Chicken Network Saves The Day.

Chicken Network Saves the Day

In my last post I mentioned that herself and I have ‘kept tabs’ on some friends and acquaintances who also keep chickens … or were seriously thinking about it … for the purposes of gifting spare hens, trading stock, and getting practical advice from direct sources, rather than relying on the gurus of the interwebs. Our own little ‘chicken network’ so to speak. Little did we know we’d be using it so soon and for reasons completely unrelated to our own birds!

There are times when I feel that my wife and I over think and over analyze before taking on a project, and honestly, chickens are pretty easy to raise. So much so that they are considered a ‘gateway’ livestock amongst the homesteader types. Well … it turns out there are reasons I am glad we over think these things!

When we had purchased our first chicks, and by that time had researched every aspect we could ad nauseam, I was surprised to discover that we had to sign a form stating that they were not pets and we were required to take a minimum of a half a dozen. You can read about it in an earlier blog post. There are reasons that various towns do this! It is the height of foolishness to buy a cute baby chick as an Easter gift for a child! It is also a bad idea to attempt to keep chickens in the house, they are messy, loud, and destructive (even more so than our two cats and our pig). By requiring a purchase of a half a dozen or more and signing a form it helps reduce impulse buys. Also, there are several classifications of chicks a person can buy at the feed store in the spring. Most notably, sexed and unsexed. Also, laying hens or meat birds. You should really know what you are doing and make decisions about what kind of chickens you are going to buy before stepping in. I know it is hard to resist the peeping little fluff balls under the heat lamp, but you must not buy on impulse! Now, we have a fully functional coop and run and know what we’re doing, so if my wife came home with a couple of chicks, I would be mildly upset over the impulse, but we are equipped to deal with them.

My wife has an acquaintance in the Jersey City/Bayonne area of NJ. For those of you not familiar with this area it is a very urban section of NJ right across the river from NYC. Sure, it is houses and duplexes, but all with tiny, tiny yards if they have yards at all, close neighbors, and all the appropriate city ordinances. My wife’s friend is an animal lover with a huge heart who basically lives on her own in such a house. Although not in daily contact with my wife, she would keep up with the posts on Facebook.

My wife got a call from her one day out of the blue. She was upset and the city was going to fine her if she didn’t get rid of her chickens.

WHAT CHICKENS???

My wife called me at work and told me that her friend had eight chickens that needed a home and what could we do about it? I lovingly told her that it would have to be a discussion for when I got home. Once I arrived home I plied her with the detailed questions of what happened, what was the back story, what were her expectations, and every aspect I could consider to get ahold of the situation.

Turns out … it was something like this. Her friend had apparently wandered into a feed store in late spring. Most of the baby chicks they had were sold and only a few left … now getting onto a week old, the feed store would have to put them down. She had scooped up the eight unsexed chickens of various breeds, purchased a heat lamp and feed, and took them home. She had intended to put a small coop in her tiny, tiny yard and keep the chickens. Now, about five weeks later, she still had no coop, the chickens were four roosters and four hens, some bantam, some full size. One rooster had turned feisty so she locked him in the bathroom, and the neighbors had complained to the city so she was ordered to remove the illegal livestock. That … is the situation that befell us.

Well, upon hearing the initial story, I was reluctant to take a non-heritage bird into our flock, but figured a hen or two extra would be no matter and we’d adopt out the rest via the chicken network. But with four roosters??? If we took a hen or two for ourselves, we’d be making bad chicken math even worse. So, we made the calls, posted the pictures that her friend had sent us (beautiful birds!) and tried to convince anyone to take eight birds including FOUR ROOSTERS.

 

Nearly all of our contacts said no. They either had too many roosters, thank you very much, or lived in a town that allowed them to have chickens but no to roosters.

But then we reached out to Bruce.

I briefly described Bruce in my last post, but let me go just a little farther. As I had said, he is a tall, burly man that comes from old farming folk. Within his large, somewhat gruff appearance dwells the heart of a man truly at one with nature. He’s an animal lover, but also with the old school farm sensibilities that allow him to deal with animals on their level, rather than anthropomorphizing them into ‘little furry people’. When my wife and I had been around to visit him a season before we discussed with him the possibility that he may want to start his own flock and that we’d be glad to help. And so, when we called on him over this issue we discovered that his old beloved dog, who was of great age, had passed on and it grieved him sore. He was happy to have this new project full of life and agreed to take the birds.

We coordinated the exchange where my wife’s friend would come by with the adolescent flock and Bruce would pick them up. Once my wife’s friend saw the gentle soul of the tall man before her she knew her babies would be in good hands.

Chicken network came through, TWO friends were helped along the way, and eight young chickens had a hope of a good life on the farm. My wife and I were most pleased.

Epilogue: Bruce is also a bit of a photographer and we’ve had a chance to see the chickens grow along the way. Being from farm stock, he has his own chicken network and was able to trade one rooster for two hens that helped balance his own chicken math. We’ll check in with Bruce again a little farther down the road!

Coq Au Vin's Sentence of Execution is Commuted.

Coq Au Vin’s Sentence of Execution is Commuted.

With herself and I now looking forward to the warm spring days, we were turning our attention to preparing the ground for gardening. This is where Coq Au came as near to a death sentence as he had gotten ever before. My wife is normally a confident woman who is perfectly capable in all ways of confronting any situation out before her. One of the reasons that I love her so much is that she has a personality strong enough to keep me from getting away with bullshit. She moves through her life that way with a strong sense of rooting out other people’s bullshit and feeling perfectly comfortable with calling them out on it. Somehow, she was unable to bring that wonderful trait of hers to bear in dealing firmly with our rooster. She was reaching a level of being upset over the prospect of facing an angry rooster every time she wanted to enjoy her yard and the company of her chickens. She let me know these feelings with no uncertainty and my heart was breaking for her over the dilemma and for Coq Au. With a torn mind, I continued to drag my feet over the issue.

Then a miracle happened. The miracle of life.

There comes a time in a young hen’s life when she gets ‘the urge’. Now that our hens were grown and the warm weather was fast approaching, little Mildred went ‘broody.’

When a hen goes ‘broody’ it means they are inclined to sit on their eggs for the purpose of hatching chicks.

What it REALLY means is that they will pluck out their own feathers near their chest to create a bald patch to make skin-to-egg contact for greater warmth for their developing babies, eat extra food to put on a little weight, get a glossy, far away stare, flatten themselves out over the clutch of eggs, growl and even peck at anyone that comes near them, and stay there for 21 days. They will turn the eggs three times a day. They will hardly get up to poop, eat, or drink. That is tough on a chicken. There is no knowing when a chicken will go broody except to say they won’t do it in cold conditions, realizing that baby chicks might not survive. There is no way to stop a hen from going broody if it is determined to do so (except through some cruel methods that don’t always work anyway) and there is no way to force a hen to go broody if they don’t want to. Some breeds are more inclined to go broody than others, some individual hens are more likely to go broody than others.

Some things that you should do if your hen goes broody and you want to encourage her: make sure she has food and water close by so that she can take nourishment without straying very far. You should move her to an isolated spot from the flock so that she will not be disturbed. The trouble with this is that with a young and inexperienced hen, of she is disturbed, she may lose interest and give up sitting. Sometimes, even if everything is perfect, she will give up after a few days anyway because it was just too damn hard. Mildred seemed determined.

We didn’t have an isolated place for her, so here is what we did and the mistakes we made along the way, one of these mistakes is what led to Coq Au ultimately being spared from his very near brush with execution.

We reached under her and felt two eggs, we immediately put two or three more under her. We left her alone in the nesting box for several days, making sure she did have food close by. We wanted to make sure she was going to ‘stay the course’ on her own and we had no suitable place to isolate her. That was mistake number one.

Chickens are social animals. You can spend days and weeks just observing the political structure that makes up to proverbial ‘pecking order’. What we never knew was the social nature of ‘motherhood’. It seems, that as soon as the ladies hear that one of their own have gone broody, they all stop by to offer words of encouragement and ‘help’. It goes sort of like this … when another hen drifts into the coop and sees that ‘thousand yard stare’ of the broody hen, she says “oh … are you doing that thing? Here, let me help you, since you’re doing that ‘thing’ anyway!” and she’ll climb in on TOP of the expectant mother and lay another egg. The mother will at some point scoop that egg under her along with the rest. The laying hen then feels like she is ‘participating’ in the miracle of birth and ‘helping’ the flock. In other words, the lazy bitch is dropping off her responsibilities with someone else who will do the work for her!

So, after a few days, poor Mildred was sitting on FOURTEEN eggs. With no way to tell for sure which were her original clutch or not, I could only remove a few of the eggs, the only ones I could be ‘sure’ were new and not already several days into a potential hatch. It was then that I decided to affix some plastic garden fencing around her area to help isolate her. Since her box was smack in the middle of the nesting boxes, it was particularly awkward and the whole while I was afraid I’d be making too much noise and disturbance and interrupt her concentration. To my horror, I discovered that in spite of my best efforts, and in spite of the fact that it did REDUCE the frequency of interlopers into her private space, some determined hens still managed to ignore the FIVE OTHER EMPTY nesting boxes and go through great length to crawl past the barrier with some difficulty to continue to ‘help’ poor overburdened Mildred.

So, I had to let it be, but as the days passed, it was easier to identify ‘new’ eggs under her. Unfortunately, with so many eggs under her, more mistakes happened. With so many eggs to turn, sometimes one or more would become broken. That was okay, because there were far too many. Also, some of the eggs might not be fertile. You know that old expression about counting your chickens? Well … yeah.

While this was going on, herself and I figured there would be more babies than our flock would absorb, so we decided to inform our little chicken network. We reached out to Tara who had a few chickens to let her know that if ever we had too many hens, we would gladly gift her with one or more if she wanted and if we had extra. We reached out to a neighbor with a few hens for the same reason, and we reached out to Dave, and old service buddy of mine who had a lot of land and a small flock way up in upstate NY, although ferrying hens six hours away seemed a difficult task. Also, we reached out to Bruce. Bruce is a tall, burly man who lives on a farm that is about 12 miles away. His family grown hay, straw, corn, and it has been in his family for generations, but they currently had no livestock. We discussed with him the prospect of getting chickens and if ever he wanted to start his own flock, we’d be happy to donate a few chicks and even a spare rooster if we were faced with the likely hood that one was born. We could only have ONE ROOSTER and we’d have to find a home for a spare (whichever one we felt was the ‘spare’ wink wink). So, with several potential sources for spare birds to have homes, we felt confident of a successful future for any chicks born … ones that might be staying, and ones that might have to go to good homes.

This next bit is really important. Don’t miss this bit … it is about how Coq Au Vin’s place in our home was assured.

A broody hen will only get off of the nest for about fifteen minutes at most. Take some food, stretch the legs, then back at it. If ever she spends too much time away from that nest, the eggs will become cold and the developing chicks will die. So, sometime after two weeks into sitting, I came home from work, went out to give treats to the flock, and Coq Au was giving me ‘the look’. He stood there still as a statue with malice in his eyes. Just standing there in the run, next to the nesting boxes. Glaring his hatred at me and all things human. I fed treats to the girls and glared right back at him. I steeled myself for the day’s inevitable onslaught … but it didn’t come. He clucked his usual angry clucks at me. Flapped his wings mightily, and glared. He didn’t move and inch toward me and when he’s in this state, he normally goes on the attack immediately. I was perplexed. “What the hell is wrong with YOU?” I testily demanded.

A realization struck me. I took a quick ‘beak’ count. Mildred was OUTSIDE IN THE RUN! She had slipped past the enclosure in the coop and couldn’t get back in to the eggs! Unlike what you’d expect from a nervous mother, she was happy as a clam to be out and having treats. Coq Au Vin, on the other hand, stood there stone still, KNOWING something was wrong and trying to do everything roosterly possible to alert me that life was at stake. He not only was already good at protecting his flock, but he was even trying desperately to protect the unborn!

I had no time to muse over his feelings at that moment, it was 5:30 or so, the sun was high, and temps in the coop were still hot, so I hoped against hope that we still had a chance. I scooped up Mildred in a hurry and gently deposited her on that nest. There was one cracked egg in there (something that had happened before a few times) so I snatched that egg out and hoped even some of the ones left had not gone cold!

I disposed of that egg. A cracked egg will not hatch, and I was horrified to discover that there was a developing chick (now passed on, of course) in that shell. That … out of everything else that had happened before or has happened since … was my most heartbreaking moment. To this day, I have never told my wife about what I saw in that discarded egg, and even now, nearly two years later, my heart still hurts over it.

Still no time, I called my wife and begged her to tell me what time she had last checked on Mildred. She told me four o’clock. That means that Mildred slipped the fence sometime AFTER four o’clock and was returned by 5:30. That window was still too long, but narrow enough that I help out hope that some of those babies had survived.

There were too many eggs to take care of. There were a couple of broken ones along the way. She slipped off of the nest for some undetermined amount of time. This was a disaster … to think she might have gone through three weeks of that for naught.

Four days later, it was Saturday. Herself was at work and I checked the nest. Mildred was off of it again, but standing right there. I looked carefully and one of the eggs was ‘pipped’! There was a live baby chick being born before my eyes! I took the above picture and sent it to my wife. It would be hours before the baby would emerge, so I left the situation alone.

The next day, my wife and I checked to find one healthy, happy, baby chick! The TV show Vikings, being popular at that time, we gave this new life the strong name Lagertha, one of the strongest female figures on the show!

We waited a few more days hoping more would hatch, but it was not to be. Two days later, Mildred emerged and proudly introduced baby Lagertha to the world. Unlike the first generation, Lagertha would be raised by a real chicken mommy with the sun on her face and grass under her feet. We were disappointed that there weren’t more hatched, but relieved that new life was possible for our little flock.

I quietly disposed of the unhatched eggs, without deep investigation into the contents.

I had given my wife the details of Coq Au Vin’s actions that day. I told her, and she agreed, that it didn’t matter how much of a douche bag he was determined to be, he was the best rooster for our flock that a person could hope to own. I don’t need him to be nice or gentle, I need him to be a good protector to those girls.