Category: Chickens/Poultry

Chicken Predators Return, For a While

Yipe! Starting a couple of weeks ago, something was killing my chickens, as many as five per night. This is not only heartbreaking, it’s the sort of thing that can leave you with no chickens at all in very short order.

The dead chickens were in various places, but always on the fenced pasture, or so I supposed. A strong predator like a bobcat can leap a fence with a dead chicken in its mouth, leaving nothing behind but a splash of feathers where the kill took place. Coyotes are much the same. Hawks and owls eat the chickens without moving them, and raccoons will go either way, sometimes dragging the dead chicken long distances, sometimes not moving them at all.

I searched the perimeter of the fence and found no obvious game trails leading onto my chicken pasture, which made me wonder if I didn’t have a problem with owls. I readjusted the electric fence to make sure there were no high or low spots where a raccoon could squeeze through. Making a truly raccoon-proof fence is difficult, because, unlike other animals, they have no fear and probe the fence for weak spots. I found one trail leading to where a chicken had been killed outside the fence. Otherwise, nothing.

Next, I pulled out my snares. I don’t like using snares except on a well-defined game trail that’s leading straight to my chickens, since I have no quarrel with critters that are leaving my chickens alone. I started with the one trail leading to a chicken kill, and put a couple more in likely spots. After several nights I had caught two raccoons, and the predation ceased.

I’d lost many more chickens than could possibly be eaten by two raccoons. This doesn’t mean that there were lots more chicken-eating predators: it means that the raccoons killed far more than they could eat. Nature is neither nice nor efficient!

I used to rely on the federal trapper for this sort of thing, but Benton County has become very stingy on supplying matching funds to the wildlife control program, and this has taken a toll on everyone’s livestock. So I learned how to do trapping myself. Snares are particularly easy to use, and if you do it right, cause no collateral damage. As I said, you want to find a trail that’s used exclusively by predators who are commuting to what they imagine is a 24-hour chicken buffet. I learned most of my techniques from the works of Hal Sullivan. His snaring book and video are unpretentious but good. I recommend that you buy both, and his snaring starter kit, if you have a predator problem. This is the sort of activity where you want to exercise due care from the start.

I don’t like snares very much, but it’s a lot better than having all your chickens killed. I’m responsible for the well-being of my chickens, while the predators are quite literally crossing the line to get at them: they have to brave an electric fence.

Staying up all night and shooting the predators is an option if you can manage it: I can’t pull all-nighters anymore. Some people have excellent luck with livestock guardian dogs, which intimidate predators. But fencing alone generally isn’t enough.

Winter Pasture for Grass-Fed Eggs

A lot of us live in climates that are mild enough that “winter pasture” is a valid concept. If you can manage to keep a green range going all winter, you can achieve that grass-fed goodness year-round. So what kind of winter pasture works best?

Cool-season grasses for free-range chickens. Traditionally, cool-season grasses have worked very well, with cereal grains (oat, wheat, and barley) providing good, reliable, palatable, rugged, nutritious cool-season ground cover. Here in Western Oregon, it’s not too late to plant such things. A lot of people live in warmer climates than I do, and they’ll have even better luck.

The problem with these annual grasses is that they die in the summertime, so you’ll want to sow something else by the time the cool-season annuals start to give up the ghost. This is where a grass-legume mixture shines, since clovers do very well in the season where cool-season annuals don’t.

Perennial grasses for free-range chickens. I haven’t seen any perennial grasses that leap out of the ground after a fall sowing the way wheat and oats do, but of course they don’t turn up their toes and die as soon as summer arrives, which is a bonus.

Permanent pasture for free-range chickens. Having a pasture ecosystem with a maximum amount of biodiviversity, that is tuned to your local micro-climate, sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? This is what happens on permanent pasture, where you never plow, and just accept whatever grows. All you do is mow (and re-seed bare spots). Start with whatever will create a good ground cover quickly, and allow other species to creep in. You’ll soon have a mix of multiple grasses and legumes. That’s what I do.

Grass height for free-range chickens. chickens are fairly low-slung. Tall grass restricts their movements, provides concealment for predators, and gives them opportunities to lay eggs where you’ll never find them. There was some research done on the topic of grass height, way back when (don’t have the reference handy, sorry), and cutting the pasture at two inches worked best. Six inches was too high.

It’s not edible if it’s not green. Chickens will happily eat bright green pasture plants, but when the green starts to fade and the plants go woody, they lose interest.

A lot of this information came from Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser. If you want to do anything more demanding than feeding your chickens out of a sack, you need this book. Over 600 pages of information and wisdom about poultry nutrition, including a chapter on green feed and pasturing. Written in the Fifties, when people still knew about such things, but when modern nutrition had been figured out, too. Highly recommended.

Happy pasturing!

What To Do When Your Chickens Lose Their Feathers

What do you do when your chickens start to lose all their feathers? Nothing, if it’s fall. They’re molting and look revolting. Nothing you can do about it.

Chickens grow a new set of feathers every year, usually in the fall, so they’re ready for cold weather. They can also molt in response to stress.

My older hens are in various stages of molt. Many of them are missing the feathers on their necks, others are missing wing and tail feathers, and a few over-achievers are missing both. In most cases, unsightly pinfeathers (the stubs of the new, emerging feathers) are making them look even worse.

Hens generally stop laying during the molt, which is why the fall is the worst season of the year for egg production. Winter is actually better, so long as you keep the water flowing and the feeders full and the hens aren’t exposed to too much wind or rain.

In the commercial confinement industry, the hens tend to get seriously overweight, and they lack the environmental cues that outdoor hens get, so their bodies tend not to realize that it’s molting season. Getting them back into trim sometimes requires that their water be withheld for several days and always requires that they be given little or no feed for up to two weeks. But we’ve never had these problems on free range.

Some people think you should feed hens extra-high protein diets during the molt, but I’ve never seen the point (or any research supporting it). A diet that will support high egg production will support high feather production.

It’s Not Too Late For Fall Brooding

Fall brooding is at least as easy as spring brooding, and maybe easier. The weather is usually drier. The season is winding down, so there are fewer demands on your time. And there’s plenty of time for the chickens to become fully feathered and completely winter-hardy before the nasty weather sets in.

Pullet chicks brooded in October will be in full lay by April.

Mostly, fall brooding is just like spring brooding. If you’ve been brooding all summer long, you’ll need to drop your warm-weather habits and remember how you did things in early spring.

Some tips:

  • Many hatcheries hatch year-round, but the off-season selection is smaller: mostly commercial strains. That’s okay. Buy your high-producing hybrids in the fall, and your exotic breeds in the spring.
  • When in doubt, buy from Privett Hatchery in Portales, NM. I buy all my chicks there. Mostly Red Sex-Links, but their Barred Rocks are very nice birds.
  • Take a good look at your brooder before the chicks arrive. If you’re using heat lamps, always use two or more, never just one. You can get heat lamps as small as 100W, or you can use floodlight bulbs instead of heat lamps, so you can use more bulbs without using more electricity. (I’ve stopped using 250w bulbs. Too hot. Two 125w heat lamps or 150w floodlights are better.)
  • Remember to use a brooder guard this time, even if it was too hot in the summer.
  • Beware of rats. Fall is a good time to replenish your bait stations (I like the big weatherproof Eaton Rat Fortress bait stations). Yes, I know poison isn’t nice, but having rats eat your baby chicks is far worse.
  • Have a plan for dealing with the chicks when they get big. Don’t assume that you’ll magically come up with a winter henhouse for a group of chicks once they outgrow the brooder house. Winter construction projects need advance planning. At a minimum, plan to keep the chicks in the brooder house, and allow two square feet per chick.
  • If you need to bould a new henhouse for your new flock, read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, the only book that gets the basics of chicken-house construction right.
  • If the chicks are going to be confined most of the winter, buy a non-cannibalistic strain of chicken. Crowding tends to bring on outbreaks of cannibalism, while free range tends to cure them — but range often isn’t available in the winter unless you’re in a mild or hot climate.
  • Last but not least, buy a copy of my book, Success With Baby Chicks, which goes into all the considerations very thoroughly.

All of which makes a long and slightly intimidating list, but when you do things by the numbers, your fall brooding will go like clockwork. Try it and see!

Fancy New Brooder House, Almost Done

Our new brooder house, described in a previous post, is now close to completion. Its main architectural feature is a concrete floor and concrete pony wall to make it ratproof and rotproof. It’ll probably be standing 100 years from now with minimal maintenance. We put broad eaves front and back to keep the rain away from the building. We’ll add rigid foam insulation from a stash we discovered in the barn (thank you, previous owners!). In our climate, insulation is optional in a brooder house, but it’s nice to have.

A word about the siting of the brooder house: it’s facing north, with trees to the south of it. With a regular chicken house, in our cool climate, you’d want to spin the whole setup around 180 degrees — house facing south, with trees to the north — because it’s hardly ever too hot for chickens. But with a brooder house, you want to avoid wild temperature swings and exposure to storms. A northern exposure has steadier (though cooler) temperatures, and the storms in our neck of the woods come up mostly from the south, so the site is protected. The brooders themselves, heated by heat lamps, make up for any deficiencies the site provides in the way of temperature and light.

The roof is ordinary corrugated steel roofing over plywood. The roofing is thin and cheap but should last at least 30 years with no maintenance, and maybe twice that long.

The brooder house is big. We’d need a building permit, or at least an agricultural exemption, for anything bigger than 200 square feet. The house is 196 square feet. We can easily brood 200 pullet chicks for six weeks. This gives us a theoretical capacity of 1,600 chicks per year, far more than the 600 or so we actually plan on brooding. On the farm, over-capacity equates to freedom. It put you in charge of your schedule, rather than having it dictated by your equipment.

The door hasn’t been hung yet, but it’s a spiffy old beast with a lot of glass.

The three windows would not be enough on a henhouse, but will be fine for a brooder house, where the chicks need more shelter and less ventilation.

(If you haven’t already, you want to check out the sample chapters of Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, to get the pitch for highly ventilated chicken coops for all seasons. The book has interesting things to say about brooder houses as well. Though it’s from 1924, it’s the best poultry housing book on the market, because it’s the only one that gets the fundamentals right.)