Keeping Chooks

'Helping' to weed the garden

We’d always planned to get chooks.  Even when we were living in town.  When we found out what the local bylaws were and saw that friends had them in their backyard we started planning for having chooks.  That didn’t happen, so it became one of the first things we planned for when we moved out here.

I researched hen houses, I read up about space requirements, I gave Hubby the basic plans for the perfect chook house. When it was finally finished (the chooks were in boxes beside me) we dubbed it the “Chookie Hilton”.

The reality wasn’t quite so flash.  It leaked when it rained, it had holes and gaps, the door made a horrendous racket when opened (it caught on the corrugated iron around it) and you had to climb over the perches to muck it out.

Our first chooks came from a local guy who buys in the hens that have finished their first year of commercial laying.  Some have always been free-range and some have come from battery farms.  These six were supposed to have come from a free-range farm, but I noticed that they didn’t perch - they’d sleep in their nesting boxes instead.  That suggested that they hadn’t been free-range at all.

I had always thought chickens were fairly stupid, I soon learned that this really wasn’t true.  I also learned that they were clever escape artists.  One in particular soon earned the name Houdini.  After a few months, we stopped trying to keep them in their poorly fenced area.  They’d figured out that if they went through to the paddock next to them, they could roam freely and were often seen scratching around on the side of the road.  We didn’t lose any on the road though.

After a few months, one got sick.  She wouldn’t move at all.  I picked her up and put her in the chook house because she’d been staying outside.  She immediately got picked on by the other five.  A friend suggested that she might have been egg-bound.  I hopped on the internet and looked it up. The only symptom that didn’t fit was that she’d been like this for more than two days and was still alive.  There were a number of ways recommended to fix this, although many were contradicted by the next website.  The only one that I had the facilities to do was a warm bath.

So I bathed my hen in the laundry sink.  She perked up quite a lot while in the water but I soon noticed that one of her legs was curled up and she wouldn’t move it.  I dried her off and made her a nest in the corner of the chook house.  Miss 7 made sure that she had food and water within reach.  She lasted another 4 or 5 days before we found her dead.  It was a little upsetting, but as we’d been told when we moved here - if you have livestock, you’ll also have dead stock.

We were getting 3 or 4 eggs a day from our 5 remaining girls.  After a while we decided to increase our little flock.  I got in contact with the same guy and he offered me a cheaper deal if I got a few more.  In the end I bought 10 new hens.  The day before I went to pick them up I found another one of my hens dead.  I didn’t know what she had died from and she’d been partially picked over by something so I didn’t know if a predator had killed her or she’d died and the rats had been at her.

I mentioned this to the guy I bought the hens from and he threw in an extra one for free.  He also said to keep an eye on them. He’d lost a few recently but a feed of dog roll had perked them all up.  This was the first I’d heard of giving hens meat.  They love mince and dog roll, it turns out and the dog roll contains a lot of vitamins and minerals that they really need and don’t always get from other sources of food.

When I got the new girls home, I made the silly mistake of letting them out of their boxes outside the hen house.  We spent several hours chasing them around the paddocks trying to catch them before giving up.

These poor girls were a ragged looking bunch.  They didn’t have many feathers on their necks and none on their bums.  Their bums all looked rather red and raw.  Apparently they’d come from an organic free range chicken farm, but one that locks all their hens in a barn until about lunchtime and the nesting boxes had a high rough front to them and they scraped their bums getting over it.  They looked a bit funny for quite a while when their feathers started growing back - first the soft white downy feathers in little patches and then the bigger normal feathers.

After a couple of months, I had a flock of healthy looking birds.

It took us some time to find out where they were hiding their eggs.  My son found a stash of 30 eggs in a shed - more than half were still okay.  I found another stash of 20 in a pile of cut branches under the trees.  Soon we had more eggs than we could reasonably use.  Hubby mentioned it at work and got several offers.  We were selling at least 5 dozen a week at his work, this was more than enough to cover the cost of their feed.  We got told off for selling them too cheaply - I was happy with $4 per dozen, but our first customer refused this and gave us $5 instead and told us that this was what we were going to charge now thank you very much.

This went on for about a month when I spotted a ferret.  It ran under the house, right in front of me.  I found a dead chook, half dragged under the feed shed and gone altogether an hour or so later when I went out to bury it.  We bought a ferret trap, but hadn’t figured out what to bait it with.

About 8:30 that night, Hubby heard one of the chooks making a racket.  It was dark, they should all be asleep.  Armed with torches, we went looking.  There were none in the chook house, but a pile of feathers suggested that at least one had died there.  We couldn’t find any in their normal roosting spots but found several piles of feathers.

Hubby pointed out to me where he thought he’d heard the chook and when we stopped to listen, I heard something that sounded like eating.  We went over to that spot and there was a tiny ferret eating one of my hens.  Her head and neck had gone already.  Hubby grabbed a broom and a rake and chased after it.  We were standing by the hen, discussing how to deal with it when the ferret came back.  It ran over our feet and started to drag the chook (which was about 4 times it’s size) away.  Hubby lined it up carefully with the side of the broom and whacked it.  It squeaked but got up and ran away.  Hubby chased after it, trying to thump it, he got it a couple of times judging by the squeaks, but it kept getting up and running.

I suggested that we put this chook in a box with the only entrance through the ferret trap.  As we were trying to set this up, the ferret came back and we went through it all again.  The cheeky little bugger had almost no fear of us and was determined to haul away it’s prize.

We set up our trap and left it.  Master 14 wanted to be a part of this, so he stood guard armed with a rake.  He came in after an hour and a half, he’d hit it a few times but it had gotten very wary of him.

The next morning was a silent one.  We couldn’t hear any of our girls at all.  Normally their little noises were the first things we heard in the mornings.  Hubby went out and had a look in the paddock.  There were four more dead chooks that he could immediately see.  There was also a ferret in the trap.

So we caught it, he said, how are we going to kill it?  I’d been thinking about that and was going to fill a fish crate with water and drown it.  That way we didn’t have to let it out of the trap first.  Just throw the whole trap in the crate and leave it for a while.  We were filling the crate and hauling it over to the trap when Master 14 yelled.  He’d picked up the trap to have a look at the ferret and accidentally let it out but had managed to put the end of the trap down on it’s hind legs and tail.  It was hard to believe that this tiny and beautiful little creature had devastated my flock so quickly and brutally.  It took 3 blows to the head with a log splitter before it finally died. These little things are almost indestructible.

It took until late afternoon before I saw any of my living chooks.  A grand total of 3.  In the space of two days we’d gone from having 15 to having 3.  The remaining 3 wouldn’t go near the chook house.  They started perching for the night on the deck.  It drove Hubby nuts as the side effect of this was a small mountain of chook poo on the deck every morning.  You couldn’t leave a door open because they’d come inside and eat the cat biscuits.  If I was weeding in the garden, I’d have help.  If I sat outside, I usually ended up with one on my knee.

We pulled the old chook house down and built a new one.  The second one is completely hole free, it doesn’t leak and is much better laid out than our first attempt.  They started to lay in it, but unless I fed them right beside it or the weather was really bad, they didn’t spend much time in it.

We got a puppy who took out another one.  He didn’t kill her, just broke her neck and left her alive.  Then another got sick and died.  We were down to one.

Hubby wanted any more chooks that we got to be contained so we started work on a big chook run.  At a party we met a couple who were moving into town and couldn’t keep all of their flock and certainly not their rooster.  We gained Howard the rooster and his mother Mrs Wolowitz.  We’re back up to 3.

I saw in a mailing list email a lady who is giving away her flock (and 2 pigs) so we’re picking up 15 new hens on Monday.

Keeping chooks is an interesting pastime, but not one for the faint-hearted.