Plague Ship

Peaches had a cold last week. She was a real trouper, but it was a long slow decline and she didn't get better until she spent a day flat on her back, sleeping the bug away.

She's fine, now, but the Babygoddess has it. She stayed home from school today, missing the Hallowe'en parade at kindergarten. I took her trick-or-treating tonight around downtown Boulder Creek. She had a fine time but was really ready to be done at a quarter past 6.

Aoibheall has it. She got home this evening after a hard day at work and she sounded like one of the installations at the haunted house.

I felt the clammy grip of this bug latching onto my throat this afternoon. I reckon that in two days I'll be in perfect shape for dia de los muertos.

Chickie Movie

Click here for chickie movie

As Pirate Guillermo and I were getting ready to go inside for lunch, we found a huge spider zipping around. We took it into the chick pen and put it down. It crawled over to the feeder and crouched down in the shavings and the chicks, who were all huddling in the corner freaking out over the noise of the garage door opening, ignored it.

I used the "chick chick trick," where I hold a handful of feed and call "here, chick chick chick." The baby chicks came running to my hand for the feed, and after they had eaten almost all of it, I threw the rest over near the spider. One of the more enterprising among them found the spider, grabbed it up, and a wild game of keep-away ensued until the chick finally swallowed the spider.

I took videos of the chicks hanging out, being chickies. They're cute.

Spiderific!

We kept going back and forth between the stuff we had to do for construction of the coop and watching the chickens. At one point, Pirate Guillermo came in with a millipede and set it down in the pen. It sat there for a minute, curling and uncurling. The chicks didn’t pay it much mind until it started flipping itself around, and then one particularly intrepid little chick snatched it up and started running around the pen, peeping loudly. Every other chick in the pen gave chase, peeping and flapping and otherwise having a lovely time. Once in a while the chick would drop the millipede and someone else would snatch it up and run away and everyone would chase him.

A little while later, I found a gigantic spider and I put it in the chicks’ pen. It took them a while to find it, and the spider himself was no fool. He crouched in a corner, seemingly aware that the second he moved, the chicks would see him and come for him. It was an accident that one of the chicks found him and gave him a little peck. The spider scurried through the mesh of the pen and the chicks were done out of one heck of a feast.

For the rest of the day, every time we found a sizeable spider, we’d stick it into the chicks’ pen and they’d grab it up. I don’t know offhand whether they actually ate the spiders and bugs, but they had a grand old time chasing them around.

Next week, we can let them out of the pen for the first time. I think that might come early. They seem too curious about the world outside to keep them penned up forever.

That’s my chickens – already thinking outside the box!

Our Chickens Are Growing Up

So, as near as I can figure, the chicks were born on Monday, shipped on Tuesday and got to us on Wednesday, which means that as of Friday, they were four days old. And on Friday, they were already growing little tiny wing feathers. They looked kind of fake - all the same length and totally different than the fuzz on the rest of the bodies.

There are a few who are developing weird growth above their noses. I think it's the araucanas. Araucanas have longer feathers around their faces, and the one who's brown and puffy has started to look like a hamster with puffy cheeks and a brown fluffy body.

My next magical trick has been calling "chick, chick, chick" while holding out a handful of food and letting them come to me. As you can see, the Pirate was able to do this yesterday. I'm a little slower. But the snoring trick still works.

Today we framed three sides of the chicken house. Tomorrow we have to do the last side (the tall side), and then put the walls and roof on. We're nearly done with the coop, and it's a good thing, because they're going to outgrow the garage pretty soon at this rate.

I've been amazed that we haven't lost a single one yet. I'd figured that 20% (5 of them) would likely be lost before we realized any benefit from them (either in meat or eggs), but if we continue to exercise the caution and vigilance we've practiced thus far, I think we can keep all of them.

The last irony is that I was having lunch with my co-workers and they were uniformly aghast that I was going to kill and eat some of them. One of them said something like "haven't you heard of Safeway?" I don't like having to explain to people that it's not a terrible thing to like and enjoy the chicks, even while we plan to eat them later. I'm not gruesome or bad. People have been doing it for thousands of years, for crying out loud. So this morning I went down to the feed store to find out if I needed to add a vitamin supplement to my chicks' water, and we got to talking about the chickens. I told her what breeds we got and she was very enthusiastic, saying that they were great breeds - good layers. I told her about my plan to kill half of them at the first of the year, and she nodded her head and said "Oh, yeah. Barbecue. Good idea." Didn't even stop to think about it, like it was the most natural thing in the world. At the hardware store, when the Pirate and I were agonizing over hardware choices for connecting the framed wall to the floor joists, the guy walking by said "Oh, man, it took me $500 to build my chicken coop, and I was trying to be cheap." Everyone here has chickens, and they eat them and it's what people do.

It made me feel much better.

 

Pasted

The chicks are all doing well, running around and peeping and scratching. This evening they have been out of the shell long enough that we could put shavings down on the floor instead of just newspapers. I picked the chicks up and put them in holding boxes so I could clear out the inside of the brooder and have a clear field on which to scatter the shavings. The first chick I picked up had a big plug of poop on its vent; I put all the other chicks with that coloring in a different box.

When I'd cleared out the pen I scattered about an inch and a half of shavings all over the floor. I got to break in my new mucking boots! Then I put the chicks back in the pen and boy, were they excited! They'd been peeping most mournfully in the boxes, but when they got their toes on the shavings it was as though all my manhandling of them had been forgiven. They looked positively gleeful as they dug around in the shavings.

Several of them had pooped in the boxes, but plugchick was still plugged. After I put all the rest back in the pen, I took the one sorry chick upstairs to the kitchen, ran the tap to get warm water, and used a rag and warm water to clean the fouled bum. By the end of the process, the chick was shivering and not really moving otherwise. Poor chilly chicken. Upon being returned to the pen, the wet chick set to preening its down, but within a few minutes it, along with all the others, was merrily engaged in kicking shavings all over the place.

I got curious about their eating habits. I wanted to know if they'd peck at things that were not chick feed. I had an apple for my dessert, and I set the core in the pen. The red peel got a few pecks, but mostly they'd peck once at the flesh and then go wipe their beaks, as if trying to get rid of a nasty flavor. I used a box lid to fetch a spider from the ceiling and set the whole kit in the pen. Eventually a chick came over and pecked at a bit of the web. The spider, which had been motionless up to that point, took a couple of steps. This got the attention of every chick nearby. The first chick moved to peck at the spider and the spider dodged and ran across the pen, with about 15 chicks in hot pursuit. A scuffle not unlike an American football match ended that experiment. All the chicks walked away, but I saw no spider emerge. Aoibheall will be so pleased.

The Chicks Are Here!

Our chicks are enjoying every technological advantage, including this one: remote temperature sensors. Note that the top number says that it is 91.4 degrees in my garage, compared to the next number down, which tells you that in my dining room, we're shivering in our socks in the chilly 72.1-degree air. I have a confession to make - Pirate Guillermo got this gizmo from his parents for Christmas. It tells the temperature where it is, and you can add up to three remote sensors to it. They gave him one, which he put in the basement (for the record, our basement is about 62 degrees). When we ordered the chicks, he ordered two more sensors, and put one outside the basement and one down where the chicks will be. I scoffed at him. I tutted. There might even have been some head shaking. And then, once I got home and we got the chicks situated, I couldn't put the sensor down. I have been carrying it around with me, informing everyone of the temperature in the chicks' pen. Pirate Guillermo is doing a happy "I told you so" dance even as we speak.

And here are the little peepers now. There are basically two types of peepers - pooping peepers and sleeping peepers. It's wonderful how they'll peck at anything. As we were setting up the pen, I was despairing at the amazing volume of spiders in my garage, but perked up once I realize that the little peepers would be thrilled to gobble down a tasty spider.

Note the warming lamps. You can see right in the middle of them the temperature sensor for their pen. It was only 75 in there when I took the picture, and we covered the pen with blankets to trap the heat, because we're supposed to keep them damn near sweltering for the first week or so. It's no wonder they drink so much water!

On the order form, when you order 25 chicks, there's a little box you can check that says "Include a free rare exotic chick." And here he is - the only one who doesn't look like any of the others. At least it's a chicken. For a while, I was worried they'd send us a tiny turkey or a pheasant or something. I'm not sure what breed he is, but I'll check it out and figure it out.

I'm pretty sure this one is a Black Australorp. They all seem to have white bums and white armpits, which I imagine will darket up later. Either that or they'll become maids.

The yellow ones are the araucanas.

This one is either a barred rock or a silver-laced wyandotte. I'm not sure. The blue-headed worm is Peaches' finger.

The Baby Goddess could harly keep her hands off them. She wanted to touch each and every one of them. I let her touch many of them. They're so light it doesn't feel like you're holding anything. They peck at your fingers if you hold them too long, but it doesn't hurt. They're so sweet. I'm sorely tempted to get out the guest bed and sleep in the garage. For crying out loud, I won't even need a blanket - it's ninety degrees!


The scariest thing is that they just fall over and close their eyes. When my girls were tiny, each of them spent her first six months in a cradle next to my bed. I got up a zillion times a night for the first few weeks to make sure she was breathing. These poor chickies have had to put up with me poking them to make sure they're not dead. I knew this would happen. They'd flop over to go to sleep and I'd panic.

So, they're here. And all 26 of them made it just fine. They were thirsty when they arrived, but they've been eating and drinking like crazy. They're mingling and peeping and pooping and sleeping and drooping and in a few minutes, it'll be time for me to change out their newspaper. Man. Can chickens ever poop.

The Chicks Are Coming

This is where the chicks will be living when they arrive. It's my garage. Note the lack of cars.

The structure itself is the chicken pen that the Goddess Minder gave us. The part to the left is the henhouse portion. It attaches to the chicken run portion on the right, keeping the entire thing enclosed. The henhouse's top opens up for access and cleaning. The chicken run does not have a bottom, and is currently using newspaper. After the second day, we'll be using the two bales of pine shavings you see behind the pen to layer litter on the floor.

Inside the chicken coop, Pirate Guillermo put newspapers down. The white bottles with the red bottoms are waterers. The metal discs with holes in them are the chick feeders. The galvanized steel pails to the left are full of feed. Hanging from the top is a ceramic heater. We will probably replace it with a red hamburger lamp.

The cardboard skirt is to keep out drafts, but the more I think about it, the more I think I need to cover the top to keep the heat in. We don't want chilly chickies.

And last, but not least, signage.

 

 

 

Carpentry for Chickens

I've never nailed two pieces of wood together with the intent of creating a permanent structure. In fact, unless you count pictures frames and wall studs, I've never nailed two pieces of wood together at all. And you can't even count that, because you're not technically nailing them together.

Suffice to say that throwing up a chicken coop is a little more of a challenge than it is represented in any of the do-it-yourself literature.

It took us most of the day and no fewer than three trips to the hardware store to get the outside floor joists in. But we also got feed bins and completed preparations for the chicks' arrival this week. Well, almost. I plugged in the heater we got and - bupkiss. Nothing. No heat. *sigh* Back to the feed store to tell them that we need a new element for the heater. They're pretty nice there, I'm sure they'll be good about it.

I've been reading up a lot on chickens and their care and feeding, and I think I'm to the point where I've assimilated a lot of good information, and now I'm just overthinking things. Start over again with a new flock every spring, not mingling the new chicks with the established flock, avoiding diseases and problems like cannibalism...there are tons of things that I think "how on earth did chickens ever survive in the wild if this is a problem?" But I have to remember that a lot of the advice given is for people who, I think, are far more concerned about some performance metric (number of eggs laid, pounds of meat per pound of feed, beauty and showability of birds) than am I. I'm to the point where I'm starting to think that I just need to figure stuff out on my own.

Next step: framing the sides. We have the lumber, we have the plans...we're waiting for the energy!

Chez Poullet

Up until now, we'd been working with a very tenuous idea of what our chicken coop would be. We knew the rough dimensions of it - 6'x12'. We chose those dimensions because we saw another plan we liked online and it was 6'x6' and we knew that wasn't enough space, so we doubled it. But then I decided that the door was on the wrong side, and we wanted more windows, and we were going to put in two chicken doors....long story short, we kept the dimensions and threw everything else about that plan right out the window.

But then I realized that we had the footers sunk and didn't have a clear idea about where the doors, windows, chicken flaps, nest boxes or anything else were going to be. We did have a pretty clear idea of where we'd put the roof, but that was it. The task of figuring it all out was made harder by the fact that when the two of us sat down with pencil and paper to plan, we got really backed up in what to me seemed unnecessarily niggly details, but what to Pirate Guillermo were crucial to his understanding of the whole project. (We've since realized that he works his way from the tiny to the large, and I work exactly the opposite - good to know for the NEXT big project.) We ended up with several pages of scribbled-out drawings and no clear understanding of what we were going to do. It was time to turn to something we were both comfortable with - software.

It turns out that you can plan your entire house in Visio. We made the dimensions of the room, added the door, added openings where we're going to put the chicken flaps (they're the openings on either end) and put in all the windows. Visio really doesn't come equipped for chicken-house design, so they don't have ready-made template features for nest boxes, waterers or roosting perches. We made do with cabinets, barstools and handrails, but you get the idea. The three minuscule little dots sort of in the middle are the electric light and the two hanging heaters. Visio puts them in as features, but marks them badly. They'll all be suspended from the ceiling, with the electricity coming into the henhouse via heavy-duty extension cord plugged into one of the outlets on the deck just above. In the future, we have the option of running the electricity that used to go to the hot tub (on its own circuit breaker) directly to the henhouse, but that's a while off.

I'm looking at it and thinking "Yeah, that's really nice. Our chickens are going to be happy here."

We Broke Ground!

 

Here's a lovely aerial photo of me with my trusty ground-breaker, Ford Mattock Ford, in the middle of doing the last of the post holes for the chicken coop. The coop will be 6x12 on a south-facing slope, with the north end close to the house. It should be well-sheltered and have great drainage. To the far left of the picture, you can see the fallen logs we used as brakes to level the ground a little. The many cubic yards of dirt we managed to dig out of the postholes, as well as bales of stuff raked out of the yard, are forming the basis for leveling the hill a little. Those lucky chickens will have a lovely view of the creek.

 

 

The view from the ground. The yard in the foreground will be fenced off for the chickens' use. The yard in the background will also be fenced off, and there will be two chicken doors, the plan being to let them "tenderize" the ground by scratching and depositing their own special brand of compost, and then scattering grass seed and letting nature take its course while they do the same for the back pasture.

 

The last look at what will be our future chicken house. The floor is going to be made up of "droppings boards" - wooden frames with 1x2s set 1" apart on the top and wire screening on the bottom. Droppings boards are easier on the chickens feet, they keep their waste from building up on the floor where the chickens can scratch in it, and they encourage ventilation so that the chickens are less prone to respiratory infections. We're planning on 6 of them, 3'x4' each.

The footings have been sunken into concrete, so the bottom of the coop is stable. We think that digging ten postholes by hand, and then mixing the concrete by hand and filling them is probably going to be the most physically laborious part of the venture. The next step - putting in the floor joists and framing the walls!