Adding to the Family

Our first goal in moving to a homestead was to get chickens and I am proud to say that we have met that goal! One of our Christmas gifts was a chicken coop (with much guffawing from the giver) so we had a home for them. We had been debating back and forth about whether to get the hens now or wait until the spring until a neighbor came to us and said he had a friend who was giving away a flock of Rhode Island Reds and asked if we would like any. Knowing that we wanted chickens no matter when we got them we told him yes. So we headed down to a great local co-op where we purchased a feeder and waterer along with some feed and pine shavings. A couple days later the neighbor said his friend had already given away the chickens. So what were we going to do with all of these supplies? Well, we took to Craigslist where we found a local seller with a great reputation and off we went to get our chickens! We ended up getting 2 Marans that are already laying and 2 Rhode Island Reds, one that should start laying in about a month and the other in about 3 months.

   

 

The first confession I have to make when it comes to chicken raising is that it’s been nearly 3 weeks since I first began this post. A great deal has happened since we first brought the girls home and that leads to my second confession. We lost one of our beautiful new girls. The large Rhode Island Red in the first picture was lost to a predator six days after we brought her home. We were allowing the girls to range outside the coop in the fenced area, but the fenced area is not covered. We weren’t watching the girls when they were outside the coop, but we weren’t really thinking about possible predators either. I was just pulling in from school when CT met me at the car and told me we’d lost one of the chickens. We’re not 100% certain what happened, so we’ve tried to piece together a possibility from the evidence we found. CT had checked on the chickens about an hour and a half before I got home and they were fine then. Right before I got home, he heard our neighbors dogs barking madly in the vicinity of the coop. When he went up to the dogs to shoo them away, he found the chicken with most of her innards ripped out. We tried to find signs that the dogs had pulled her out but there were no holes or other gaps around the fencing of the run; however, there was a big pile of feathers outside the fencing near a corner of the coop. Our best guess is that a hawk tried to pick her up but found her to be more than she could handle and dropped her right outside the coop at which time the dogs found her. Whether it was the hawk or the dogs that killed her is unknown, but there is definitely a Cooper’s hawk hanging out in the trees around our place. Needless to say, the three remaining girls were immediately put back into the enclosed run area.

Our next learning experience with the girls has been the extreme cold weather we’ve been having. The weather was great for the first week and a half we had them here, then things turned really nasty. With heavy snow and subzero wind chills, we were very worried for the girls in their small coop. Since the coop is right next to the garage and it is fairly light and mobile, we decided to move them inside the garage (in the middle of a massive snow storm). It’s not a heated garage, but it is insulated and would provide shelter from the winds. We filled the bottom of the run with newspaper and pine shavings and so far they’ve been doing very well. We’re supposed to see a warm up by the end of the week so we’re hoping to get them moved back outside in a few days. I know they would probably appreciate being able to scratch the ground rather than cement.

The Marans have not begun laying since they were moved and with the stress of the weather and the coop being moved around, we expect it’s going to take a bit more time for them to begin laying again. The young Rhode Island Red (who I named Scarlet) is really showing a lot of personality. Whenever either CT or I go in with scratch, she has to first get her pick from the cup we have it in before we toss it into the run. And she’s teaching the Marans (who CT named Phoebe and Zoe) to do that too. Scarlet loves to be picked up and will gently pick at whatever treat I happen to be holding for her. The Marans are still apprehensive about being picked up, but they’re getting more and more comfortable with us.

Looking forward, we are making plans to build a large covered run so the girls have plenty of room to scratch to their heart’s content. We are also planning to expand the coop so that we can bring our total number of chickens up around 12-15. We’re going to order chicks to arrive sometime in the spring so that we can experience raising them from babies. We’ll also likely add a rooster so that next year we may try our hand at raising chickens from egg to adult. There is so much to learn and so many beautiful breeds that we’re certain we’ve only scratched the surface. Even with the loss of a chicken, we are truly enjoying the girls and look forward to when we can start making scrambled eggs using fresh eggs.

Until my next confessional, happy homesteading everyone!