Two Hens Gone

Well, it happened yesterday.

It was a beautiful day following lots of rain. The chickens were happy to get out of the coop as they had been kept in during the rainy days. We keep them in for two reasons. One is that when it rains, they want to get out of it, which usually means getting on the patio and snuggling up on my patio furniture! Ugh!
The other is that when it rains, coyotes run everywhere. Rain floods their usual hiding places, dens, and trails. They get confused and just roam. On rainy days in the desert, you can see coyotes at shopping malls, at the gas station, in your front yard, on all the roads and wandering around school playgrounds. This puts the chickens in more danger than usual, so I prefer to just keep them off the patio and out of harm's way.
So, as I said, they were glad to get out on such a sunny day. The earth worms had been flooded up from the ground and were providing a tasty treat for the chickens. I appreciated them cleaning up those nasty worms.
It was about 1:30 in the afternoon. Greg was helping my dad on his boat in the front yard, next door. I had just gone to the backyard next door to visit with my mom and their new puppy. The kids were in the family room playing wii. The dog was inside with the kids, and the chickens were roaming the yard as usual.
Mom and I heard a chicken squawk and wondered what it was. Then we heard it again and saw a chicken flapping above the 6 foot fence. We ran over and saw 3 chickens outside the fence. We figured that they were squawking because they were trying to get back in. Without looking into the yard (why didn't I just look into the yard?!?) we started herding the chickens around the front of the house to the other side where I assumed they had come from.
This took several minutes and when we got to the other gate, the chickens refused to go in. I opened the gate to see chickens running and a coyote in my yard!! I started yelling and running, and mom did, too. Greg came running. Mom saw the coyote jump my 6 foot fence and then had to chase him away as he didn't want to leave. I wish she had had a gun.
We accounted for each chicken. 9 were okay, one lay mortally wounded in the yard and another struggled to walk, falling over, laboring to breathe. They were Henny, our big ol' Buff Orpington, and Flare, a beautiful Speckled Sussex. Both were great layers. Henny laid huge eggs. She was a great character, and Flare was the chicken that Nathan named when we brought them home as chicks. We were all devastated, realizing what we had to do.
One of the important lessons in having chickens that I wanted my children to learn, was that they are here to provide food. There would be no life saving attempts, no nursing the birds back to health. They had to be put out of their misery, butchered and baked. The children knew this.
Now, as much as I wanted this lesson to be a part of our chicken raising adventure, I dreaded it, and now I wept at our loss. We dearly loved those chickens. They had names and little personalities. But we did what had to be done, albeit tearfully. My dad was there to coach us on what to do. He and mom were great support. They taught me these lessons about animals when I was young. I am thankful they were there to help us pass on the wisdom to my kids.
Greg and my dad set out with guns and binoculars to hunt the coyote who would surely be back soon. They were unable to spot him that day, but his fate is sealed. He has discovered our chickens and will come back over and over again until he has killed them all.
I find myself harboring the appropriate hatred of the competing predators.
So, Flare and Henny are gone.
Farewell girls. Thanks for the eggs.

I should note here that my previous posts have been edited to reflect our mistaken identity of our first laying hen. It wasn't Henny who laid first, it was Penny, and she is still with us. Big ol' Henny did start laying just about 10 days ago, but wasn't the hen I was blogging about. Oops.

Eggs! Eggs! and More Eggs!

Here they come!! The eggs are arriving! It was just 12 days ago that Penny laid her first egg. When that happened, we thought the rest would soon follow! Well, they are now!

Penny has been a faithful girl. She marches into the hen house every day around noon and leaves us a beautiful cream-colored egg. They are small, but each one is just a tiny bit bigger than the last. Following is a video the kids made of their taste test between a store bought "free range" egg and one of Penny's eggs. Guess which egg they liked better!



So, we were waiting for more chickens to lay. We watched them carefully for the same "laying behavior" that we saw in Penny. Well, two days ago, we noticed Cinnamon (my favorite hen - she follows me everywhere and is so curious!) looking around in places she had never looked before. She was coming out of dark corners, and from under bushes with a determination that indicated an impending egg. So we knew it was coming.

What we didn't notice, was Hazel, the quiet Ameracauna looking also. The only indication I got was a strange sighting out of my bedroom window. She was up on the window sill acting a little strange, then seemed to jump down. Later, I went out to retrieve Penny's egg. As I came across the patio, I happened to notice a chicken in the garbage can!! It was Hazel. She had jumped in there from my bedroom window sill! That silly hen! I picked her up hoping to get her into the hen house before she laid, but nope, too late. There was her egg! I took her and her egg to the coop and put them both in a laying box. I hoped that her last memory of coming out of the coop would help her learn to lay there, but alas, the next day, she was perched atop the garbage can squawking.

So, in an effort to prevent this from happening with another hen, we locked Hazel, Cinnamon, and of course Penny in the coop.

This created a scene that I wish I had gotten on video! Cinnamon, who has the most outgoing personality and vocal expression, commenced to squawking loudly! In response, the rooster came over and started honking even louder and pacing outside the coop. This went on for about 20 minutes while Cinnamon checked out each and every box and paced the coop.

I found this on the web. It helps explain why they make so much noise:

For instance, when a hen is ready to lay her egg, she gives a
nesting call, inviting her mate to join
her in finding a nesting site.
Together they find and create a nest by pulling
and flinging around
themselves twigs, feathers, hay, leaves, and loose dirt,
after they have
scraped a depression in the ground with their beaks and feet.
Upon laying
her egg, the hen issues an "egg cackle," which brings the rooster to
her
side, and together they rejoin the flock. United Poultry Concerns

Meanwhile Penny, quiet little Penny, entered her favorite box to lay her egg. Cinnamon eventually settled in the box opposite her.




















When both eggs were laid, Cinnamon started squawking again, announcing the arrival of her egg. You can hear General Cotton (the roo) in the background responding to her. He stayed right by the coop until we let them out. He is a good roo!




We eventually let all three out as we didn't expect to get another egg from Hazel that day.

So, I went out at sunset as they were tucking themselves in bed and checked the boxes one last time, and, Hello!! another egg. We don't know who laid this one! We definitely think it is a "first egg", but whose? My money is on the speckeled sussex, Flare. We will have to watch and see who laid the mystery egg!!!

Now, this morning!! There is another egg! We think this is Hazel's second egg because it is the same color. I guess we will soon have to give up the idea that we will always know who laid the eggs we find. For now it is fun to try to figure it out!

When a hen lays her first egg, our experience has been that it will have a grainy texture, speckles, and be thinner than subsequent eggs. Our exception to that is the RI Red, Cinnamon, who laid a fairly big normal looking egg. It was slightly grainy, though.

I am pleasantly surprised that the eggs seem to have very healthy shells and good colored yolks (per the ONE that we have cracked open). We let the hens free range in our yard and they eat a lot of grass, bugs, seeds, etc. They really don't eat much of the feed we provide. I would guess that it is maybe 1/4 of their diet. I don't feed them any oyster shells, or other supplements. They get kitchen scraps only if they are organic, or from the middle of the fruit (as with cantalope seeds). But they don't get a lot other than what they are finding in the yard.


Where will we put all the eggs? I guess we will need an egg refrigerator!

Our Summer Project 2008 - Raising Chickens Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Why would we want to raise chickens? Well there are many reasons!! But at the time, the purpose was to get us back home!

There are many folks who, in their ignorance about homeschooling, think that homeschoolers must be isolated at home. They must not be getting any social time with peers. Well, I am here to tell you that that isn't the case for any of the homeschooled kids we know. At the end of the last school year, we were so exhausted, burned out, and DONE with the social scene (Or at least I was. I think the kids were having fun), that I just wanted to spend the whole summer at home! I felt like we should spend more time as a family. So we bid farewell to all the chaos, put the school books away, and found ourselves at the local feed store. BTW, I don't recommend buying chicks at a feed store. More on that later.

We didn't have a coop, a place to put a coop, feed, or any other paraphinalea that might go along with owning chickens. But, I figured if we got the chickens, they would live in a box for a few weeks which would give us time to get all that hammered out, right!?

We bought 6 chicks from the local Pet Food Depot. We were told we were buying 3 California Whites and 3 Brown Leghorns. All great egg layers. Leghorns were just what I was looking for. California Whites are a cross between a Leghorn and a California Grey, so good enough. They were all healthy and perky. However, now that they are 5 months old, I can say with confidence that the feed store had NO IDEA what they were selling me! What I actually have (after one of the "leghorns" died) is ONE California white hen, 2 Speckled Sussex hens, A Red Sex-Link hen and a Sex-Link ROOSTER!! HELLO?! Reason #1 for not buying chicks at the local feed store.

We put the chicks in a box with the little water thing and the feed and the wood chips and a heat lamp left over from when we kept that horned toad a couple of years ago. We set them up in the laundry room and closed the door so that our dog couldn't eat them.

Okay! We are chicken farmers now!

NOW WHAT!!??

Our First Egg!!

We got our first egg today!! I figure it is high time to get this blog started. I will have to go back and fill in for the first 5 months of our flock's life. Those posts will come after this one.

Today was a cool, cloudy day in Phoenix. The kids and I went out to clean out the chicken coop. We had been watching the chickens and figured it was pretty close to time for the egg laying to start and we wanted the coop conditions to be nice and clean. We recently learned that they are ready to lay when their comb and waddle get big and red. We have 3 chickens that have big red waddles and combs. What was really neat is that the three would lay different colored eggs, so we would know which chicken it was when it happened.

Our chickens are happy free range chickens. They wander and peck in our backyard which is about 1/4 of an acre. They have gravel, dirt, sand and grass to peck and eat, and all the bushes, trees and structures of the yard to hide under. There is also that place over on the side of the yard where my husband insists on keeping 2x4s and other scrap wood that we will probably never actually use, but that we must hang on to. There has been a pack rat building a nest over there and I have been asking him to clean it up.

That is where Penny the Buff Orpington hen was spotted!

Not by us, but by the dog who must have seen her sneak behind a piece of wood. When he chased her out, she did the "bu, bu, bu, bu, bu-cock!" thing that chickens do when they lay an egg. She was very vocal about it. We went over to investigate and found that she had been digging a nest under that wood. She had been there more than we knew. She may have even laid an egg there before and fed the pack rat!

We all moved away and she made her way back to her special nest behind the wood. We waited... and waited... and waited... Just how long does it take to lay an egg? I wondered. I couldn't wait any longer. I approached her nest. She darted out. She had not laid an egg yet, but her behavior said she would soon. The rest of the chickens were on the other side of the yard. It is very unusual to be separated from the rest like that. So, she went back to her nest. And we waited.

We then decided that we really did not want her laying her first egg there. If she did, then she would seek to lay all her eggs there. We want her to lay in the nesting boxes in the hen house. So I went back over and got her and put her in the coop. I locked her in. This was very upsetting for her. She went in the hen house and got in a box. Then she came out and got in another box. Then she came out of there and got in another box. She checked out all eight boxes and then came out of the hen house. She paced around the coop. She wanted to go back to her nest.

Having no other choice, she eventually settled into a box at the back of the hen house and I could hear her scratching and scratching. Then finally, she quieted. I was busy cleaning up the wood pile. I will tell you now, that her "nest" no longer exists. I cleaned up that side yard myself! Got rid of the pack rat nest and the wood laying on the ground. So that's that! Well, until my dear husband piles more stuff there. :-)

When I was finished and ready to go inside, I thought I would check on our dear Penny. She was quietly sitting in the nesting box. I opened the hatch and looked at her. When I reached down to touch her, she fussed a little. Then she moved out of the box to reveal a small cream colored egg!!!! I gasped, then teared! She did it! Our first egg has finally arrived. The most expensive egg in the world!!

Then I felt bad that my kids did not get to discover it. I closed the hatch leaving the egg in the box. I then saw Penny leave the hen house and begin her "bu, bu, bu, bu, bu-cock!!" I got her on video on my cell phone. I have no idea how to access that video!

I went in and told the kids to come check on Penny. We got the camera and went in. We photographed the egg and the hen and the kids, of course. We sent the egg picture to several folks including my mother who lives next door and she came right over to see our first egg!









We spent the rest of the afternoon just hanging out with the hens. The rooster was distressed by the hens hanging so close to us. He crowed and ruffled his feathers and kept a safe, respectful
distance. As long as he behaves, he can stay.