I AM JACK BENNY
Posted on 03/08/2010 7:27:44 AM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
MADISON, Wis., March 7 (UPI) -- Keeping chickens as backyard pets was fairly uneventful until the day a hen inadvertently rode to the mall in my car.
My very sociable hens are in a coop at night but roam the backyard by day. One morning, while cleaning my car, I had all the doors open and a hen we call The Mensa Chicken found her way into the garage and into the back seat of my car.
I drove off without seeing her, and without knowing she had hopped up on the arm rest behind me and was looking out the window. I was puzzled why people in cars around me were smiling and pointing until she softly and contentedly chirped behind me and I realized The Mensa Chicken was on board.
Not all chickens are that clever. They are in fact very dumb, which is why you need to learn how to protect them and keep them healthy if backyard chickens are in your future.
Many towns and cities now allow backyard hens and for good reasons -- chicken eggs are rich in protein and far tastier than store-bought eggs, chicken poop is high in nitrogen and a great source of organic fertilizer and chickens are pest-control naturals at gobbling up aphids, grubs and mosquito larvae, which reduces the need to use chemicals in the yard.
They're also great company and follow me around the garden on summer mornings waiting for me to turn over rocks so they can scoop up baby slugs. At sundown, they voluntarily seek the shelter of their coop and sleepily chirp a goodnight to me when I close them up to keep them safe from predators, such as raccoons and hawks. A sturdy coop is a must since raccoons are strong enough to tear off wire, pull boards and burrow under the sides of a coop.
Chickens eat an amazing variety of food, including mice who inadvertently wander a little too close to a quick chicken's beak. I pamper my backyard hens with warm cornbread, oatmeal with raisins and crickets from the local pet store.
My friend Naimhe Jeanne Raia, who has a 10-acre homestead in Freeport, Ill., thrills her 38 Buff Orpingtons, Rhode Island Reds and Bard Rocks with the entrails of deer and cattle.
"We think of it as recycling," Raia said. "Chickens will choose (entrails) over grain anytime."
Online, you can learn a lot about backyard chickens and meet other chicken owners at UrbanChickens.org, which even has state-by-state lists detailing ordinances about keeping chickens. Many communities these days allow a homeowner to keep three to six hens, but no roosters because they are obstreperously noisy -- especially at dawn.
For print sources, my chicken bibles are Gail Damerow's "Raising Chickens" and "The Chicken Health Handbook," both from Storey Publishing. There's far more in those books than you need to know if you're raising just a few hens, but they are well worth owning if you're serious about keeping healthy, happy birds.
If you decide chickens have a place in your future, take a look at McMurrayHatchery.com, based in Webster City, Iowa. McMurrary, and a number of other hatcheries, start shipping chicks this month and have a dazzling variety of breeds.
I'm fond of Buff Orpingtons because they tend to be sociable, friendly birds able to weather the frigid winters where I live in the Upper Midwest. (On the coldest of nights, I still put a safe ceramic heater in the coop and rub Vaseline on the hens' combs, which can be prone to frostbite.)
When I started keeping backyard chickens years ago, I was in the minority. In recent years, however, the ranks of backyard chicken owners have swelled, forcing zoning boards and city councils to reconsider their rules.
I knew things were turning in favor of backyard chicken owners when I saw this bumper sticker on a mini-van at our very suburban mall:
"Wherever chickens are outlawed, only outlaws will have chickens."
Hens get rather loud for a few minutes while they are passing the egg. Otherwise you probably won’t notice the noise.
Chicken coops REEK......
As for as that crazy, scared look in the eyes of hens, I think it has far move to do with the sexual proclivities of roosters than sleep deprivation. They're worst than human males as they never can seem to get enough.
I AM JACK BENNY
I have a little stripey cat who is also in favor of chickens in the yard.
Grocery schmocery, it’ll make your life more interesting, and your food will taste better. :)
Thanks! It took about 2 months to build and it wasn’t terribly expensive.
It has a 2’ wide hardware cloth apron buried around the perimeter so nothing can dig into it. It’s based on six 10’ 4x4 treated posts that are set in concrete, so it’s very durable, windproof, and pred proof. We have coyotes here in the neighborhood that feed on cats and squirrels, and would love a big fat chicken dinner. Lots of egg-eating ‘possoms too. With our predator load here, it made sense to be as thorough as possible. The border along the front just keeps the yard out of the front of the run.
Did you catch the water barrel on the back? It collects the rain from the roof so the girls are never without clean water...
We expect to get about 4 eggs a day from the flock once they start laying, and that is plenty of eggs for our family and our friends and neighbors. Feed is pretty cheap and if you keep a clean coop you generally keep a healthy flock. The run is sand and stays perfectly dry and that helps dessicate everything the chooks leave behind. I also put a bit of feed=grade diatomaceous earth in the sand which accelerates the process and kills any bird lice and mites.
Besides, keeping chickens is as old as man, and it is a lot of fun and quite rewarding to boot...
Looks like chicky ate all the cheese that was within reach and only a little of the bun, LOL! Cute.
Ha ha ha! In Chatsworth, CA, we had neighbors with peafowl. What a racket. We thought someone was being murdered the first time we heard it. They were three blocks away!
I’m sure, but my life is ‘interesting’ enough as it is. I’m trying to hold onto my home after downsizing.
Were I raising a family, especially male children, I’d be more concerned about additives & hormones. For only myself, eh. *shrug*
Fine coop, very well done.
“Do you realize how many people actually think chickens can’t fly?”
Alice Cooper thought they could fly...once...
I used about ten large sheets of graph paper to plan it out. Just a number 2 pencil, a good eraser and a clear plastic drawing scale is all it took. Pretty easy cheese, and I was amazed at how inexpensive this project was, compared to some of the prefab coops that are out there on the market. Backyard chickens dot com has all of the design criteria you could ever ask for, and there are a million different ways of building a coop, and most of them are pretty good.
We also took 2 months to build our coop, and spread the cost out so we could pay cash for all of our materials. No charge cards, no loans and no interest! I also purged my shop and garage for as many materials as I could find to re-use, paint in particular, and that saved a ton of money too.
The other motivation quite frankly is preparedness. If all else fails, we have hens and hen fruit as long as we can feed them, and we have that taken care of as well. In a barter economy, eggs are a valuable commodity....
True, good job!
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