Chickens

Last week, Miguel built us a chicken run for the girls. They have been cooped up in their new coop for almost a month and their misery was showing – one egg every few days. I felt so bad for them, the new coop has a hardware cloth bottom on it for better predator protection, but they can’t scratch in the dirt. They’ve got plenty of food, water, shelter and light, but I can tell they’ve really wanted out.

Astonishingly it took Miguel only two days to put together the chicken run. We used 4 foot high welded wire fencing and T-posts. The entire thing only cost about $250 though a good portion of that was for the tin snips, the fencing pliers and the post driver. We used some leftover material we found around the property including the leftover landscape timbers from my clothesline project, a leftover telephone pole and finally when we ran out of wood posts, he cut down a cedar tree, stripped it’s limbs and used it as a corner post. The gate is built out of 2x4s leftover from the Moon Hut and he used trees for three of the main posts, using fence staples to secure it and the tractor with the come-along to tighten it.

The chickens seem much happier now.

We had some friends over on Saturday and we sat with the chickens for a while. One of them caught a toad and they chased each other around with it for a while. They couldn’t actually eat the thing whole, but they managed to peck out all the insides and left just the toad skin.

My friend’s youngest chased the chicken around trying to retrieve the toad, and then finally settled on giving the chicken a talking-to about the dead toad. It was pretty hilarious.

We picked up 8 new chicks on Saturday from a local breeder. They’re already a couple of weeks old which makes the much easier to sex. We picked out one Barred Rock, three Leghorns, two Blue Andalusians and two Golden Campines – all hens but for one Leghorn rooster. We’ve got them in a large dog crate with chicken fencing zip tied around it for the time being until they are older and able to be integrated into the existing flock. They’ve got at least a couple more weeks until they’re fully feathered, then we can slip them in at night like they were always there.

Part of Simple Lives Thursday