DOUBLE TROUBLE

The continuation of the Clucking Saga,
Episode 1:  http://gloriouscreations.blogspot.com/2008/09/fowl-story.html
Episode  2:  http://gloriouscreations.blogspot.com/2008/09/leghorns-mass-exodus.html

We talked about how spoiled we have been with having fresh eggs. What will we do when the girls decide they are going to molt? We will be 6 weeks with out a single egg.

We began reading books on the subject of raising chickens. One was a small paper back called, “Starting Right with Chickens”. There is a whole farm series of “Starting right” books. We contacted Missouri extension service. They had a great floor plan for a chicken house. It was 12 ft by 12 ft. We decided we would make two of them connected with a 10 foot wide room for storing feed, implements used with chickens and an old refrigerator for storing the eggs.

While we were building the “coop” we ordered baby chicks. We ordered one hundred straight run. Straight run means you get whatever hatches. It is usually fifty/fifty, pullets and roosters. Pullets grow up to be hens. You can order all pullets and it usually cost over double. We knew we wanted to try our hands at butchering our own chickens. We didn’t know what kind of chickens we liked so we ordered the heavy breed assortment because we wanted layers that would be productive in the cold Missouri winters. We also wanted to be able to butcher the roosters. You only need a couple of roosters to keep 50 hens happy. A couple of roosters are ecstatic with 50 hens to share.

The chicks came. They were in two boxes with a sisal type straw in with them. There were instructions to dip their beaks in water to teach them to drink and to peck at the food to get them to eat. You have never seen anything like a box full of one hundred walking cotton balls. They are all colors. We had no idea who was who. They didn’t give us a pamphlet showing us what our five breeds of chicks looked like.

We housed them in the carport which had been closed in for a nice little barn. We made this area that was 8 ft by 8 ft. We enclosed it with 4 ft high walls (we figured the little cotton balls wouldn’t be flying that high very soon).

The area was outfitted with a hooded heat light in the center, just outside of the area the heat reached we had the feed and water. We had regular lights around the rest of the pen.

We were on our way to supplying our neighbors with eggs…only five months to go.

A month goes by and we have growing chicks. Now that they are feathering out we figure we could identify who was who. Boy, were we surprised. Several were pink with white top hats (beige crested polish); black checkered with white top knots (silver laced polish). And the list went on. None of them looked like they could be light brahmas or dark brahmas, buff Orppingtons, Rhode Island Reds or Barred rocks. I called the hatchery and they said they’d send us out a new assortment. We said we just wanted our money back. They said no. We asked them what should we do with the others and they told us they didn’t care, drown them. So here we are stuck with weird chickens. They were all on the skinny side so we wondered how much there was to eat on them, and wondered what we would do with them. Mind you we were new at this, it never occurred to us these funny looking skinny chicks would lay eggs too.

The new chicks arrived and we had to make another area to raise them. We had been warned the larger chicks would pick on the younger chicks, that chickens were cannibalistic. We decided to put the rush on the chicken house and finish it.

The new Chicken house was finished and the older chicks moved in. They were happy as can be with their new larger quarters. Next step was to make them a yard to run around in. With the older laying hens we had discovered the delight of chickens when they are free to “flock” around.

One of the biggest thrills a chicken gets out of doors is to dust bathe in the sun. They scratch out a place till it is raw dirt and then start in scratching and turning and scratching more till the have a bowl shaped depression filled with powdered dirt. They begin with fluffing their feathers, sifting the dirt under their feathers. We have witnessed a hen being possessive of her dust hole and another hen trying to get in her hole with her. You have heard of an ostrich sticking her head in the sand. That is literally what we saw this hen doing. She went behind the hen in the hole and pushed her head down under her body and kept squeezing under her till she had lifted her out of the hole. And voila, “Ha ha it’s my hole now!”

Caring for the chickens, feeding and watering, was our 5 year old's job. She was fascinated with chickies. As they grew older she became a little disillusioned with them. She called them “persons”. One day she came running in the door, hollering, “Mommy, mommy you’ll never guess what the persons did. They gave us a present.” What kind of present I asked her and she proceeded to describe the egg in minute detail.

I was shocked, we were told they were an exotic assortment. Now this is one of those moments when you say, why, did I have such an obviously dumb moment? Of course exotic birds lay eggs, even those who aren’t chickens. They just lay either smaller ones or not as many.

Oh NO, we were going to butcher those babies as soon as they got big enough. We now have 58 hens that will be laying in the next couple of weeks. They have just been presented a stay of execution. That will be 58 more eggs than we were counting on each day. What will we do? Now chickens don’t lay everyday but almost. From reading I had been doing, we should expect more than 300 eggs from each of the exotic ladies.

You do remember we ordered 100 chicks and got the wrong chicks and they replaced them telling us to drown the others. In one month the heavy breed laying assortment will start laying too. I have 53 hens in that bunch. What will we do with 100 eggs everyday? That is just a little under 9 dozen eggs a day. Worse than that, it is approximately 56 dozen a week. I only have one month to plan what to do with them. We had homes for the eggs from the 58 ladies. Now twice that amount. Guess what the grocery stores can’t buy them from me. Why, we aren’t inspected (we haven’t paid our dues).

We had to think of another solution. Our son came up with the bright idea to advertise the hens for sale. So that is what we did. We advertised fancy breeds for sale at the feed store. BTW, there were some we just couldn’t part with because they were so cute. We still ended with 65 hens we couldn’t part with. Needless to say we ate lots of eggs (glad we were physically active). It was before cholesterol was known to be a major health factor.

Other blogs by me:

http://glosgarden.blogspot.com/

Where I have stories of my cats and other pets

a blog about my courtship with my husband,

and a blog about my most embarrassing moment.

A "Soap box" blog where I do air my opinions.

http://organicinstlouis.blogspot.com/

blogs about the wildflowers on our farm

Organic methods we use, some cooking and some poetry,

blogs about Seed sprouting, insects, and garden pictures

Blog about an endangered beneficial beetle

http://pitbulladog.blogspot.com/

Blogs about our pair of pitbulls.

All recipes, pictures, and writings are my own.

I give credit for items which belong to other people in my blogs .

Please do not copy without permission 

Leghorns: The Mass Exodus

In episode 1:
http://gloriouscreations.blogspot.com/2008/09/fowl-story.html

I explained about the building of the pen in the work shop. I did not say we fenced the area with the chicken wire to the ceiling. We didn’t know what to expect from our new tenants.

When we built the out side pen we figured one 4 ft course of wire would be enough. Because we observed they had not flown higher that.  

The next part is a little excursion from the leghorn story but necessary to the plot.

When I was growing up I had gone to visit my great aunt. She lived out side a big city. They had a very avant-garde house. I believe they got the plans from a 1950’s Women’s day magazine. It was a square house with an enormous living/Dinning room with windows covering the wall and the other half of the house had a large bedroom with a huge bathroom backing up to a tiny laundry and a galley kitchen. As an eleven year old I was impressed, but what impressed me more was an old garage on the property they had turned into a tractor shed for their cub cadet tractor and the work shop that was attached was turned into a chicken coup. Out side she had made a chicken wire run. I asked her why the chickens needed a ceiling. She said to keep animals out. She didn’t want the chicken hawks to eat her chickens. I am sure my eyes got big, because I remember looking at the skies and asking her what a chicken hawk looked like (I had a new baby sister that was not even as big as her laying hens, I was worried about her laying in the buggy in the sun).

I had never seen chickens before and was enamored with the idea of them. Great Aunt Flora took me inside to gather eggs and another lesson awaited me. I found wooden and glass eggs in the nest. I was told to leave them there. It teaches the hens where to lay their eggs.

I wish everyone could have a Great Aunt Flora in their life.

Now back to the original story. We left the last segment with the chickens learning what the outside was like. Each day it became routine to let the chicks out unless it was raining. Chickens are creatures of routine. They expect the same thing to happen everyday at the same time. My leghorns (rejects from the egg factory) were no different. When I came in, in the morning they crowded over to the little door, anxious to get out side. They never seemed to learn only one chicken can fit through the door at a time. It was always like the stuffing of a phone booth routine. Once released they always ran helter-skelter around the pen. You heard the raucous cackling and crowing and a tremendous flapping of wings. It was like a freedom cry.

For 2 weeks everything was copacetic. I wasn’t worried about leaving during the day because they seemed to recognize danger and run into the house at the slightest disturbance.

The kids and I went out grocery shopping, the little one blowing kisses to the chickens and telling them she’d be right back. (Mind you at other times she was saying she was afraid of them.) The shopping trip turned into dinner out, we returned home late. It was just getting dark and you could still see, especially if it was a white object. As we drove up to the house, against the black of the asphalt drive, were white objects all over the drive. It looked like someone had driven up and thrown out their towel wash. It was all our chickens. We jumped out, counted bodies and wondered what had broken into the fence and let the chickens out. Before it got too dark, I went around to see what damage there was.

I told the kids to pick up the chickens, one by one, and carry them into their house (the chickens had already decided it was sleep time, so they were very docile).

I surveyed the outside and couldn’t find any damage and scratched my head and wondered how they got out. I figured I would give a look see the next morning; they must have crawled under the fence.

The next morning I discovered no egress. So I opened the little gate and let the feathers fly. Yep that is exactly what happened, the feathers flew and flew and flew up and over the fence. The Exodus was complete.

They say hind sight doesn’t count; as the leghorns made the great escape, my eyes followed them skyward. I remembered looking at the sky when I was eleven years old and knew the real reason Aunt Flora had a ceiling for her chickens.

Episode 3:  “Double Trouble"
http://gloriouscreations.blogspot.com/2008/09/double-trouble.html

Other blog sites by me:

 http://glosgarden.blogspot.com/

Where I have stories of my cats and other pets

a blog about my courtship with my husband,

and a blog about my most embarrassing moment.

A "Soap box" blog where I do air my opinions.

http://organicinstlouis.blogspot.com/

blogs about the wildflowers on our farm

Organic methods we use, some cooking and some poetry,

blogs about Seed sprouting, insects, and garden pictures

Blog about an endangered beneficial beetle

http://pitbulladog.blogspot.com/

Blogs about our pair of pitbulls.

All recipes, pictures, and writings are my own.

I give credit for items which belong to other people in my blogs .

Please do not copy without permission 

A Fowl Story

On one of my internet groups there has been several discussions about peoples various experiences with fowl of all kind. I enjoyed the chook stories and remembered the fowl situations we have been through. Chuckling over the turkey stories (once you’ve known turkeys you would know why a person pulling a dumb stunt is called a turkey). I have never written of our challenging moments with the feathered “friends”. I decided this would be the time to bring them out in the open. Here is the beginning of our long association with feathered friends.

A very long time ago we decided we would move to the country. To be exact it was in 1973. The children were 5 and going to be 4. We left the subdivision and our home with a 2 car garage, fenced ¾ acre, four bedrooms, 2 baths and a full basement with a family room and fireplace. The house we were moving into had a 1/8 mile drive, 10 acres, no neighbors for ¼ mile any direction, three bedrooms, one bath, a combined living room dinning room and kitchen, with fireplace. There was no basement. It was built on a slab.

We lived in the house for three months when our almost 4 year old came up and said, “Mommy, when are we going to move upstairs.” I said, “We don’t have an upstairs. Why do we need an upstairs?” She replied, “This has tile floors like a basement we need rugs.”

Our “new” house had heating in the concrete floors. We couldn’t cover them with rugs.

We were very into gardening. We even started a wheat field on a half acre. We decided we could thresh our own wheat and make flour and then bake bread. Yes I know “back to the landers”. Our families were outraged. They said we were depriving our children.

We discovered our children were very sensitive to additives in foods and allergic to cow’s milk. We were gearing up to producing everything we consumed. We had already acquired goats and sheep. So we had available milk and meat. Next acquisition, Chickens!

I went looking for chickens already raised. We had neither the knowledge nor the room to raise chicks. I found a feed store that was also a hatchery. They had over-done layers, ones that had passed their prime. In other words they were not laying up to snuff.

I decided, if they weren’t laying every day, I should get twelve chickens. We used about 6 eggs a day for the families use. They boxed the white leghorns up in two cardboard boxes. I worried the poor hens would suffocate crammed in there and voiced my opinion about it. The clerk begrudgingly cut some holes in the sides of the boxes, immediately, out poked heads. They were ludicrous looking boxes eliciting a laugh from the other customers.

The hatchery must have never heard about loading a person’s car. They felt if you bought them you can cart them. So out to the car the boxed babes and I went in two trips. Six chickens moving around in a cardboard box are an armful. The boxes felt like they had a mind of their own.

Being I didn’t know I would be acquiring the hens so fast, we were not prepared with a place for them to reside. I called Hunny and told him about the hens and told him I would start making a place for them but would need his help finishing it up.

I cleared a corner in the old work shop, which was attached to the carport. Started looking for something to enclose the area in and couldn’t find anything. Off to the lumber yard I headed. I purchased a 50 foot roll of 4 ft high chicken wire. When Hunny came home he put up a corner post and another post 3 feet away on one side. Then we stretched the wire around it, leaving the three foot space open. In the open place he installed an old 3 foot wide screen door. We outfitted the 8x8 fenced area with a roost and feed and water dishes.

Are you worried about the chickens in the boxes? Don’t be, when I got home I hunted up the retired playpen and turned it upside down and placed the chickens under it. I had a surprise when I un-boxed the chickens. There were two eggs in one box. Those old ladies were not has-beens yet.

With the finishing of the “coop” we installed the chickens. The poor things just stood in the middle of the room. They had no idea what to do. We had to take each one and dip their beaks in the water dish to let them know where it was. And we had to peck with our fingers in the feed dish, they had no idea what the dish was for. Why were they so dumb? Because for the first 18 months of their lives the lived in a 10”x 10” x 12” cage. They did not know what to walk around was. It took three hours for them to start investigating their area. We realized the dilemma and knew we would just have to wait and watch till they got their land legs.

It took three days for the first one to realize she had wings. And when she started to flap them it was like there was no stopping. With in a few minutes others got the idea and you had 12 chickens running around on the floor flapping their wings.

They had no idea they could fly. We had not seen any evidence of the roost being occupied. We wondered how long it would take for them to find out they could fly. Their wing muscles must have atrophied with no use for 18 months. There was three weeks of running around and flapping before one run resulted in flight. Not too long after, the other hens realized they could fly and then they discovered the roost. As each hen reached the heights they would sit there and cackle at the tops of their voices. Bragging to the other hens they had done it.

We bought the chickens for eggs. We had provided them with two nest boxes. They were about 2 feet off the floor. Needless to say, they were not used. Eggs were laid everywhere. Some of the Hens picked the same corner to lay in. I was getting no less than 10 eggs a day…and sometimes 12. I was deluged with eggs. What to do with the excess. First I started making Challah requiring 12 egg yolks, the egg whites were used in an angle food cake. 

Tutorial For making Challah, not the one with 12 egg yolks:

http://gloriouscreations.blogspot.com/2011/05/challah-made-easy.html

I had plenty of cream and yogurt from the goats, I sometimes used the 12 egg whites to make a Bavarian Crème. Sponge cakes, I was making one a week. The kids were taking egg salad sandwiches in their lunches. I was still being overwhelmed with eggs. I decided to put the word out I had fresh country eggs for sale. People were disgruntled they were white shelled eggs and that they were not fertile eggs. The hunt was on for the one thing I could fix (I couldn't change the egg shell color). I could get a rooster to provide that function. It was just our luck; friends had bought pink and green chicks for their kids for Easter. Their kids were bored with caring for the “chicks” which had turned into roosters. The roosters were 6 months old and getting ornery and the neighbors did not like their morning revelry. They asked if we would give them a home. We told them it was very fortuitous, we were looking for a rooster for our hens.

Pinkie and Greenie (You could still tell who was who. The ear holes had stayed dyed.), arrived with feathers ruffled. When we put them in with the hens, they ran to one side of the pen and the hens to the other. We had a Mexican stand off. The roosters had never seen other chickens before. It was good they were leghorns. Chickens will pick on other chickens that look different than themselves. (This does not happen when they are raised together.) That night the hens got on the roost to sleep and the roosters staked out their corner and went to sleep.

The next morning (a nice fall morning with the windows open) we were startled out of bed with non-stop crowing. The previous owners only said the neighbors did not like to hear them crow, not that they crowed constantly. We went out to observe the crooners. They were occupying the roost and the hens were huddled in the corner. The roosters were still non-stop crowing. This time they were bragging they were king of the hill, gleefully waiting for someone to challenge their ownership of the perch.

It took four days before we noticed there was a mutual admiration society beginning in the household. Observing the tenants, I mentioned to Hunny we needed to make a pen for them to go out side. The living quarters were a little crowded for the shenanigans going on in the pen.

He used “T” posts and the remainder of the chicken wire to fence an area on the side of the work shop. He cut a door into the wall and hinged it so it could be closed when we wanted to keep the chickens in and other animals out, namely raccoons, opossums, and skunks who love to dine on a chicken smorgasbord.

There was still one more chore to be completed before the hens could make an excursion into the great unknown. They needed a ramp to go from the little door to greener pastures. Hunny fashioned a ramp with bars across it to give them traction to maneuver up and down it. (Chicken talons don’t grip flat boards well).

The ramp was installed and the door was latched open. We stood outside and watched the door….and watched the door…and watched the door. We went inside to see what the hang-up was. Why wasn’t the gang flocking out? The strangest sight greeted us. The chickens were lined up and parading past the door. They would look out one by one and then move on so the next one could look. We put on our thinking caps to see how we could get them to go out the door. Finally decided some cracked corn on the ramp to lead them out would work.

The corn was sprinkled, 3 heads reached out and promptly ate all the corn within reach. The other chickens decided they wanted in on the corn and tried to reach through the door. 

Mind you this door is only 12 inches by 12 inches. And 14 chickens are trying to reach through it. All of a sudden, with a squawk, a hen falls out the door and jumps up cackling and ruffling her feathers. She discovered the corn on the end of the ramp the other chickens couldn't reach. She started eating all the corn. The other chickens observing her decided they would brave the out of doors. They ran out together, getting stuck again in the door. With in 5 minutes the outdoor pen was filled with chickens learning how to scratch in the dirt. They were so excited. Then we wondered how we would get them to go back in.

There is nothing more perplexing than trying to out think a mini-brained bird. We went in the pen as the sun was going down and tried to herd them to the ramp and in. No way were they having anything to do with going in the door, much less being caught. We couldn't leave them out all night. It was going to rain and the coyotes had been running through the yard at night.

We went in for supper, leaving the light on inside the coop. We hoped they would be afraid of the dark and go inside.

When we went back outside to close the door and put them to bed we were the ones who had to apply a new strategy. The chickens had bedded down in the grass when the dark descended. We went in the pen and picked each chicken up and put them by the opening and pushed them through. Every chicken was clucking and fluffing wondering why they had rudely been awakened. We gave them time to settle down and hop on the roost and turned out the light.

The next day the chickens acted like they had done the routine everyday of their lives. Coming and going, in and out the door all day.

Next Chapter: Leghorns, the mass exodus.
http://gloriouscreations.blogspot.com/2008/09/leghorns-mass-exodus.html

Other blog sites by me:

 http://glosgarden.blogspot.com/

Where I have stories of my cats and other pets

a blog about my courtship with my husband,

and a blog about my most embarrassing moment.

A "Soap box" blog where I do air my opinions.

http://organicinstlouis.blogspot.com/

blogs about the wildflowers on our farm

Organic methods we use, some cooking and some poetry,

blogs about Seed sprouting, insects, and garden pictures

Blog about an endangered beneficial beetle

http://pitbulladog.blogspot.com/

Blogs about our pair of pitbulls.

All recipes, pictures, and writings are my own.

I give credit for items which belong to other people in my blogs .

Please do not copy without permission