Three ways to get chicks

April 25, 2011 Posts No Comments

Cute chickMy original goal for 2011 was
to hatch out four batches of ten chicks apiece using our broody hen.  When she fell down on
the job, I moved on to plan B — hatch out five batches of seven
chicks apiece using our Brinsea
Mini Advance Incubator. 
In both cases, I hoped to come up with five good layers with prime
foraging genes to replace our aging hens this fall and put the rest of
the chickens in the freezer at broiler age.



Unfortunately, there
seems to be a steep learning curve involved in hatching our own chicks,
and we only came up with one homegrown chick during our first
trial.  I was starting to feel pressed for time, worried that any
pullets we hatched wouldn’t start laying this fall, so we went out and
bought 16 locally hatched Black Australorps.  I’ve heard very good
things about Black Australorps’ abilities as foragers, so I figure it
won’t hurt to give a few hens a try in our flock.



Brinsea octagon incubatorBut we don’t want to give up
on hatching our own, so we decided to sink some more money into the
project and buy a Brinsea Octagon 20 Advance Incubator.  This
larger incubator will hold up to 24 chicken eggs, hedging my bets so
that even if I continue to have abysmal hatch rates, I’ll at least end
up with multiple living chicks.  The incubator also has a humidity
reading on the digital display and a vent to allow me to adjust the
internal air flow, which should help fix one of the major causes of our
low
hatch rate during
round 1.



Cuckoo MaranWe saved up our best
foragers’ eggs for our second round of incubation, but also ordered a
dozen Cuckoo Maran eggs from Golden Willow Farm
and Hatchery. 
One of my role models, Harvey
Ussery, uses Cuckoo
Marans to hatch all of his chicks since this heritage breed is a great
brooder and mother, so I’m hoping we’ll get at least two broody hens
out of the deal.  Maybe in 2012, the incubators will just be a
backup to natural hatching under a broody hen.


All seventeen of our current
chicks are off to a healthy start with their POOP-free chicken waterer.

A true forest pasture for chickens

April 22, 2011 Posts No Comments
Chicken forest pasture

Rooster on branchWe moved the flock on to
their newest pasture on April 20.  The first and second
pastures we fenced
in this year were on a grassy slope at the edge of the garden and were
pretty similar to what traditional pastured poultry farmers graze their
chickens on.  But this third pasture is closer to what I’m aiming
for in the long run — a true forest pasture, with some scrubby
box-elders, a big black walnut, spicebushes, elderberries, and a new
Illinois everbearing mulberry (fenced off to protect its mulch from
chicken feet.)



When we cleared the
nearby garden patch five years ago, we threw the branches over the
fence and into what has become our newest chicken pasture.  Our
rooster was thrilled to have a higher spot to stand guard while his
ladies went about their foraging and I think the whole flock will also
enjoy this spot’s shadiness — their previous pasture was already
starting to get a bit hot for comfort in the afternoons.


Chickens on pasture



Forest floorThe groundcover in the new
pasture is so variable that I can’t even list all of the components —
a good sign since chickens like variety.  Due to partial shade,
there are only a few patches of grass and most of the ground is instead
covered with chickweed, cleavers, violets, golden ragwort, lots of
Japanese honeysuckle (hopefully it won’t be a problem!), virgin’s
bower, crowfoot, and purple dead-nettle.  Actually, there are
probably a lot of other types of plants present — those are just the
ones that jumped out at me as I watched the chickens forage on their
first, drizzly morning.



Chicken with crowfootI expected the chickens to
demolish the chickweed that is copiously covering the ground, but the
plants are going to seed and must not be as tasty in this stage. 
Instead, everybody went straight for the developing fruits atop the
small-flowered crowfoot (Ranunculus
abortivus), a
weedy relative of the buttercup.  The other top choice was
scratching through fallen leaves in search of worms.



Although our chickens
are great foragers, we added in a few design features to tempt them to
spend even more time in the pasture.  I feed the flock just inside
a door halfway down the length of the pasture, and the chicken waterer is screwed onto a tree a
good distance away.  Since chickens tend to hang out near the food
and water, I figure this will help spread their impact around a bit
better.

Value of chicken matriarchs

April 18, 2011 Posts 2 Comments

I’ve been reading about how
important old, wise matriarchs are to elephant herds.  (Bear with me here
— this really is relevant to chickens.)  If you’re an elephant,
you scoff at lone female lions, but male lions are half again as
big.  While it would take about seven lionesses to kill a
full-size elephant, two male lions could do the same job and it’s
conceivable that a single male lion could take down an elephant in a
pinch.



Until recently, humans
couldn’t tell the difference between the roar of a male and female
lion, but modern digital magic has shown us what the oldest elephant
matriarchs knew all along — the sounds are subtly different. 
Scientists played recordings of roars from male lions or female lions
to various herds of elephants, some of which had old matriarchs and
others of which had younger matriarchs.  Only herds led by
elephants who had reached or surpassed their sixtieth year reacted more
to the higher danger male lion roar than to the lower danger female
lion roar.  Perhaps the younger elephants couldn’t tell the
difference, or just hadn’t been around long enough to discover how
potent a single male lion can be.  Other studies have shown that
herds of elephants led by an older matriarch are better able to survive
droughts and to avoid bee stings.



Old hensReading about the
importance of these old elephants got me wondering about whether we
should keep our oldest hens in the flock even though their egg
production has slowed down.  I have high hopes that by this fall,
some of our homegrown chicks will be overflowing our egg basket. 
At the same time our then nearly six-year-old hens will be molting and
settling in for a long winter of eating me out of house and home. 
I had originally planned to whittle down the flock to delete these old
sit-abouts, but when I watch our chickens on pasture, I can tell that
the oldest hens have a lot more foraging tricks up their sleeves than
the youngsters do.  Mark threw a crawdad into the pasture the
other day, and one of the old girls tore into the tasty treat while the
younger hens looked on with confusion.



I think there’s a happy
middle ground between the most efficient chicken-keepers who kill hens
as soon as they reach three years old and the least efficient
chicken-keepers who let their coop turn into an old chickens’ rest
home.  Perhaps maintaining at least two matriarchs should be part
of my strategy for building the best foraging chicken flock?


Our chicken waterer is twice as essential for
old hens since they seem to need more water more often.