Coop, part one

Our friends came over this weekend to help us with the coop. Dave and I had no idea how long it would take or how complicated it would be. Well, it's not terribly complicated, but neither of us have any experience with this type of thing. Luckily, our friends built houses with Habitat for Humanity for seven years, and they have real tools and real experience, and they know what they're doing! We were also lucky to have someone in charge of refreshments:Without our friends, this coop would be crooked and rickety and just kind of sad. Happily for us, they actually enjoy doing this stuff and really did most of the hard work! Dave lifted and sawed some things, at least. I mostly sat and was impressed...

Here are some photos from Sunday, showing some of the progress on the coop.

We recycled part of the old shed and turned it into the floor of the coop. It took a lot of scary nail removal and cutting out notches so it would fit snugly within the beams. This is what we didn't realize would take so long. It fits perfectly, though!Here's the floor going in!
Two sides and the floor in:

This will be where the chicken door goes:
Dave put on the front and built in some nest boxes on Monday, and will continue to do more as we have time. I'll put up more photos when the weather cooperates a bit better with us. Watch this space!

No luck

This morning I decided to take the chickens out for a backyard field trip. We have fortress-like raised beds designed to keep out dogs, chickens, and toddlers. Since they don't have soil in them yet, they conveniently double as chicken playpens. I locked the dogs in a bedroom and brought the squawking birds out one by one. They were a bit nervous at first with the new environment, but pretty soon they started exploring and got comfortable. Dave and Jonah came home and I let the dogs out, and we all watched the chickens run around - some of us with a more benign interest than others...

This gives you a good idea of the setup. The board in the middle is a makeshift roost, which they didn't really use. In the grass behind the pen are some beets I'd brought out for them to try, but the chicks didn't have any more interest in them than we did.


After a couple of rainy weeks, there is a lot to do in our yard. We were preparing to get started on some yard work when suddenly Bella lunged at the pen, causing a big commotion. We quickly shooed her away, and it looked like all she'd done was put a dent in the chicken wire. So Dave and Jonah went to get the staple gun and secure the wire, and I wheeled out the lawnmower. I had a few feet mowed when suddenly Dave shouted at me. One of the birds is dead!

Oh no!

I ran over, and little Lucky was laid out motionless, eyes closed, not breathing. Just like that, one moment all were tootling around, the next, five birds were huddled on one side and Lucky was gone. We didn't know what happened - we hadn't been more than ten feet away from them, always within sight, and they hadn't been outside more than thirty minutes. So shocking, a warm pretty spring day, happy chicks outside for the first time, and then this memento mori...

We have two theories: perhaps Lucky had a little birdie heart attack after the Bella incident; or maybe somehow Bella got hold of her through the wire in that split second and broke her neck. Terrible! But there is nobody to blame but ourselves for being not vigilant enough. Bella is, after all, a bird dog, and this is probably the first bird-dog thing she's done in her life. She's really a very timid thing for being seventy pounds of muscle. Everyone, including the two year old, is dominant over her at our house, and she usually lets everybody else have their way. But those chickens are just too flighty and fidgety for her to ignore...
Poor bird. Once we removed her from the pen, the other chickens appeared to forget about it and spent the rest of the day happily pecking, preening, and napping. We, however, didn't forget so soon - we lost our only named chicken! The little one! The one people actually ask about! But, well, we did get six because we knew we'd probably lose at least one, and we did have chicken for dinner just the other night, so it's a bit silly to get too maudlin about it... Still. A bummer way to start the day. Lucky was buried in our side yard with a few words to send her on her way, and now she must be peep-peeping in chicken heaven. Lucky, we hardly knew ye.
Well, we must soldier on...Some personalities are beginning to show in our chicks. One of the Buff hens is feisty and will suddenly squawk and fly straight towards another bird feet first. The other birds all scream and run around and nothing else appears to happen until the next time she gets a wild hair feather. The rooster likes to lie in the grass and fluff up his feathers and is still the most timid of the bunch. Everybody cuddles up together for naptime in one big mass, even preening each other's feathers. I really enjoy these birds. I hope we don't lose any more.

For a while today we thought Zoe might be guarding the birds, because she'd get after Bella if she got too close to the pen (so did we), but later we figured that she just wanted to be the one closest to the exciting chickens.

The weather was lovely today, so tomorrow we're on for building the coop. Once the coop is done, our chicks will officially move out of the laundry room and into their own place! We have friends coming over to help, and our biggest helper is going to be on the job, as usual.

One of these kids...

I've had this song running through my head whenever I go take a peek at the chicks:



What do you think?




I think one of these kids is a rooster, don't you? If so, he's the biggest scaredy-cat rooster I have ever met. The madam in the top photograph will let me pet her, has jumped out of the brooder and cruised around the laundry room floor (it's a good four-foot drop), and likes to check out the camera. The beauty below runs screeching away when I take the top off of the pen to change their water. This guy is the one whose grody legs and feet I showed you a couple of weeks ago. He's grown into them, though, and now I think he's pretty. Fickle, I know.

Last weekend it was 84 degrees, Dave framed the coop, and we were all set to finish it tomorrow. Today we woke up to snow, and it is hailing hard as I type this. So, it will wait another week. Here's how it looked earlier today:
We are going to put a gutter up on the metal roof and then attach a rain barrel - that way we'll have a way to catch and collect clean rainwater that can be used for the birds and for the garden. Normal roofs slough off material that isn't safe to ingest, so the water collected from our house's gutters can only go on the ornamental plants around the house. It's really exciting to get some permaculture stuff going in our own backyard.

Now we just have to wait for spring to come back.

New digs

Our two-year-old is already on the job documenting the chicks' new space. They were starting to get crabby with each other, flying and squawking, so we decided to extend their living quarters. We'd been using half of our dog's old training crate, so we brought the other half in, and Dave put up a nice little bridge between the two. The chicks were hesitant at first, but our friendly
and curious Buff Orpingtons led the way, peering through the bars to see us, checking out the new space. Their old water bowl was constantly full of the wood pellets we use for bedding, so I got them one that would be less likely to get clogged, as well as needing fewer changes.
Because of the new layout, we now have a much better view of the chickens, and they have a better view of us. Since I don't have to pick anybody up, I'm over my slight revulsion and back to thinking they're kind of cute. All of the birds' feathers are coming in and looking lovely. As you can see, most of the photos are of the Buffs. The Rhode Islands are much shyer and will go hide in the corner when I take the lid off for photographing.

I also added a pile of pine shavings for the birds to take dust baths in, and they got right to it. They are so calm now that they have extra space. They putter around, lie down in little nests they make, stretch and preen, and generally seem happy.

There is someone else in our household who is very, very interested in the chicks' development:Any time we open the door, she's right there with us, whining, wagging her tail and licking her chops. Our lab ignores the birds, our cat ignores the birds, but the border collie is obsessed. As is usual. Her way is to be very annoying with anything new, constantly following and bothering it, and then her curiosity is finally satiated and she can coexist peacefully. I hope this will be the case with the chickens.

The chicks are three weeks old now, and we are having more fun with them than ever. I had been hesitant about adding more members to our busy household, but this is more entertaining than TV ever was!

A confession

I am a little bit grossed out by chickens. I know, it's ridiculous. I eat them and their eggs, and now we have six living in our house! But they just kind of give me the creeps.

In college I once house-sat for friends who had a flock of about fifteen chickens. One of them had been hurt the day before, so Jeff showed me how to keep her warm and separated from the group...and then showed me where they kept the chopping block and cleaver, just in case she took a turn for the worse. They were concerned about her well-being, really, and I pretended to be cool with the whole thing, but there was no chance in hell I was going to chop the head off of that chicken. I did end up having to spoon water into her beak and try to hand-feed her, and then, when she didn't make it, to dispose of her body. This sounds terrible, but touching that bird at all when she was alive was very difficult for me, and I really had to gather up all the bravery I had to pick her up and put her into the compost. Ugh. Poor thing.

But I don't think that was traumatic enough to make me feel this way; it's more just a visceral reaction to the feel of the skin (too reminiscent of a cutlet), the reptilian eyes and those scaly feet. Do you know, by the way, that people actually eat chicken feet? And I respect that. If you're going to kill an animal, you might as well use as much as you possibly can. But still.We took this little/big chick out today for some photo ops. The paper is there to catch the poop, of course - as they get bigger, their output gets bigger too. She screamed and flapped when I picked her up, and I shuddered some, but once I had her out, she calmed down, looked around, and was quiet. Jonah and I sat by her and she walked up to us and even let us pet her lightly. She walked under my legs and looked around interestedly. Buff Orpingtons are supposed to be very docile birds, friendly even, so I was relieved to see her conforming to type. I'm thinking that as long as I don't have to pick anybody up, we will all be happy.

This is one of the birds that we think could be a rooster, but I think some of the aggressive behavior is related to growing out of that brooder. Don't worry, all that "aggression" entails is a flying hop across the brooder and some loud peeps, just a big kerfuffle. But we'd like to keep things as peaceful as possible in order to set the tone for later relations. We have plans to expand their living space this weekend.

Another issue might be boredom, so I'm going to go out in the yard and get a clump of dirt for them to worry. It's warm today, so the dirt shouldn't chill them. I did some research and found it's really not safe to take them out for another few weeks yet, so this will have to do. Other than the crabbiness with each other, they seem to be doing quite well at two weeks old. Just four more weeks indoors!