(NOTE: this is a long posting, finishing up the story from when I first bought the chicks until I started writing a day by day entry....)
While the coop was being built, the roosters figured out they were roosters and all hell broke loose. It was as if all the teenage boys in the neighborhood matured at once. They were all now 5 ½ weeks old. Sumo decided he was going to “rule the roost” so to speak and started pecking S.B.’s comb and drawing blood. In addition to beating up S.B., he also decided love was in the air and began mounting Goldie-locks repeatedly, whose expression looked like, “What on earth are you doing?!?” Bob was over building the outdoor coop and as politely as he could, told me to get rid of him because if he was mounting at 5 ½ weeks, he would be a royal monster. I separated him and put him in his own little box only to come out a short while later to find him on the top of it trying to get back into the coop. He had flown up, managed to knock the top off and was trying to reunite with his Goldie Locks, his new girl friend. So I put him back in the box and placed three small boards on top. A short while later, to my amazement, he had knocked off all three boards and was again sitting on the edge. Poor, determined little guy. I feared he’d break his neck first and felt awful, breaking up all his dreams of amor.
To make matters worse, the coop was finished and when I put all the chickens in it, after being delighted with watching them finally scratch in the dirt, Gwen and Runt now tag-teamed and ganged up on S.B. He, however, was having none of it, and to my dismay had pinned Runt to the ground and was pounding him nearly to death. I then had to separate S.B. out and put him in a box next to Sumo’s box in the garage, at least they could discuss their woes with each other without killing each other. Peace was not yet to be had though, for as soon as I separated out S.B., long-time pal’s Gwen and Runt began attacking each other and it became obvious that Gwen was not a Gwen after all. I now was in a panic trying to find them a home. I had put an ad on Craig list, but of course, Craig list was plastered with people who had just found out they were in the same situation as me and I didn’t want my roosters to be raised for a soup pot. I called a man that my neighbor’s suggested and told him I wanted to buy some chickens from him that were around the same age as mine and did he know anyone who would want my roosters? He didn’t want them at first but when I told him that Bob Davis who taught the Chicken Keeping class at NC State said they were healthy and beautiful, he said he’d take them. Turned out he knew Bob and said, “Well, if Bob thinks they are healthy, I’ll take them.” Thank You God! Thank You Bob!
I knew by this time that I also wanted rare breeds. Joey’s farm was about an hour away and it was a regular smorgasbord of chicken breeds. Amazing. I finally settled on a Silver Lakenvelder, an Easter Egger and an Ameracauna. I wanted rare breeds but also wanted the blue eggs that my neighbors had and the Ameracauna and Easter Egger would supply those while the Lakenvelder was a rare breed. I said goodbye to my beautiful males and hoped the best for them and said hello to the new girls. This time I made sure they were GIRLS who became Ellie, Farrah Fawcett Blue Girl and Hawk eye. Ellie was white with a black head and neck and black tale feathers. She was the Lakenvelder, known for their shyness, derived from an ancient mix of breeds like the Egyptian Fayoumi and raised in Lakenvelder Germany and preserved by the Jewish people there. I couldn’t think of a female Jewish name and kept thinking of Elie Wiesel, so I figured Ellie was close enough. Farrah Fawcett Blue Girl was blue/gray in color and looked like she had cinnamon sprinkled all over her. She had a puffy face, full of feathers, a trademark of the Ameracauna breed, derived from the very rare Araucana breed, a rumpless chicken who also lays blue eggs. Her puffy face feathers curled back around her face and reminded me of the wings that Farrah Fawcett had made popular. Hawk Eye, was an Easter Egger, a sort of “mutt” breed that has the blue/green egg gene. She is yellow with black feathering all over her, a large girl with a fierce hawk-like expression on her face, thus she became Hawk-eye, not named after the actor on M.A.S.H. but after a hawk.
I was worried about the introduction to the existing girls as I had heard it could be rough but...it went exceptionally well. I placed them into the coop next to Raven and Goldie Locks as soon as it got dark just as the books said to do since chickens can’t see in the dark and go into a kind of stupor. The next morning, they were all still in one piece, but the three new ones were huddled in a corner of the coop as if they were the new girls at school and were not yet accepted into the click. Farrah was braver than the others and kept approaching, taking a few pecks from Goldie and Raven and then retreating. It took all of one day for them to integrate, most likely because they were still all young and had just lost four of their number and the flock instinct is very strong. I breathed a sigh of relief.
The new ones had arrived hen-pecked and lacking feathers because they had previously been in cages crowded in with hundreds of other birds. Lacking enough personal space, chickens will peck on each other. They were a scraggly looking bunch with bald spots on the back of their necks, their chests and at the base of their tails and had voracious appetites. They ate as if they had been starved and I gave them tons of food, making sure there was a large variety of fruit, nuts, berries, grass, kale, lettuce, mealworms, earth worms and chick starter feed. It was amazing how quickly they all grew. The bald spots turned to little pin feathers which looked really weird and prickly, then to tiny feathers, then to a carpet of gorgeous feathers. The older and bigger they got, the prettier and more varied their plumage came in, displaying a myriad of designs unique to each one. They had also established the pecking order, with Raven at the top, Goldie next (funny to see two bantams bossing around standard-sized birds), then Hawkeye, then Ellie and then Farrah. This too of course, would change, several times....
As I began reading about the other rare breeds, I was coveting a Dorking, a breed known in Roman times and a Black Copper Marans, a French breed that is not able to be exported to the U.S., thus a small gene pool exists here. The Marans are known for laying chocolate-colored eggs and are supposedly the favored egg of James Bond, omelets sometimes selling for $30 each in France. I searched around for Dorkings and couldn’t find any. I searched for several other rare breeds as well but to no avail, but did find a breeder about an hour and a half away who had a few black cooper marans chicks left. When I got there, he had one female and she didn’t look so hot. She was about half the age of my existing chickens. I ended up leaving with her, another who the owner “thought” was a female but who was two weeks younger and then a third gorgeous blue copper maran who he thought was also a female, but even a week younger than the second bird. This meant more work for me as they would have to be kept separate from my birds until they were big enough not to be pecked to death. Also, much better to introduce a small group of new birds versus just one since the existing chickens spread out who gets pecked on and the new birds have some birds to bond with in case they don’t bond well with the older birds. I have found this to be the case, new birds bond better with the group of birds they are introduced into the coop with versus the existing birds in the coop. They must have some sense of “us versus them”.
I named the new birds Chanel, Coco and Mademoiselle. However, in my excitement, I had again broken my new rule, “Don’t buy birds that aren’t sexed.” Coco, the blue copper and my favorite of the new group, turned out to be Claude. Mademoiselle turned out to be Monsieur and so I was again trying to find homes for roosters and no one was biting and worrying about how little Chanel would fit into the big girl’s coop all by herself with no buddies to follow her in. I had moved the small cage (a rabbit cage) with the new birds into the run of the big birds so they could see and smell each other through the bars. Each night, I would lock the big birds in their coop and let the little ones run around for awhile. Eventually I let them all run together and intervened any time the little ones would get pecked on. Hysterically, Claude, the largest rooster, would hop up and peck the older hens on the back of the neck, all except for the most dominant hen who he would run from. It was too funny. Soon, he was chest bumping with Monsieur as well. I contacted Bev Davis, a woman out of Florida who specializes in breeding only Marans and asked her if she knew any one who might want my two roosters.
She put me in touch with a woman in South Carolina who had just called her inquiring about some Marans. The woman had one female Marans and wanted to breed her so she drove down from South Carolina and picked up my two boys, unceremoniously put them under separate laundry baskets inside a dog pen in the back of her sons pick up truck and drove off in the stifling heat. I was shocked she had come so ill prepared and I had no boxes to give her to transport them. I filled some plastic containers with food and water and prayed they would make it there in one piece and would survive. They did and are doing fine.
Poor Chanel though has had a hard time of it. She had been a sweet little girl and now spent her days running from the other chickens, especially Goldie Locks. I intervened again and again and eventually it was pretty much just Goldie who still held a grudge towards Chanel. Each night I would find Chanel on top of the coop by herself and I would sneak in and put her back on the roost inside with the others. She would get pecked mercilously by Hawkeye and I would put my hand in between them to prevent it. Eventually she went into the coop on her own and they stopped pecking at her.
I made sure I spent time sitting in the run hand feeding Chanel so she would get enough to eat. Little by little she began to fit in, but it is obvious that she is still not part of the original group. She also began to bully Raven who had at one time been the leader. I decided all of her suffering was my fault because I had wanted a chicken who laid chocolate colored eggs. (I still have a hard time not saying chocolate covered eggs.) I also decided that I won’t do that again and that five is the ideal number of chickens for my 10 foot by 10 foot coop.
When not taking online classes or posting for prospective jobs, my days of unemployment have been spent sitting either inside or outside the coop, picking grass, or kale and weeds from my garden and feeding them to the chickens. I have discovered some of their favorite things like cantaloupe, watermelon and melon seeds.
Each chicken has her own personality and her own order in the big scheme of things, in the click of the chicken world. They have an amazing variety of vocalizations which they use to warn of danger, tell each other to freeze in place, run for cover, beg for food or tell another to back off or invite another to dust bathe with them. They spend their days eating, digging for goodies in the dirt, flying around, dust bathing, preening and sleeping. Oh, and making future garden fertilizer. What a life.
Watching chickens daily patterns should be an instructional life manual for humans.
As the days turned into months, I began wondering when the first egg would appear. I began calculating it on my calendar, the earliest time was supposed to be around 18 weeks, the latest, six months. I dragged some cement blocks into the run and placed a scrap board on top of them and on top of that, I set a book case sans the shelves. All items I had scrounged from the trash area of the elementary school around the corner that was being torn down. I had also miraculously found several walls and a roof to a chicken coop that someone had torn down and thrown away there at the school. I figured I would somehow piece it together (by myself), but as the 95-100 degree days wore on and on, I abandoned this idea for later. Inside the book case, I placed two plastic crates (also from the school) and inside those, I placed the two small nest boxes that Bob had made for the bantams. I quickly realized though that the standard chickens wouldn’t fit into the bantam boxes and set off one day to hunt down something cheap that would work and be big enough. God has a way of working things out. Before I had even left the neighborhood, I saw three large white plastic boxes on the side of the road. One of the neighbors had thrown them out. I pulled a quick U-turn, and pulled out my tape measure. They were the perfect size. I said a small, “Thank You God” quietly, placed them in my trunk and drove back home, elated. I put them next to the bantam boxes in a sort of quad arrangement and filled them with wood shavings as well which the chickens promptly decided was food and made a royal mess of. I had found two golf balls in my yard (no doubt a gift from the neighbors grandkids who I have repeatedly asked not to hit golf balls towards my house) and put those in two of the boxes. I had read that just about anything would do to act as an egg to “show” the chickens where to lay. I also found a large, white oval shaped rock, about the size of a chicken egg, that I put into one of the other boxes. I now had four nest boxes, two for bantams and two for the standards.
The next dilemma was to fix the roof. I had placed a tarp over it to prevent rain from coming in and to provide shade. However, I quickly found this was a bad plan as each time it would rain, gallons of water would pool in the middle and I was in constant fear it was going to collapse the wire roof in and it took all my strength to push the water up and off the roof. I called a man who had done lots of work on a neighbor’s house. I had a number in my head that I thought it should cost. He came in at half that price. I was elated. He quickly put a corrogated metal roof on half the run, at a slant. Now they were safe from the rain as well and no more pushing the water laden tarp up.
One day, at the 17 ½ week mark, I went out to say Hello to the girls and was surprised to notice a small, brown, perfectly shaped egg in the nest box. My God, someone had laid an egg!!!!! And it was BROWN. I had been hoping one would lay brown eggs, but I couldn’t be sure because I didn’t know what breeds the two bantams were and had only been able to guess after looking through many pictures online. It was like a gift from Heaven. I was like a proud mama. Now I had to figure out who had laid it. I had suspected that they would be laying soon because the combs and wattles on the bantams had turned dark red and they were hopping in and out of the nest boxes. The egg was small so I knew it was one of the bantams and guessed it was Goldie since her comb had gotten loose and had begun to flop over as if she was wearing a beret over half her head. The next day....nothing. The third day, another egg. On the fifth day, another and then nothing for a week. I became very worried that she was egg-bound and sent emails to Bob. He reassured me this was normal and that in the beginning sometimes they start and stop a little sporadically. A full week later, I saw Goldie in the box, straining. She looked like she was going to have a heart attack, she stood up, stiff, neck extended and arched, neck feathers up, she waddled three steps, looking more like a zombie than a chicken and almost laid the egg in my hand, right outside the box. Had I not been there, it might have rolled off the platform and broken on the ground. The other chickens would have eaten it and might have started pecking eggs, a bad habit. It was still warm and much larger than the others, no wonder she was having problems. But now I knew for sure that it was her. I was proud of my little girl!!!!! It was a big egg to come out of such a little girl. Ouch. After she began laying, when I got near her, instead of being skittish and running away, she would stop, crouch down and spread her wings out and let me pet her. Bob told me she was showing submission to me. Perhaps she had gotten me confused and thought I was now the rooster of the bunch. In any event, I stroked her back and told her what a good girl she was and how proud I was of her....
Goldie began laying an egg every day and afterward would announce what she had done with a loud series of cackles. The first time she did it, I was sitting on the picnic bench behind the coop, waiting on her to lay and couldn’t see her. When she started making such a ruckus, it scared both me and the other chickens and they all went running in different directions not familiar with what alarm call they were hearing. They eventually figured it out though and would poke their beaks in to check on her each time she sat on the nest. She laid a total of 17 eggs and then promptly stopped laying and went broody, favoring and delicately rolling the golf ball under her with her beak. When anyone would get near her, she would arch up her neck and and neck feathers and make a little chittering noise. I eventually reached under her and took the golf ball out, in fact, took all the fake eggs out. I have also picked her up and taken her out of the nest box several times, but even tonight as I type this, she is sleeping in the box, with nothing under her, no eggs. Bob to the rescue....he advises it could be two weeks to two months of broodiness and no eggs.
My husband finally got excited about the chickens when they began laying eggs. Truth be told, he would sneak out there every once and awhile and look at them or go into the run and give them food. I was hesitant to crack open the first eggs. I somehow felt like I had stolen them and it felt a bit sacrilegious to eat them. But one morning as hubby slept in, I pulled out some sausage patties from the freezer and scrambled two of the eggs. The first thing I noticed was how hard the shells were, much harder than store bought, probably because store bought are forced to lay eggs constantly with no rest and not enough calcium in their diet to make strong eggs. They probably all have osteoporosis! The next thing I noticed was that the yolk was not a pale yellow color, but a rich orange and the yolk was firm and round, not flat and runny. It was immediately visible that these eggs were much better quality. Heck, they should be, my chickens eat better than I do. I even give them flax seeds for the omega 3’s. Move over Frank Perdue!
The next person to cook eggs was my husband and he too noticed the difference and felt they tasted better. It was not long after that I came across an article that said tests had shown that pasture-raised chicken eggs have 1/3 less cholesterol, much more vitamin A (hence the orange yolks) and are much higher in a number of other vitamins. I forwarded the article to Bob so he could use it in his classes. It had been a question I had asked him earlier and he had not come across any studies yet that had quantified the differences so he was happy to have the article.
The other day, my husband and I were out looking at the chickens and he was remarking that their combs and wattles had gotten red. I told him that I felt either Ellie or Raven would lay next because theirs were the darkest.
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