Seven Months of Chickens

Chicken math means that, somehow, you mean to get ten chickens but accidentally end up with fifty. I’m not joking. Just eight months ago, our family had no plans to be at the place we are right now.

Last winter was a tight financial squeeze for our family. We had big plans to begin homesteading, but as 2020 began, we were wondering when we could ever afford the cost or have the time to get anything started. The corona virus quarantine hit in March just as our second child was turning six. His birthday party plans were suddenly cancelled and Michael suddenly had extra time off work. We took a deep breath and jumped into the chicken world, calling it “William’s birthday adventure.” 

The ten baby chicks lived in a brooder in our garage for several weeks. We assembled it out of scraps of plywood screwed and propped together. The broken screen from our sliding door was the brooder door. While the chicks were in the brooder, Michael managed to turn our pool shed into a coop using mostly scrap wood and fencing foraged from our property. After the initial expense of the chickens’ infrastructure, they’ve been relatively easy to maintain (see our other chicken adventures doing chores and clipping their wings).

I didn’t think we’d be ready for any more chickens for a while, but Michael has been interested in raising meat birds for years - ultimately, we want to know that our meat had a healthy life. With the assistance of the government stimulus money in the spring, he was able to convince me to invest a bit more in our homesteading journey. He built a permanent brooder in the garage and a mobile chicken tractor to raise pastured broiler chickens. Even then, I didn’t expect to actually get those chickens until the following year. But, I think Michael has figured out how my brain works: I get used to new ideas slowly. So, by August, we had ordered a box of 30 baby chicks.

Michael became a real homesteader recently when he butchered two of our original flock of chickens. We had ended up with three roosters which isn’t a great ratio for seven hens. It was a good learning experience to prepare him for the meat birds which will need to be butchered in November. I experimented with cooking them - even though they were only about seven months old, their meat was tougher than standard chicken. I made chicken pot pie so that the meat was cooked in broth for a while and it turned out pretty decent!

Just a week or so before the meat birds were ready to move out onto grass in the chicken tractor, my sister mentioned that a coworker’s family had a flock of birds that they needed to rehome due to family health problems. Our coop has plenty of space for more hens, and we had already discussed adding more laying hens next spring… so we adopted 15 more birds. 

We had an immediate problem because the best practice when introducing new birds to a flock is to quarantine them for a few weeks to be sure they don’t have any diseases or pests, like lice or mites. We put the new chickens in our garage brooder for a week and kept an eye on their health. While the brooder is an appropriate size for 30 chicks, it was really too small for 15 larger birds.

For a few days, we transported the birds back and forth to our fenced garden for more space. Since the garden is almost finished for the year, the chickens could nibble on the leftovers and their droppings will compost over the winter to make more fertile soil for next year.

Once the new flock was happily pecking around in the garden, we were able to get to know them better. We still aren’t sure about all the breeds; some of them are probably just a barnyard mix. There are five full size hens about three years old. The bossy Silver-Laced Wyandotte we named Ms Bea; the Rhode Island Red who is molting acquired the unfortunate name of Molty. Eight small orange bantam chickens are about four months old and haven’t started laying yet; we started calling them all “the Pumpkins” because we can’t really tell them apart.  One sweet bantam hen has such soft lavender-grey feathers all the way down to her toes that the kids started calling her Fluffy. And, the last bird is Snowball - a little white bantam. 

As we mingled with the chickens during their garden time, one of the Pumpkins stuck out as being a bit different - it had pointed saddle feathers, similar in shape to our rooster’s. And, sure enough, within a few days, I heard the little guy crow. We dubbed him Gingerbread Man when he led us all on a chase around the yard trying to catch him.

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do with bantam chickens. Their eggs are so small that two together are about the size of a standard medium egg. And, if we ever decided to cull some, their meat seems hardly worth it… I expect we’ll just enjoy the cute factor of these mini-chickens.

After three days of transporting these chickens back and forth between the brooder and the garden, we abandoned the quarantine and just stuck them in with our flock. They’d had a soft introduction to each other through the garden fence; but, for the formal introduction, we put the new flock into the coop after dark, setting them on the roosts. Then, they all woke up together the next morning. We knew the chickens would need to develop a new pecking order so we expected some fighting and kept a close eye on them the first few days. I was surprised to see that our rooster, Freckles, broke up several fights between the hens - I’m glad he’s good for something!

The past few weeks have had a lot of new decisions, problems, research, and trials with being a chicken owner. We’ve discovered that at least three of the Pumpkins are probably roosters and we still have to figure out what to do about that. Our sweet Fluffy seems to have a foot problem which we are trying to figure out (what I’ve learned so far: don’t just try any random treatment you read about online… I’ll leave it at that). One of our original hens, Speckles, may have a vent prolapse, and we had to buy our first chicken medicine. We began supplementing the chickens with calcium because we found a couple eggs with soft shells. So, if all my social media posts are chicken related, it's really just because that’s the main thing on my mind these days…

I’m happy that I am learning how to be a good chicken mama with these experiences, but I’m ready to take a break with new animals. 

...but, now Michael is talking about fixing our fencing to set up a goat yard...