Finally a new post! I promise they will be more frequent. There have been lots of projects we have been working on over the summer. And I have remembered (sometimes) to take pictures.
This isn’t really a DIY post. More of a story of our adventures over this summer getting chickens for the first time. I have worked on a lot of farms with both laying hens and meat birds over the last few years. So, I am pretty familiar with looking after chickens. Though, this was our first time having chickens all on our own. Which has definitely had its challenges for us newbies.
We began our adventure in April of this year (2014). After reading a lot of different books and talking to friends with backyard poultry, we decided to buy some young female hens (pullets). Despite the warnings from many of the books. We thought this might be easier than setting up a brooder, etc. Plus, we would get eggs faster.
Most of the warnings from the poultry books warned that vendors at fairs were always getting rid of the birds they didn’t want. Runts, sick birds (without obvious conditions), birds from bad stock, inbred birds, etc. Would we luck out and still get good birds? Or….
So, one frosty Sunday morning in late April at the ungodly hour of 6:45am. We found ourselves in a red pickup truck on our way to the Fur and Feather Livestock Fair in Mount Forest, Ontario (an hour north of Guelph).
The weather was favourable for the event. It was beautiful and sunny out, though a bit cool to be standing outside for a long time. We had our friends Ellen and Saja in tow. They were interested in having chickens too. But didn’t have enough space at their house. We had a sort of boarding arrangement for chickens in mind at our house, this didn’t really work out in the end. But it was fun having them along for the adventure.
When we arrived at the fairgrounds in Mount Forest, we were surprised by the number of vehicles everywhere. Making for a bit of a walk to the fair. We noticed lots of people carrying pet carriers around to transport their birds in. We took note for the future. Not knowing quite what to use, we had just brought some crates lined with wood chips. These still would have worked fine. But most of the vendors also had cardboard boxes for them. It sounds a bit cruel, but keeping the birds in the dark actually calms them down. There were also people with carts to carry their new animals around with. This would have been an even better idea, as 5 little chickens get kind of heavy after carrying them around for an hour.
Mount Forest’s fairgrounds is quite large and it was packed with breeders selling all kinds of poultry birds: chickens, ducks, geese, peacocks, quail and more. Plus, larger livestock, like: goats, pigs, donkeys, and a few horses, sheep and puppies. It was a very noisy, busy and smelly, combined with a lack of sleep, made for a pretty surreal experience.
We had no idea where to start. So, we just wandered around in a daze looking at different vendors. After half an hour or so, we noticed some of the vendors were already selling out of pullets. We started to get nervous and bought a couple of birds from one vendor who seemed to have healthy looking pullets of some of the breeds we were looking for. They had 9 and 11 week old birds. We bought two Rhode Island Reds and one Plymouth Barred Rock. Ellen and Saja also bought a few hens from the same vendor.
After walking around and around the fair, we managed to find a couple more of the breeds we were looking for. A grey Wyandotte and a Gold Cochin. These were slightly more expensive birds, but I was happy to have some diversity in the flock. The birds ranged between $9 and $20 each, we spent a total of $64 on 5 birds. Ellen and Saja spent $56 on 3 Rhode Island Reds and 3 Columbian Rocks. Happy with our new feathered friends, we packed them safely in the truck and headed back to their new home.
We were lucky that our garage already had an insulated and vented room separate at the back of the garage. It was all painted and ready to go as a chicken coop. It just needed some perches, nesting boxes, feeder, waterer and a hole cut in the wall for a hinged window. Oh and a fenced in run coming off the back of that with some ramps on either side to get in and out. Easy right? Take a few hours…
Here’s Lea enjoying watching our new chicks through the new window in the newly renovated coop. Unfortunately, because of the size of the room. It was impossible to get a photo of the whole inside of the coop.
Here’s Ellen with the flapping Columbian Rock and Saja releasing another of the Columbians. The nesting boxes are visible behind them. I have since added a little perch to help them get into the boxes. The hanging feeder is in front of Saja. Beside them is a shelf with wood chips on it underneath the roosts. This makes it a lot easier to clean up their poop regularly each day. Which keeps the coop a lot cleaner with minimal effort. I got this idea from Hilltop Pastures, one of the farms where I apprenticed years ago.
We also had a galvanized gravity waterer, which was a very thoughtful house warming gift from friends, Bryan, Masako and Jamie.
We were too busy with the coop to prepare any of the run before the chicks arrived, I spent the next two weeks completing it (with help). I wanted to do the run right. As it would make the chickens more secure from predators and save me repairing it in the future. This mean, digging a two foot deep trench all the way around to bury the chicken wire and mounting cross supports along the top, to cover the run as well. The longest and most tedious part of this job was wiring together the multiple runs of chicken wire fencing. I bought 4 foot fencing, the tallest I could easily source, it still required multiple runs. The total area of the run was about 200 square feet.
First I staked out the area and dug the trench.
This jumps ahead a bit. Sorry, I forgot to take a lot of pictures. Here, the posts are in place. I used mostly t-bars, except for were the gate will go. I fastened wooden blocks to the tops of the t-bars, including one in the middle. Then I ran cedar 1″x2″s across for cross supports for the chicken wire going across the top.
This shot gives a bit better prospective of what’s going on.
Here’s an inside and outside shot of the finished run. It has a wooden gate I stole from another structure in my yard. You can kind of see how the top supports work. There is also a little roof over window and ramp area to keep rain from coming into the coop if the window is open. About 8 months in now and the run seems to working out well. No animals have broken in or chickens broken out.
The Challenges
In short, all of the books (not surprisingly) are right. Don’t buy chickens at fairs. Get chicks from registered breeders or small breeders that come recommended. It won’t be more work in the end because dealing with the issues from our fair birds has been a lot of work. It began with…
Very shortly after arriving at our place (just over a week) our grey Wyandotte began to show signs of sickness. Because of the timing, I am pretty sure that it was something that started before we purchased her. There are a number of things that it could be. Since we didn’t get a diagnosis from a vet, I won’t try to guess.
We separated her from the flock as soon as we saw these serious signs of illness: tail feathers down, head tucked in and drooping wings. We had her in a cage in our house with her own little waterer and feeder. This photo is actually about a week after we separated her, her wings weren’t drooping like that right away. We tried to nurse her back to health, by making special food mixtures with probiotics in them to help her digestion. We took her outside sometimes too. Where she seemed to be happier, but she would still hardly eat and drink. If this starts happening with one of your chickens, it usually means the end. Sadly in the case of Lady Grey, she died just over three weeks after we got her.
I wish this was the only heartbreak we suffered. A few days before Lady died, we noticed one of the Columbian Rocks had an enlarged crop. So big that it was dragging on the ground a bit. On top of that, she was eating like she was starving. Ellen and Saja took her into their house to try and look after her. After some research, we figured out that she had an impacted crop. This means that her crop wasn’t functioning properly. So, it was getting filled with food that wasn’t going anywhere. Hence why she kept eating, as she must have felt really hungry. An impacted crop is usually caused by a sour crop, which is usually caused by a chicken eating something (like twine) that clogs up their crop and won’t break down. It can also be hereditary. Since she had been restricted to the coop with a diet of only feed, it was more likely the latter. Again beware of fairs. When one of the other Columbian Rocks showed signs of an impacted crop. We were pretty sure that was the problem. Another reason to be wary of buying chickens from fairs.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done about an impacted crop. It is possible to put a crop bra on the hens and give them a special easy to digest diet. But that is a lot of trouble for most people. Without those measures, they will probably starve to death. They can however, be eaten as an impacted crop isn’t caused by a disease.
As the Columbians were still Saja and Ellen hens at this point. They decided to bring them to a chicken sanctuary where someone there offered to give them special attention. Probably not the decision I would have made, but a very nice one.
After having problems with our hens and being short 3 hens from our original 11, we decided to order some day old chicks from the local feed store for pickup in mid-June.
We’ll save that story and more of our chicken adventures for the next instalment in our saga…
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