Chickens Are Really Odd Ducks!



Front to back:  Penny, Henny, Screech

 We have chickens.  Not alot of chickens.  Right now we have three chickens.  We had four, three hens and a rooster, but we lost a hen at the age of almost two.  It seems that two is a critical age for hens, and that in the chicken world, finding a two year old hen that hasn't made it through the night is not an oddity.  It's an oddity to me, because I take pretty seriously owning any living creature, and so I searched chicken forums for days to find out why we lost this wonderful hen, named Penny.  None of the health reasons applied, so finally it boiled down to the fact that some chickens just die.

Our remaining chickens are named Henny, Jenny and Screech.  Screech is our rooster.  His name is fitting.  Henny is a Rhode Island Red and Jenny is an Araucana.  Screech is a Delaware rooster.  All of our chickens are very friendly.  I have trained them to recognize a white ceramic bowl as "we come bearing gifts" and they run to greet me with pure enthusiasm when I'm carrying the magic bowl.  The bowl carries things like chopped up grapes, cooked corn, cut up spaghetti (they love the noodles), chopped up lettuce, and other favorite goodies.  I also buy them bags of unsalted roasted sunflower seeds, which is their ultimate favorite treat on record.  They are very easy to keep.  They require a commercial chicken feed, which we supplement with cracked corn and oyster shells.  The oyster shell additive is a calcium boost and helps the shells of their eggs become stronger.

Before the chickens, there was the GREAT CHICKEN DEBATE.  The debate starred Elaine (pro chicken) and Paul (anti chicken).  As debates go in the Tweedy household, this one lasted a long time.  Much longer than the SHOULD WE GET A SECOND HORSE debate (we have five) and the THREE DOGS ARE TOO MANY debate (as you recall, we have eight at the moment).  Yes, in the annuls of Tweedy debatedom, the GREAT CHICKEN DEBATE may go down in history as the longest running debate, lasting several years.

Pro chicken Elaine would say things like "I want to get some chickens" to which anti chicken Paul would say "over my dead body."  That was all of year one.

Year two started with pro chicken Elaine using research and proof to back up her statements.   "Did you know that chickens eat 12,000,000,000,000 bugs a year?  Imagine how clean they could keep our barn!"  To which anti chicken Paul would reply "over my dead body."  (Anti chicken Paul was not very inventive in Year 2.)  The second half of Year 2 had pro chicken Elaine stating things like how free-range chickens produced great tasting eggs, and how more and more processed foods and larger factory farms were producing eggs that weren't really "organic."  Anti chicken Paul would say "uh huh, that's nice."  (It was a refreshing change from "over my dead body.")



On their original wood ladder perch.

 In Year 3, Elaine simply came home with three chickens, pulled into the driveway, got them out of the car and said "we have three chickens."  Paul spent about four hours that day rebuilding our extra hay room into a chicken dwelling (and probably saying bad things under his breath), while Elaine ran out to Agway for feed, feed containers, waterers, etc.  After the first week of eggs, Paul finally realized how easy they were to keep and how good their end product really was, and we were now in the chicken business.  We added one more hen (Jenny) to the mix at that point.

We have a mentor, who has raised and continues to raise, plenty of free range chickens, and we learned as we went along.  For instance, a good economical brooder is a milk carton nailed to a plywood base, with hay as bedding in the carton.  We originally used a wooden ladder as their perch, but Paul has since built a great wooden staircase-type ladder with wider planks for them to climb up at night.  Our "coop" area is screened in the summer and one half the door is planked in the winter so they do not get a ground draft.  We have heat lamps for the winter as well, and a plug in chicken waterer which keeps the water from icing up and at drinkable room temp.  They get a fan in the summer.



Our horses hiding from the chickens.

 Our chickens wander around our property when we are here, and when we are not, we put them back into their coop so we don't have to worry about any predators finding them.  As dusk begins to fall, they gravitate toward the coop on their own and climb up onto their perch where they sleep all night.  We lock the coop for the overnight hours.

My grandmother was the instigator of the "odd duck" syndrome.  If she didn't like what you had to say or you didn't agree with her, you were an "odd duck."  Out of the blue she would say something like, "That Josephine Armatto, she left her clothes hanging out all night and they were rained on....what an odd duck she is."  My grandmother would NEVER leave clothes on the line in the rain, or for that matter overnight, and her standards for clothes hanging were so high, most of us were afraid to even hang a sock for fear we would put the clothespin in the wrong spot!



Are you in there?  Do you have food?
Our chickens at the front door.

 So it's with this same "odd duck" ferver I am here to tell you that chickens very much march to their own drummers.  They aren't like other household pets that you have.  You really don't "pet" chickens, and they don't come when you call their names, although, Screech does seem to know his, because when I say it he turns his head sideways and walks toward me a bit.  They are smart.  They learn from doing, and they learn quickly.  For instance, just one time, I walked out the front door of our house to see the chickens in the driveway, went back inside and got a bag of roasted sunflower seeds and threw some on the front walk for them.  Every single day after that, they would march up the front walk and peer in the side window of our front door to see if I was coming with more sunflower seeds.

They also have a large self-preservation sixth sense, which tells them where and where not to go and what they should be afraid of.  They are not afraid of our cats, and our cats have never tried to bother them, although our Harry is very curious about them and will lay around them for long periods of time watching them.  They know that our dogs remain in the perimeter of our yard, and though they will walk very close to the fence line, they have NEVER come into our yard, unless they were being pursued by some unseen preditor (once we found Penny in our yard, and more recently Henny in our yard--and both times we feel they were being pursued by our neighbor's dog).  Our dog Winston has actually been in the barn with them and he just blinks at them.  He has never tried to go after them.  I do believe our dogs Burton and Bethy would definitely be interested in using them as rag toys.  Piper would only want to herd them somewhere.  Ike has also never bothered the chickens.

Roosters really don't just cock-a-doodle-doo to greet the sunsrise.  Oh no, they crow when they are missing the hens, when they want to puff out their chests, when they expect something, when they are out and about and want to make sure you know it, when Pluto and Mars are out of alignment....dang it, they crow an awful lot.  Hens also make ALOT of racket when they are laying.  The very first time our hens were laying, I heard so much screeching coming out of the coop, I ran, barefoot, to the barn thinking a fox or coyote had gotten in the barn.  In fact, they were announcing the birth of an egg.
We are about to add two more hens to our fold.  They are coming on Wednesday (tomorrow).  Chickens are not very friendly to each other.  My mother told me my grandfather used to sneak the new chickens into the brooder at night, when the others are on perch.  Well, we tried that when we snuck in Jenny as a new chicken last year.  Nope, didn't work.  All the others came down and examined her, then tried to peck her to death in their "odd duck" chicken fashion of saying "hello...we do not welcome you to this farm."  So we had to intervene and separate them for a while.  This time, we are ready.  We are putting the new girls in a dog crate so that the others can walk around them and get used to them without attacking them.  This may minimize the punishment they would originally receive until they find their place on the chicken totem pole.



Eggs from our chickens!

 At any rate, you cannot beat collecting your own eggs every morning, or how fresh and good they are when made in traditional ways, or added to baking or other dishes.  No matter how odd chickens seem to be, they are alot of fun.  Even Paul agrees.

Aarrooooooo!