Anyone who has known us very long knows that we had quite a hard time getting started with keeping chickens.
It was pretty early after we moved back to Iowa that we decided to acquire some laying hens. At the time, we didn’t really want to have to wait, we wanted eggs now. So we went on craigslist and found some two and a half year old Buff Orphington hens that somebody was getting rid of. They had just received their new chicks and didn’t want to stew all the old hens, so they were giving them away. We made the arrangements and rigged up a cage of sorts to put in the back of our Jeep Grand Cherokee that we had at the time and headed out to pick up our 20 new/old chickens.
We didn’t have an all together bad experience with those old hens, but it wasn’t stellar either. It wasn’t long before we found that our egg production wasn’t keeping up with our feed costs, and we needed to change the plan. Meanwhile, we had been plagued by predators like foxes and coyotes and raccoon, and a stubborn, mischievous dog. We were down to about six birds after a couple of months.
The decision was made to start a new group of birds. We ordered 25 heavy breed pullet chicks from a local farm store and waited for them to arrive. We were renting an old homestead at the time. It was a bit run down, but we were excited because it had a lot of outbuildings we could use, including a nice sized brooder house. We spent an entire day going over the brooder house getting ready for our day old chicks to arrive. We double checked every corner, and window, patched up the chicken wire, worked on the door, put down bedding and bought new feeders. Everything was ready. When the day came to pick up the chicks, we were very excited. We introduced them to their new home and everything seemed to be going quite well. Things went perfect for two days. On the third day, I got home from work and went out to admire the chicks. They were gone.
We need to make a note here that this was the day after we had come home from the hospital with our second son Jebediah. Our parental instincts were running very high. Anyway, I thought that someone was pulling a prank because I knew the brooder house was secure. I began to frantically investigate, knowing that if the chicks had found a way out that they wouldn’t last long in the yard. I saw something move in the straw bedding as I was searching, and found one tiny Buff pullet hiding out in the stuff. The lone survivor. (We called the chick “Betty” and she is a legend around here. She was the only hen we ever had that actually hatched out a clutch of eggs! She disappeared one night and we never saw her again…adding to the legend.)
Betty
What I found next started what you might call an ‘armed conflict.’ (parental insticts 🙂 ) In the floor of the brooder house there was a tiny hole. I had searched the whole building for holes before, but must have missed this one, down behind a board out of sight. I looked more closely at the hole and saw something, so I commenced to pry up the floorboards. I found my chicks. All 24 of them, dead, with a bite each on their necks. A stinking, filthy, dirty, fill-in-the-blank rat had come up and killed each one.
After the unbridled fury of rat extermination had ceased…pause for effect …we had to begin all over again. We had committed that we were going to keep chickens. And we were going to.
Over the next year we had a lot of the same problems. No matter how we deterred them, predators seemed to find a way in. We lost a lot of birds, and a lot of confidence.
Things really didn’t look up until after we moved onto Toni’s grandparents homestead. It was here that we took a more measured approach and were rewarded with success. We were able to fix up the old chicken coop and brooder house and, with the exception of the occasional rogue, predator losses were kept to a minimum. We still have had waves of predator attacks. At one point we put a baby monitor in the coop in order to catch a raccoon that had been breaking in. The late night predator extermination excursions always provide excitement, and the boys always want to see whatever it was that Papa got out in the chicken yard.
We used some siding crates from a local business to build tractor type runs for our birds before we were able to free range them, and later built a fence to keep the birds from scratching up garden beds during the summer. We learned to take better care of our chickens, and they, in turn took better care of us.
Chicken tractors made from siding crates
Our Fence
We are now rewarded each day with about a dozen brown eggs. We do slaughter birds from time to time for meat, but not very often.
It feels good to have reached a stasis with our chickens. For about two years it felt like we were never going to get it right. As with many things, we have to be prepared to let success take time. If we do good work, and stay on the course, we can be sure that the outcome will be very rewarding!
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