Rebuilding the Coop

I recently joined the local 4H club and joined the poultry club to learn some more on how to take care of them and how to show chickens. You didn't have to get a chicken for the club, however I wanted to. We didn't have enough room for a seventh chicken, but we had a 'plan'.

The fig tree had lived a long life and was intruding on the other nearby plants. My dad and brother cut it down and took out the stump. My dad flattened out the dirt and moved the coop onto the sidewalk. He took the chicken wire out of the frame, mainly because it was the wrong wire. A raccoon could easily slip his grubby little fingers in and pull a chicken through the wire. We are going with a mesh wire, too small for coon fingers. I think my dad is also gutting the coop and changing where the bars and nesting boxes are so the chickens don't hit their wings on the roof when they jump up. They break their feathers very often doing this, and jumping down hurts their feet. Progress is being made quickly, and I hope we can finish the project before Winter break is over.

We will push the coop itself to where the fig tree was and expand the run all the way to the fence and coop. This will double the size of what we have. The little coop will stay where it is, however, just in case the new chicken(s) are not bullied by our veterans. I want my show chicken(s) to be as little ratty-looking as possible.

Where the fig tree used to be.

A lot of turned up dirt and bugs.

The coop without it's bottom.

Betty got stranded in the box while my dad changed the coop door.

Lots of painting and priming.

The original run repainted.

The Molt

Recently our chickens began molting. Beatrice led the charge, after her Marigold, then Penny, Millicent, Betty, and Opal has yet to start. Beatrice got through hers quickly, but she is still losing feathers every once in awhile. Penny lost hundreds of feathers in a week, but it seemed to make very little difference. It took a long time for hers to grow back, and she is such a dirty girl her feathers don't seem new. Beatrice, on the other hand, is super soft and her feathers are still clean and probably will for awhile.

Betty's back became full of pins and she wouldn't accept any petting.

Mari and Milli lost a lot of weight, and they were already small chickens, so we worried for awhile, but they still ate every once in awhile. They survived, although Milli gets really cold and needs to be held very often. Betty still got the worse molt, however. Before the pins came in she was naked in huge places. One side of her head, her butt, and her back were naked. She got into the habit to come inside during stretches of time because of the cold mist and rain we have had recently.

Penny didn't look as if she lost any feathers and all those fell out in five minutes.

We are really waiting on Opal to molt. Nearly all her feathers are broken in at least one place or have big nips out of them because she is the most bullied chicken. Why do chickens have to molt in the winter? Why not in the summer when they don't need the extra feathers?

Betty's butt became very naked.

The Faeries of the Garden

We recently did a little experiment for Halloween. And, as you might guess, we dressed up the chickens. We made little tutus out of fabric and everyone got one. Our "Faeries of the Garden". I apologize for most the pictures, they were very dark.

So we dressed up everybody and brought them out front, however no one was a fan. At first we though Penny liked them because she just sat there, but once she moved and realized it followed her, she had a mini freak out. Nothing like Betty's though. Betty, an 8 pound chicken, the fattest of our flock, nearly had a heart attack. The Pink and Blue monster chased her and she was a blur running by.  She ran all around the house before we could get her outside. When we caught her and took the tutu off she was wheezing, old girl wasn't used to that much running. But we had to put it back on for the photo shoot. She ran around outside, calmed down for a bit, but then freaked out again and dove head-first into a fern bush. She stayed there for thirty minutes or so and we'd take her out but she'd go straight back and you could hear her talking. "Is it gone?". When we did take it off she went deep into the garden anyways and sat down, she'd had a stressful day.

Opal doesn't mind it.

Mari nearly got her's off.

And she is free!

Poor Betty tormented by this monster.

Penny shines in the sun.

Marigold wondering how to escape again after we put it back.

Betty calmed a little.

Mari and Betty try and escape.

Everyone kept taking breaks to try and pull theirs off, they weren't amused.

I thought she looked best but she didn't agree.

BB was fine with it.

Opal making a break for the neighbor's yard, away from these tutu-making loonies.

Opal never bothered her's but it fell off anyways.

That school yard bully Mari approaches Opal.

Everyone but Penny.

Is the monster still there?

Penny got tired of it after awhile.

Beatrice didn't.

The only two who were okay with it.

Our poor Betty was so embarrassed, she head-dived into the fern bush and didn't leave for thirty minutes, we had to pull her out and then she went deep into the garden and sat down.

I was wrong, Opal got annoyed too. The tutu was too big for Opal and it kept sliding down and tripping her. 

Faeries of the Garden. 

Fabulous Penny in a photo shoot.

Penn was the only one who left it on until the end so we used her for a photo shoot. If she wasn't so fat and out of breath all the time it would have been lovely.

The Queen's Bath

This past Sunday (the 12th), we had to give our tom boy a bath. She is very high maintenance and be a bother. Her chest gets matted and mussed up from food drying on it and her nose is always clogged with dirt. Prior to the wash her comb and wattles were brown and above her eyes was covered in dirt. Her nails were caked with mud and her beak was brown with dirt, too.

Penny before her bath.

She is the only chicken who enjoys foot-soakings or bubble baths, she has a great appreciation for the finer things in life.

"Move it slave, draw me a bath!"

"What the deuce are you looking at?"

"Haha very funny. Who made me a hat?"

"Am I pretty?"

"Yes I am."

"I am very pretty."

Here is our Penny, nice and pretty. She stayed this way until morning when she got out of the coop and into the run. Once I got home I found her chest matted and sticky again and felt disappointed, but she was very pretty while it lasted, not a mark on her. We blowed dried her until she was fluffy. She has the fluffiest butt out of all our chickens and it usually requires weekly baths when the poo dries against her skin and irritates it yet we cut some of those feathers off and it was a little better. 

We bathed her in a big box full of warm water and soap that didn't wear off too much of the oil on her feathers. The water was black after she was done with it.

Sun Bathing and Dust Bathing

It really isn't bathing, is it? 

Dust bathing smothers mites and annoying critters outside the body. Sun bathing just feels good. My family says they have batteries they need to refill once in awhile because they will randomly drop on their side to sun bathe. We have a ring of concrete around the pool and they usually sun bathe on this. We have three dusty spots for the dust baths within the yard including the sandy run. They also appear to love sun bathing on the outdoor couch, don't they?

Silly Opal on Mommy's legs.

Chicken batteries don't last very long.

They fall on their side with their wing and leg out and new chicken owners may mistake them as being dead. Dust bathing and sun bathing are common scares that come to new owners because they don't know what is happening.

Little Millie loves the sun.

They usually dust bathe back to back with their friends-Mari and Millie, Penny and Betty, Beatrice and Pearl(RIP). They also used to love dust bathing in the vegetable beds but they were ruining them so we kicked them out. Penny and Mari are the only ones who don't sun bathe. Penny is too big to go down like that and Mari is from Sweden so she doesn't need help to stay warm. It is hard to even jump up half a foot or sit down on the couch for Penny. Betty sun bathes but rarely. 

Things to Eat

During the summer we get hundreds of peaches from our two trees. The chickens love these, however they get very dirty. They get their faces all sticky and immediately return to the garden. I had to use a wet rag to clean Beactrice's face every day and she would just get dirty again. No one was as bad as her, though. We cut up the peaches and skin them and freeze them for later, we get many big zip lock bags full and never use all of them throughout the year. We have peach cobbler and peach pie and peach cookies even and we always have some left over.

Beatrice really enjoyed peach season and we must have processed one hundred peaches and thrown away triple that because we aren't home for huge chunks of the day and they fall by the minute.

They also enjoy eating maggots. We have two big garbage bin composters that soldier flies lay their eggs in. We don't give them whole dishes of them because rotten forage isn't very healthy for them. We wait for the. Maggots to fall out of the bins and they eat them then. Penny will come running if you open or move the composters. She will only run for food. If she thinks she did not get her fair share she will cry so loud I think our neighbors will call animal control or something.

Worming

Sadly our flock was infected with worms recently. At first we took fresh stool samples and looked at those under a microscope and wormed the flock accordingly. You can't eat their eggs for ten days after this and then you have to worm them again after those ten days, and you shouldn't eat their eggs these ten days, too. It seems like a waste of eggs but the worming stuff is basically poison and it cane be in their eggs.
We use Valbazan and at first the flock was fine but half a year later we have them again. Beatrice stopped laying eggs a long time ago but she recently began molting and we thought she had cancer and was going to die, yet she is still here. We assumed all her behavior was caused by molting when she did not pass. Then we noticed she had worms, so we wormed her, and then Opal got wormed, and then Penny and the others are next. We don't worm them all at once because that would be twenty days without eggs at all. So far it seems to solve the problem but worms aren't something that goes away completely. Wild birds can bring them and they can live in the soil itself.

Eggs, Eggs, Eggs!

I have a lot to update you guys on. Well, first, right after I stopped updating my blog Pearl died. We got Millie and Marigold. Millie is a Cream Legbar and she lays a blue/green egg.Marigold is a Swedish Flower hen and she lays an egg like Beatrice's which slowly got bigger until it is now fairly difficult to tell the two apart. The two got bullied a lot because Marigold wouldn't run, but nobody could catch Millie. Millie was also the best flyer and we had to clip her wings about she flew up onto the arbor we have in the backyard. It didn't change a whole lot, though.

 Millie is the blue egg-layer.

Then we got Opal. It was chicken math, get one chicken, then another, then 2 more, then another, until you have a big flock. Opal was giving my mum big sad eyes when she went to buy the girls some feed and she brought her home. The 2nd coop we had gotten for Marigold and Millie went to Opal and Penny because Penny has had bumble foot for awhile, which is a type of staph infection. She limps and is very half-hearted in her pecks so we thought she'd leave Opal alone. She does for the most part, but will peck Opal once in awhile.

 I'm going to guess you can tell which one is Millie's. The big white one in the left hand is Beatrice's, with Opal's smaller brown one and Betty's gigantic brown egg. Marigold's egg is lighter in color like Beatrice's and is next to Millie's and Penny's big brown egg is also in the right hand.

We get many eggs a week, as shown by the picture above. We don't buy store bought eggs at all anymore. Sometimes we fill up three cartons and run out of room! Betty's eggs barely even fit in the cartons they are so huge. We give some eggs away but keep most of them, we have an egg breakfast nearly every sunday. We also blow out Millie's beautiful blue eggs, by making pin holes in each end and blowing out the yolk. Although Opal recently destroyed around two dozen of those.

 She is from Sweden so she has a really nice beard and muffs.

 Betty with her little ruffled comb.

 Beatrice and Opal looking in on the kitchen.

 Opal loves to sun-bathe on the walkway.
Two of the things first time chicken keepers will freak out about are when their chickens sun and dust bathe. When they dust bathe it looks as if they are having a seizure. They use their wings to throw dust over them, it keeps them cool and suffocates mites and lice. For this reason we add sand and wood ash to their favorite dust bathing spots. When they sunbathe, though, it looks like they broke a leg. As you can see with Opal, they flop over on their side, put their legs and wing out, and arch their neck feathers. It is chicken nirvana. It doesn't last long, though. They are solar powered and only need to recharge their battery a little bit. 

 This is Betty in the house, on the COUCH.
Very early on when we began having the girls live in the outside coop they tried to get inside. Betty mastered the back door first, we used to keep the back door open so we had a little fly net type thing, and she found out how to get around it. She'd come inside, go outside, come inside, go outside. She would come in and sleep on the couch as you can see from the picture. Once she came inside, went up the stairs, went into my parent's room just to check on my mom before going back outside. They think they are house chickens and my mom only reinforced that idea when Betty got bumble foot. The vet said she shouldn't be outside on the concrete so much so we began bringing her in and letting her sit on the desk while my mom checked emails. Now she comes in, goes up the stairs, and sits on the desk alone. If we can't find one of the chickens outside we always find them inside.

Penny with her bustle fluffed out.