More New Books

I’ve been using my vacation time from my day job at Citrix to catch up on publishing tasks. In particular, I’m getting Karen up to speed on this whole publishing thing, since she’s got an immense list of books that ought to be made available again.

We’re giving ourselves permission to be eclectic and print what we love, so not all the books will fall into neat categories, but mostly Karen’s line is going to be “adventure books.” We’ve got three basic categories in the pipeline (click the highlighted text to take a look at the books):

  • Boys’ Adventure Books, starting with Percy Keese Fitzhugh’s boy scout novels. The first two volumes of his Tom Slade series are already available. (Amazon’s listing of Tom Slade #2 is incomplete, but it’ll be fine by tomorrow or the next day.)

    • Tom Slade, Boy Scout

  • Amelia B. Edwards’ books on Egyptian travel and Egyptology. If you’ve read Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia P. Emerson mysteries, you’ll instantly recognize that Amelia Emerson was based on Amelia Edwards, a redoubtable Victorian novelist, travel writer, and Egyptologist. Her works are charming and informative. I can’t praise them enough. A Thousand Miles up the Nile should be live on Amazon and other booksellers in a few days.

    • A Thousand Miles up the Nile

  • One Survivor, a science fiction novel I wrote years ago but couldn’t find a publisher for. Well, having my own publishing company certainly takes care of that problem! Read the sample chapters.

    • One Survivor by Robert Plamondon

I’m on the look out for more good poultry and country living books to republish, too, of course. My short list includes:

  • Animal Breeding by A. L. Hagedoorn. Wonderful book, but I’m not sure how to acquire the rights to it, since this would involve identifying and contacting Dr. Hagedoorn’s heirs in Holland.
  • Poultry Breeding and Management by James Dryden. I’m mostly trying to nerve myself up to believing that it will sell well enough to pay for the extra processing the photos will require.
  • The Henyard by Geoffrey Sykes. Similar rights problems to Hagedoorn.
  • Another volume on chicken housing, since this topic holds tremendous interest for people.


More New Books

Thinking About Chicks

I’ve spent a good part of my life thinking about chicks — by which, for the moment at least, I mean “baby chickens.” It’s just about the new year, which means that hatchery catalogs will start arriving in the mailbox any day now.

One thing I’ve been doing over the last few years is popularizing the insulated electric lamp brooder developed by the Ohio Experiment Station in the Forties. I have their paper on it here, and I devote two chapters to it in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. It’s done us proud over the years and I routinely get fan mail about the design. Check it out. Your chicks will be warmer and you’ll use less electricity, and the whole shebang only takes a couple of hours to knock together.

Another trick I’m fond of is using the little quart-jar waterers, but with narrow-mouth glass canning jars instead of the horrible plastic jars the feed store wants to sell you. Glass jars glint like water, and you can watch the baby chicks wander over and peck at the glass a couple of times before finding the actual water. Also, the plastic jars are hard to clean, and they’re not clear enough to see when they’ve gone empty. Just buy the bases and leave the plastic jars alone.

I don’t like bigger waterers (gallon waterers, say), because they have too much water area and day old chicks get soaked, then chilled. The quart-jar waterers are tiny enough that this pretty much doesn’t happen.

If you’re wondering about what kind of breed to buy, try one of the brown-egg commercial hybrids if you haven’t already. Not only do they lay a lot more eggs, but they do this largely by laying in the off-season. If you’ve found yourself having to buy eggs at the store in the fall and winter, a handful of commercial layers should fix this. My personal favorite is the Red Sex-Link from Privett Hatchery in Portales, NM. They are just about as docile as Barred Rocks but lay a lot better.

Hooray for Scratch Feed!

Every time I go out on the pasture, I have to feed the chickens some scratch feed. They come running out, eager for a treat, and it’s really hard to look at all those expectant faces and disappoint them. Besides, it’s a good practice. By feeding your animals kinda-sorta by hand, they come a lot tamer, you become a lot more attached to them, and you get a good look at them, close up and in good light.

I didn’t always do this. For a while, I just kept the range feeders topped off and didn’t feed anything by hand. But the whole exercise of poultrykeeping became mechanical — just another chore. And the free-range egg biz doesn’t pay anywhere near well enough unless you enjoy it. Things got better when I started using scratch feed again.

I use whole grains, usually about a gallon or so. You want to feed enough that every chicken can get some, even the timid and the latecomers, but you want it all to be gone within a few minutes. If there’s still grain leftover from last time when it’s time to give them some more, they don’t much care about the new feeding. Sorta defeats the purpose.

I broadcast the grain into the grass, as if I were sowing the seed rather than feeding it. I like to cover the area thinly, covering an area roughly a hundred yards long and a few feet wide. I try to do this in the greenest, cleanest grassy area available. If the grass is reasonably short, the chickens will find every single grain. Ground grains or finely cracked grains will be wasted, though. They shouldn’t be fed on the ground. The chickens scratch up the ground looking for the grain, so the area looks a little shopworn after a few feedings, so using new patches of grass each time is a good idea.

You get extra credit for using a kind of grain that’s different from what they have all day long. Usually we have whole corn in some of the feeders, so something else — whole wheat or whole oats — works best as a scratch grain. Chickens like variety.

If the chickens seem unusually happy to see you, your feeders are probably going empty. If they act as if you don’t exist, either you overfed them last time or something has happened to put them off their feed — being chased by a dog, for instance.

Most chickens will rush out for a treat (including the ones loitering in the nest boxes and who otherwise make it hard to collect the eggs). The ones that don’t are likely broody or sick. Separating the sheep from the lambs in this way makes it easier to spot the ones that need attention.

White Christmas

The snow continues, but a lot of it has melted. For the first time in two weeks, then hens came running out with their usual headlong greed when I appeared with a bucket of grain. Previously, the thick and unfamiliar snow had made them reluctant to spend any more time outside than absolutely necessary.

The snow should be gone tomorrow, and we’ll be back to normal Western Oregon winter weather — plenty of rain, occasional frosty nights, but daytime highs above freezing.

We have some pullet that need to be moved out of the brooder house. We kept them back due to the unseasonal snowfall. Other than that, things are pretty quiet.

I’m taking advantage of the holidays to prepare more books for publication. The second Tom Slade boy scout novel will be available in the next week or two, plus Amelia B. Edwards’ true-life travels in Egypt in the nineteenth century, “A Thousand Miles up the Nile.” (Amelia B. Edwards was clearly the inspiration for Amelia P. Emerson in Elizabeth Peters’ wonderful series of Egypt-themed mysteries.) And there’s even a novel of mine coming out soon. Stay tuned.

Rescue Hen How-To

I ended up in the egg business because I couldn’t resist a 25¢ hen.

We were raising our very first batch of chicks, 25 New Hampshire Reds we got from Oregon State University. At the same time, a barn owl was raising its own offspring in our barn. One day, we saw one of the fledgling owls flying around at dusk: a beautiful sight. A little later we discovered the body of our sole rooster, which was probably the owl’s first kill. Oh, no!

So I called up OSU to see if they had a replacement rooster. “Sure,” I was told, “and plenty of hens, too. We’re having a hen sale.” I bought three replacement roosters, then lost my marbles and bought $7.50 worth of White Leghorn hens at 25¢ each. This brought our total flock up above 40 layers.

Within a few weeks, our New Hampshires started laying, and our Leghorns started laying, and we had more eggs than we knew what to do with. The rest is history.

And the owl? We guessed that it was a practice kill, since the dead rooster (which was delicious, by the way) didn’t have a mark on him. We did nothing about the owl, and it never killed another chicken. Would that other predators were so wise.

Since then, we’ve bought a great many hens from Oregon State University and a few other places. Older hens are called spent hens in the industry. Some people call them rescue hens. (Why it’s a “rescue” when it’s a hen and an “adoption,” when it’s a cat, I couldn’t tell you.)

Rescue Hens 101

Let’s not be superficial. Hens that have been kept in laying cages always look terrible, but that’s not the problem. Their neck feathers have generally been rubbed off (the feed trough is outside the cage and they rub their necks against the bars when reaching for distant morsels), as have the ends of their tail feathers. Their toenails are too long. Their combs often have a bleached appearance. Their beaks have probably been trimmed. None of this matters.

The problem is that they’ve been cooped up in a tiny cage with (usually) two other hens, and this makes up their world. Drop them into an existing flock of uncaged birds, and they will be bullied mercilessly by the other hens, and will probably retreat into a dark corner and refuse to come out, even to eat and drink. Rescue hens need to be transitioned slowly and gently, left alone except by other hens that were removed from their cages at the same time. Keep an eye out for hens that may be hiding. Driving them out of the corners may help. Be prepared to move some to an isolation ward where they won’t be as freaked out. Later, when they’ve adjusted to a cage-free life, you can reintroduce them to the main flock (preferably at night).

This timidity problem is, I think, the main barrier to success with rescue hens.

They are also clumsy from their long confinement. They can fall into a bucket of water and drown. They can’t make it up onto perches or generally move without stumbling. This wears off completely within a few days, but don’t expect much until then.

The stress of the move will cause the hens to stop laying, and they’ll all molt. Don’t expect a lot of eggs until a couple of months after you get them.

My experience is that, in the fullness of time, they learn to act exactly like chickens that had never been kept in cages. Spent hens don’t lay well enough to be profitable in a normal commercial operation, but commercial layers produce so much better than standard breeds that a three-year-old commercial hen will probably outlay a standard-breed pullet.

Picking and Choosing

There are basically two kinds of spent hens: ones that are culled periodically from the flock because they look like they aren’t laying (or look ill), and the entire rest of the flock, which is gotten rid of all at once. Generally speaking, you want to avoid the culls, who have been selected specifically because something’s wrong with them.

My preference is to get birds from full-time poultry professionals, because they can be counted upon to know diseases when they see them and do something about it. Every time I go to the small-animal auction, I see diseased poultry from backyarders and small farmers. Mostly scaly leg mites. (An auction yard is a place to sell poultry, but never to buy.)

I should point out that one of the reasons everybody buys day-old chicks is that a hatchery that’s run halfway competently can guarantee that you get disease-free chicks (because the eggshell is a highly effective barrier to disease transmission, but this just isn’t the case with older birds.

Connecting with good sources of spent hens may be tricky. Find out who your area’s Extension Service Poultry Specialist is and ask: that’s probably the best way.