure if cowering or sleeping – but I am pretty certain that Perry was keeping them in there and chasing them back in if they tried to come out and feed.

So I’ve had another go at separating them. This time the new girls get the real chicken house and I’ve fenced off the end of the tunnel. Perry gets the entire run and can sleep where she pleases – on a perch or in the cat box. She hasn’t got much rainproofing though. We’ll see how this continues and it will be interesting to see where she lays.

And on that, this morning, the first morning with the new girls, there have been three eggs, so despite the upheaval and the trauma of a new flock, everyone is laying…

More photos: album on Flickr

News from the coop

Mar26

Bertha, who joined us in October last, was not long for this world.

Two weeks ago, she was clearly unwell – bleeding from her rear end. On closer inspection it seemed she had a prolapsed vent and that Persephone had pecked at it and caused an injury. I read up on what you have to do, and that was bathe her to get the blood off and see what was going on, gently push the vent back in and isolate her from the attentions of other chickens. Chickens are cannibals. Who knew?

To keep her safe, I cleaned her up and then brought her into the house in a cat carrier we have repurposed for fowl use. She was definitely in a bad way on Saturday night – I put her in the box, closed the door, slightly trapping her tail feathers. She didn’t move for 12 hours.

However, the following morning, she was clearly a bit perkier. Opening the conservatory door she cheeped at us, and when we started to feed her again – she’d been starved so she wouldn’t lay another egg and injure her vent again – she went for the food. Thinking she was well on the mend, I put her back in the run. But not a happy outcome – a few mornings later and she was no longer with us.

So, a few weeks later and I’ve restocked the coop. This time it’s new season birds, very small, and still a month or maybe two from laying.

They are a Copperhead Maran and a Barred Rock. The Barred Rock reminds P of a falcon and so is probably going to be called Peregrine. Is there a feminine version? Peregrina? No name yet for the copperhead who, we are promised, will iridesce in the sun.

We dropped them into the chicken palace along with some seeds and mealworms and there was vanishingly little squabbling. A little bit of arguing nothing too serious, so I left them to it.

Long after dark I went back down the garden to see how it was going. Persephone has now been used to us for so long that when we go down the garden in the middle of the night, she wakes up and comes to see us. For too long over the winter I’ve not been home in daylight and all of the henwrangling has been done after dark. The new birds know nothing of this and were sleeping peacefully in the hen house.

Welcoming Bertha to the hen house

Oct29

We had a death a month or two again – Houdini the chicken looked a little peaky in the afternoon, but she’d looked peaky before and rallied so we left her to it and went out to see Jason Donovan in Priscilla The Musical On Tour. By the time we came home, Houdini was dead, and in full rigor, under the feed bowls.

Going from two chickens to one answered a few questions in a slightly surprising way. We had assumed it had been Persephone laying the shell-less eggs, and that it had been Houdini who like to shout from the rooftops at 5am dawn. It had been the other way around.

We have postponed finding another celly for Persephone for the months since just because when you read about how hard it can be to introduce new birds to a flock, it seems awfully offputting. We had half-baked plans in our head of fencing off half the run, buying additional food bowls, keeping two chickens apart, maybe even using the cat transporting box as a temporary roost… but talking it through with our chicken supplier out by IKEA this afternoon made it all seem a little simpler. “Just chuck her in and see how she gets on,” was the advice. “There will be ten minutes of squawking and feathers and then it will be fine.”

The chicken lady was concerned our existing bird would try and injure our new one, but our concern, on seeing the birds for sale, was that they were enormous and it would be Persephone who would suffer.

It’s her size that gave Bertha her name: as the chicken lady hoiked her out of the pen and trimmed her wing, she said, “Come here, Big Bertha!” And that’s the name we’re going with.

We drove her home, chucked her in the pen, watched for half an hour and there wasn’t too much aggro. Persephone ducked and froze for a while and allowed herself to be pecked before flying up to a perch and sitting out of the way and bokking.

Then she jumped down and gave chase for a few minutes before it was Bertha’s time for the solitude of the perch. It’s quite hard to take pictures of a white chicken against the dark of the bark, she just ends up overexposed and ghostly. Chickens generally don’t stay still long enough for good photos anyway.

After a few minutes a sort of peace descended, broken by Bertha’s reaction to the cats in the garden. Persephone is used to them by now, but Bertha got into a complete flap and the cat ran past the hen house as fast as it could. (Not our cat – a neighbour’s cat comes up through a gap in the fence and spends most of its afternoons sunbathing in a corner.)

We heard chicken calls for a while after we got back into the house but now it’s after dark. Have the hens managed to roost together without another battle? Better go and check.

The chickens have names!

Oct14

For a long old while the chickens were called quite simply black chicken and brown chicken.

This has been disturbing a surprising number of our friends and colleagues who think that the chickens should have names. Some friends suggested Coffee and Marmalade, which I thought were great names, but didn’t really stick.

Now Black Chicken has definitely become named Houdini, because she keeps escaping and we don’t know how. (This is a bit of a problem, because once she breaches the fence she can’t get back in again. Which means she doesn’t always have access to water and sometimes if we are late to shut them up for the night, she tries to roost outside the hen house, a very bad idea in our fox-strewn neighbourhood.)

Which left Brown Chicken. A coffee break discussion at school led to her being called Persephone, a name which works for convenience, but I doubt has ever been uttered in her earshot.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the chickens have different names at P’s workplace to at mine.

Looking after them is easy most of the time. Mucking out is a 5-10 minute job twice a week; a more comprehensive clean of the house is needed every month or so, and even that is at most a half hour job.

On a daily basis we top up the feed and water and feed them treats: leafy greens, weeds, corn or bird seed. We let them out into a fenced run if we are around in daylight, which is most days.

P started off hardline: we are only getting chickens if you do all the work. Now, since he is most often home in the daylight, thanks to a crazy early start at work, it is him who does most of the feeding and watering and handling, leaving me the mucking out.

It will get trickier as the weather gets colder. I am a little anxious about what to do when the water starts freezing, especially when I am often out of the house the 12 hours of daylight, putting in regular 10 hour days at school and still not getting enough done.

If it gets properly cold they will have to be shut into the hen house at night and let out in the morning, adding another few minutes to the morning routine when time is always tight. And of course, on the days when time is tight anyway because the car needs defrosting.

We do have more eggs than we can cope with but so far not more eggs than we can easily give away when things get out of hand. We are somehow managing to think both “there are more eggs than we can eat” and “it would be nice to have more chickens.”

Expanding the menagerie

Aug16

Several of our friends have been part of the back-garden chicken revolution for ages, and so when some of them decided to upgrade their chicken house from v expensive to eye-wateringly expensive I jumped at the chance to buy their old housing at a knock down price.

It’s taken a few weeks to get the garden ready, and it also didn’t seem fair to stock up on livestock shortly before going on holiday.

But last weekend, with the garden and hen house sorted out we popped along to Hens For Pets out near Ikea to get our chooks. They’re “point of lay”, apparently, but it might take up to five weeks before we get any eggs.

The girls seem reasonably well settled into our garden now, scratching around the bark and hopefully avoiding the poisonous ivy and elderberries growing perilously close to the housing.

The first days, the birds seemed pretty nervous, and we could hear them clucking when cats got too close. Our own cats don’t really seem to have the bottom of their garden in their territory, but it seems to be a free-for-all for a coterie of black and white neighbour cats. Now it seems that both the chickens and the cats have figured out their can’t get through the wire of the run and although both are fascinated by each other, the chickens have stopped the cluck frenzy and the cats have stopped trying to rush the run.

The morning/afternoon routines seem reasonably easy to handle, but I haven’t done a weekly mucking out yet. We’ve only been able to fit the coop a fair way from the house, so the biggest thing I’m worrying about right now is forgetting they are there.

Insanely cute lambs

Apr2

Have you seen this yet? I keep popping back to play it again. A man bleats and a little chorus of lambs bleat in response. I think I’ve seen primary school classes less well behaved and co-ordinated than these cute lambs.

Trying to work out if I can strip the audio off and use the bleating sound as my text message tone on my phone!

Bank Holiday LOLcat

Aug29

For once, I’m joining Liberal England in the noble tradition of the Bank Holiday LOLcat:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Thank heavens for Bank Holiday Monday!

Cat gif

Aug26

I am sitting here, immobilised by the kitten, barely able to reach the keyboard and trying not to laugh too loudly at the following:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Most of the time he gets fed up of sitting on laps and goes and sits somewhere else. When he does, I can get on with what I’m supposed to do. But I’m a little feart that for once he is out for the count. He certainly looks fast asleep.

Cat feeding question – vote now!

May7

Cat is refusing to eat duck and heart cat food… he’s not eaten since 5pm because he doesn’t like the new flavour of food. He’s frantically demanding food, but won’t eat what he’s got. And there are starving lions in Africa!

So should we (click the answer you want to vote for)

Niles's Blog

Teaching, food and other random, infrequent wibblings

Category Archives: Animals