STILL CHICKEN?

Posted by Bec Pollock on Feb 23, 2012 in ECO-LIVING | 3 comments

Part 1 of Bec Pollock’s guide to raising chooks at home went down a treat…if you’ve been paying attention, you should know why Bec’s family wanted backyard chooks, the type of chook house they wanted, the breeds of chook they were after, and why they decided to get them as chicks. Read on to find out what happened once they picked up the little cheepers!

Looking after baby chicks is a lot like caring for a newborn baby. We had no experience with chooks or chickens before bringing them home, I had not even picked a chook up before! I had only read a couple of books, including Jackie French’s The Chook Book, and done some online research. I had attended a one day ‘Chooks in the City’ workshop with Alyson Hill, organised through Australia’s Open Garden Scheme.

On the day we were going to pick them up, we had the brooder set up, with a safe column heater in the room with it, and the heat lamp ready to turn on when we got home. We had suitable Chick Starter food, and a chicken-safe water container that they couldn’t fall in to. We drove out to the Hot Chicks Poultry in Murrumbateman, about 40 minutes drive north of Canberra, where Anita has a great set up for breeding the several kinds of chicken breed that she has, in both full size and bantam. The babies were so cute, fluffy and tiny!

Chicks are covered in fluff, but are unable to maintain their own body warmth until they grow feathers. They are usually kept warm underneath their mother. This was the main cause of concern for us, we relied on the thermometer we had inside the brooding box, as well as their cheeps (frequent high pitched cheeps mean they are not happy) and patterns of distribution around the heat lamp. If they are huddled close to the lamp, it means they are trying to get warmer. If they are as far away as the lamp as possible, it is too hot for them.

Chooks will also ‘pant’ if they are too warm or dehydrated. We had to dip their little beaks in their water when we got them home, to teach them to drink!

As we had a column heater set up in the area where the brooder box was, we had the choice to either adjust the position of the lamp (up or down) or use the thermostat on the heater. Each week you can adjust the temperature lower, as they grow and have more feathers. Eventually we turned the heat lamp off (especially during the day) and then turned the heater completely off too.

About 6 to 7 weeks old, they started having some time outdoors during the day, and by a couple of weeks later, they were outside all the time. Being Spring, it was still quite cool in the nights and mornings, or we would have moved them outside earlier on, as taking them outside & then catching them to bring them back in was proving an exercise in frustration.

As they got to be a few weeks old, keeping their warmth better, and being more curious about their world, we tried to handle our little chookies each day. This helped get them used to us, and us used to handling them too! One in particular, Tweet Tweet, who was the only chicken newly hatched when we got them, was particularly affectionate and keen to be handled. The others were shy and flighty. With six of them it was hard to know which ones had been handled, plus we didn’t want to get too attached or name them until we knew which were boys, cockerels or roosters, and which were pullets.

We had pretty much already chosen names before we even got them, as it is such a fun thing for a kid to do (and a grown up)! Princess Layer, Tweet Tweet, Spotty, Robot Chicken, Geneviere, and Amelia. To make sure the kids would end up with a chook of their own, with their chosen name, we didn’t allocate names early on. But one that we were sort of calling Princess Layer, quickly became Princess Bossy Beak, and soon became Prince Bossy Beak, because he displayed rooster characteristics very early on!

Trying to identify a chickens sex is a fun and frustrating game, and there are many ‘urban myths’ and ‘expert advice’ available to help you ponder and inspect your chickens to determine if they are hens or roosters. On the backyard chicken and simple living forums, I noticed that people frequently ask for help with identifying the gender of their chickens!

Why does it matter? Well, unfortunately, when it comes to livestock in general, the males often get the bum deal. Roosters don’t lay eggs, they make noise, they can be aggressive and in some places, you are not allowed to keep them. I think roosters can be handsome and protective, they still eat scraps and make fertiliser, and one day we would like to keep roosters.

Not this time, though, and we had decided before getting baby chicks that part of the deal was having to deal with ‘unwanted’ roosters, the plan being to rehome them or my husband would dispatch them, to be eaten. So, we eagerly awaited the time we could tell how many girls we had, hoping to have at least 3 or 4, otherwise we may have to go through the baby chick raising experience again, or try to introduce more chooks to the flock, which can have its own issues.

Who knows how many times we changed our minds about who would turn out to be a girl or boy, besides Bossy Beak who began crowing about 7 to 8 weeks old, and not long after, the boys combs and wattles began to grow faster than the girls. Even though some of them looked very hen like, and we hoped they could still be girls, three turned out to be roosters (we were told there is a 50/50 chance).

As we were going away over Christmas and putting the hens into the local ‘chook motel’, run by Sonya at Canberra Chooks, we needed to make a decision about the chooks. An ad on Allclassifieds quickly gave us a few takers for free purebred young roosters, with the three boys ending up going to a farm at Bungendore, who wanted ‘working roosters’ to breed chooks.

The girls, Tweet Tweet, Spotty and Princess Layer, were a bit lost once the boys were gone, especially during ‘free range’ time in the backyard, where the boys had been quite protective. We still haven’t built a permanent run area for them, so the chooks have supervised outside time each day to eat weeds and bugs, have a dust bath and explore.

We make sure nothing hurts or scares them, and they don’t get into the vegetable garden. In their chicken tractor, we clean their roosting area out daily or every second day, often just needing a pooper-scooping of the wood shavings, and adding this to our compost bin or into an unused part of the garden. We check their food and water each day, taking them scraps and treats, as well as moving their chicken tractor along to a new patch of grass.

Now at about 20 weeks old, we are hoping that any day now the two older of the three chooks will start laying (Tweet Tweet is about 2 to 3 weeks younger and her comb and wattle are not as developed yet). Of course, we didn’t get chooks only for eggs, or we would have bought point-of-lay chooks, probably in a hybrid breed which were purposely bred to churn out large amounts of eggs. Still, it will be exciting to find our first egg in their nesting boxes!

Backyard chooks really are easy to take care of, and a very rewarding form of backyard livestock. They are entertaining, have their own personalities and are a joy to hang out with, letting them embrace their ‘essence of chicken’ as Joel Salatin would say! You can follow along with our story of keeping backyard chooks on my blog, eat at dixiebelles, under The Chicken Diaries.

Bec Pollock, AKA dixiebelle, has been living in Canberra for three years now. Her claims to fame include Kid Wrangler, Wife Extraordinaire, Part-time RN, Wannabe Urban Homesteader, Novice Permaculturalist, Earth & Communities Supporter, Ambling Prepper, Laptop Activist, Rambling Blogger… read more of her musings at www.eatatdixiebelles.blogspot.com.