Homemade Symphony: Chickens!

Tingle showing off her comb

As our family has grown, so has our consumption of some of the best foods this mommy can find at a reasonable price. One food I will buy in high quality regardless of price is eggs. They are a wonderfully healthy food in my mind plus I love eating them. Well, we have grown past eating a dozen and the number seems to keep going up. It can be discouraging when the baby asks for more after eating two. Hmmm... if we all had three, which I know we could all do, that would be almost two dozen at each breakfast! Well, we don't eat all that we can but we still go well above a dozen for one breakfast not to mention the baking and nothing spells lovely fall weather for me better than baking with pumpkins!

So, to help with the cost of all the eggs we consume, we decided to get chickens! After meeting others who have chickens and touring their coops Nate decided it was time and diligently set to work making the loveliest chicken coop you have ever seen. For a while it even looked better than our house which was in much need of a paint job! Craigslist was probably the most frequented website for a while as I searched for laying hens all over Delaware and into Maryland and Pennsylvania. We finally found some young hens that needed a new home and off we went in a rainstorm to fetch them. I must confess to feeling nervous as we drove them home. I wasn't sure how to take care of chickens but figured experience would be a good teacher as long as we could keep them alive that long.

We arrived home with eight live chickens (first hurdle crossed!) and happily put them in their new home. We thought they should love the roosts that Nate had so carefully built and were surprised to see that they all preferred to huddle together on the floor of the coop. Hmmm... I guess we needed to read up on that one! Eventually they all learned to use the roosts and for the most part we find them bunched up on the top one as they sleep in droopy piles.

The first month of chicken raising was quite eventful and full of learning. One of our original chickens seemed a wee bit ill so we began treating her and the others for possible parasites or worms. We were never able to see if our treatment worked as she was the first we lost to a predator. Although Nate tried to prepare me for loosing chickens to fox and such, it was sad and hard for me when she went missing. We haven't had any other successful predator attacks although we did watch a small hawk try to take one of our full sized hens! The hen was running and it took us just a while to spot the hawk silently coming in to get her. The hawk was obviously too small to carry her away but we ran out and yelled at it just the same. Amazingly, it turned and came a second time! Since then I don't put the chickens out to free range until I have my ever moving "scarecrow" (i.e. clothes on the clothesline). We also avoid the morning and evening hours when hawks and falcons are more likely to be feeding.

The rubber egg with no shell

I had one additional predator scare which turned out to be nothing more than a garage "eating" my chicken! We had a bag of bird feed on the garage floor which when found and punctured by the hens instantly became a favorite feeding spot. Now that they knew something of the inside of the garage the hens thought it was quite fun to rummage through the tools, equipment, boxes, and such in the garage on a daily basis. I didn't think too much of it until one of the hens when missing one afternoon. We had looked for about half and hour and as we couldn't find her my face was showing what I thought to be true.... she had been caught some time in the morning while they were free-ranging and we were too busy to notice. I was bummed, quite bummed, and figured I would check the garage once more and do a thorough job of it as I didn't care much to find out she had been in there in two months time. As I was nearing the very back of the garage and trying to get a view between some of the boxes and totes piled there I heard a ruffling of feathers and called Nate to investigate. He moved the boxes aside and found the lost hen down on the floor in the farthest back corner and unable to get back out the way she had gone in! Whew! I was relieved to say the least and was so happy to see her back with the others! That night we found a rubber egg on the floor off the coop and as we know all the hens can lay lovely eggs we are figuring she laid it as a result of the stress of being stuck in the garage without food or water for the better part of the morning and into the afternoon.

All in all, it has been quite fun to have chickens! The kids love looking for eggs and are learning new responsibilities as well as getting first hand education on birds. Learning about birds in science took on a whole new meaning this year as I found them out in the yard pulling the chicken's wings out to see the primary, secondary and tertiary feathers. :-) I am normally not a big fan of pets but it has been a joy to have these hens who provide something so great for us!