Hangin' With My Peeps

Tomorrow my chickens will be 11 weeks old. They now look like full-grown chickens and talk like them too. I'm not sure when that happened; it seemed they peeped like chicks until very recently. The rooster's comb and wattle are now in full coloration, and the other day we saw him, well, trying out his moves. This morning, my husband heard something he thought was an attempt at crowing, but more like "aaarrgheew." Perhaps we have a pirate rooster.

About a month ago, I divided half of the chickens off into a mobile pen inspired by the design from Joel Salatin's book Pastured Poultry Profits. We made a few design changes of our own. The roofing is a nice barn red made from Ondura, an EPA environmentally-preferred product made from 50% post-consumer content (tires, we think). We attached some large lawn mower wheels that slip on and off of carriage bolts, and pick up the other end with a (too) small handle to move the pen to fresh grass.

The chicken tractor, however, has made it apparent that my chickens are pigs. Unable to control their desire to roost on everything, they sit on the feeder and the waterer and poop in everything they consume. Even though articles I read said don't give broilers roosts because they will develop unattractive breast blisters (huh?), I put in a 4-foot 2x2 as a roost, covered the feed with a piece of plywood and the waterer with a chicken wire cone. Somehow, they still manage to poop in the water. I have plans to create a waterer using the push in nipples that commercial growers use in lines of pvc pipe. I read about it in Backyard Poultry, but instead of buying the kit, I think I will just buy the nipples and screw them into the bottom of plastic kitty litter buckets. Fresh water goes in the top, lid goes on, waterer is hung and the chickens have to reach up to peck a clean drop of water from the bottom of the bucket. Ahhh, poop-free beverage. Part of this comes from my natural repulsion to any living thing drinking contaminated water; part of it from my desire NOT to have to treat my chickens with antibiotics because they become sick.

You may ask how I selected which chicks to remove from the flock for certain death. Initially, the plan was to pick the birds that did not appear to be as strong or that had the poorest coloration in their feathers. In reality, as my husband closed me into the coop to catch them and they all ran for a corner, it became which ones were slowest or thrown in front of my waiting hands by their comrades. In the end, I selected 7 Delawares (the white ones) and 5 New Hampshires (the red ones) because while I want to know which tastes best and/or grows the fastest, I think the New Hampshires are prettier and thus want them to live. I'm not entirely comfortable about what that says about me.

Commercially-grown birds are usually slaughtered at about 7 weeks. Sometimes they grow so fast and so breast-y that they can hardly hold themselves up on their scrawny chicken legs. Even though I will have a poor "feed to pound ratio"--meaning the cost of how much feed I am giving them versus how many pounds my dressed broilers will weigh--I have decided to keep my birds longer. Some only have a week left. Others I may keep to 14 weeks. That's twice the life they would have had, and with fresh grass daily along with treats of lettuce from the garden. We may feel sad to see them go, but they had a much better life than the chickens in the grocery store.