The Broody Bunch

We’re leaving later today for a long weekend in Connecticut!  We’re planning on being back home in time for Sunday evening service at church.  I’m leaving the chickens home alone…

The weather report says that it’s supposed to rain here all weekend.  That’s actually good because I won’t have to worry about the chickens getting too hot.

I didn’t have time to make the new feeder and waterer that I wanted so I had to improvise.  GH cut three holes around the top of a large plastic container.  I filled it with chicken food and put the cover on it.  Then I turned it upside down on an inverted burner cover.  The food spilled out nicely!  I figure that even if they bill out all the food, they can just scratch for it.

The current waterer is big enough to hold enough water for three days but it often gets knocked over or filled with shavings.  So as a precaution, I’ve filled a large tub with water and put it in the run.  It’s too heavy to get knocked over and with all the rain, it shouldn’t ever be empty!

That brings me to my biggest concern.  I’m going to have to leave their run open.  We’ve never had any signs of predators but there’s a first for everything.  I did tighten the fencing on the front door with the staple gun so that it’s not just tacked up with nails.

There’s not much more I can do for them now.  But I’m a believer in faith and prayer.  I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve prayed for their safety here at home as well as our safety on the road!

I’m not exactly mechanically inclined but I am creative.  And my chickens’ health is important to me.  So when I checked on my chicks yesterday afternoon and found them listless and panting, I knew something had to be done right then!

Chickens can suffer from heat exhaustion.  Especially the dark breeds like my Rhode Island Reds.  To cool off, the chickens will stand with their wings drooped down and held away from their bodies so the air can circulate.  If that doesn’t do the job then they will open their mouths and pant like a dog.  If that doesn’t do enough to help them, they will faint from the heat.  If you find a chicken in this state, you may be able to revive it with a cool bath.

I knew that if my chickens were panting that the heat could become dangerous quickly.

I gathered a piece of leftover fencing and nails from the garage.  I opened one door of the coop and tacked the fencing to the inside of the door frame.  The fencing didn’t quite reach the ground.  I found a scrap of T1-11 and tacked the bottom of the fencing to that.  When the opposite door is closed, it overlaps the fencing.  Then I hung a clip fan on the shelf to try to keep the air moving.

It’s not exactly secure but the chickens haven’t tried to test it.  I still close all of the doors at night to keep predators out.  At least my chicks are much cooler during day now. 

No baked chickens today!

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Finally we’ve had a couple of days that I might call typical summer days.  Blue skies, sunshine, and heat.  Young Master and Little Maiden even got some pool time this morning at work.  (One of the perks of being a housekeeper!)

The chickens are surviving the heat alright.  The coop gets a bit stuffy during the afternoon.  I know there’s not enough ventilation so I’ve been going out and opening the big front door for a while.  I have to sit and guard it so no one escapes.

I really need to cut some windows in the back of the coop to open things up a bit.  But we tend to not be mechanically inclined around here so we lack the tools needed for that project.  Maybe I can come up with Plan B tomorrow.

I remember Willhi telling me once to be sure to put the chicken roost higher than the nesting boxes because chickens will always roost on the highest point.  Having the nesting boxes lower than the roost prevents them from messing on their eggs when they start laying.

Good advice.  What I didn’t consider is the shelf in the coop that I keep the bales of shavings on.  It’s over my head.  But that’s where I’ve found all of the girls sleeping these last two nights when I went out to close up their run.  On the shelf and even on top of the shaving bales.

I hope they don’t try to lay any eggs up there.  We’ll have scrambled eggs in short order!

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I didn’t sleep well last night.  I was more worried than I thought about the chickens’ first night in their coop.  I kept waking up and looking out the window to see if their light was still on and if there were any predators lurking in the shadows.  I wondered if they were warm enough or if I should have put their light closer to the ground.

I was in the coop first thing this morning!  The chicks had all gotten back into their brooder under the light to stay warm for the night.  They didn’t seem distressed at all.  I checked the food and water.  All was well!  And there wasn’t one mosquito left in the place!

Maybe I’ll sleep better tonight.

On a side note, GH shot a rabbit that was in the yard today.  It sounds sad but he may have just saved my garden!

I didn’t really want to do it, but it was time!  We moved the chicks outside to their coop today.  The reason?  Two words.

Chicken poop.

I mentioned before that the chicks had started roosting on the edge of their brooder at night.  It was okay as long as their backside was hanging over the inside of the box but most often they would face the inside.  So, in the morning there would be a ring of chicken poop on the floor around the brooder.

You know, I could handle that to a point.  At least all of the droppings were localized in one area, but then the chicks started taking over!  They wouldn’t stay in the box during the day anymore.  At any given time we had one to three chicks wondering around the kitchen.  Then I was cleaning up the floor every five minutes!  I was getting pretty fed up with it and GH put his foot down!  (Not in chicken poop, thankfully.)

We spent a good part of this evening chicken proofing the coop.  We secured the run and tightened up the coop some.  I put shavings on the floor.  Then we moved the chicks out, brooder and all.  We put their light back up to keep them warm during the night.  I gave them fresh water and filled their feeders.  (I got an extra one from Willhi.)

It didn’t take long for the chicks to warm up to their new space.  The mosquitoes made it all worthwhile for them!  The chicks were running, jumping, and fluttering all over to catch them.  Then the chicks started picking all the spiders and bugs off the walls and out of the webs.  When we left them for the night, they were all busy and happy!

I was finally able to clean up the floor and rid the kitchen of most of the chicken dust.  It’s nice to have my kitchen back, but it sure is quiet in here now!

It’s been a beautiful sunny day!  We’ve had some unseasonably warm weather lately.  Especially for Maine.  it’s been in the 80’s today.  The kids are visiting their grandparents this week for spring break.  So I took advantage of the warm day and no interruptions.  Last week I bought a five-gallon bucket of barn and shed paint in a barn red color.  And now our chicken coop is barn red!  I’m sure the chickens will appreciate it.

So you know what they say about Maine?  We only have two seasons… winter and mud.  Well, mud has hit full force.  We’ve got probably 4 inches of rain in the last week.  The ground is saturated and we’ve got standing pools on the lawn.  The good news is that all the snow is finally gone!  That doesn’t mean we won’t get more snow… in fact, it flurried yesterday.  But hopefully I can put my snow shovel away and trade it in for a rake and a hoe!  I’ve got the springtime itch.  I just want to get outside and start on the yard work!  My gardens are under a layer of fallen leaves.  The compost and the gardens need to be turned over.  I need to clear out around the border of the herb garden.  But right now, I sink up to my ankles in mud when a step onto the lawn.  I kind of like having grass on the lawn so I’m waiting for it to dry out a bit.

In the meantime, I’ve priced out fencing for the coop at The Home Depot.  Fifty feet of 5′ fence costs about $35.  100 feet of 5′ fence is about $70.  I think a 7×8′ area should be plenty for 8 chickens.  I may increase it to 10×10′ later on if I decide to get more chickens.  Which, right now, I’m planning on it.  I think I’d like to add some Ameraucanas to the mix.

So now that we have chicks coming, we are trying to figure out where we are going to keep them.  We live in a suburb of the city of Bangor, so we are sort of in the country.  Not like the country I grew up in, but there are trees and critters and birds (other than pigeons and crows).  We have 1.6 acres of land.  Some of that is wooded.  We have neighbors on either side of us.  Our neighbor on the right is separated from us by a wide stretch of trees.  Our neighbor on the left, however, is not separated from us at all.  We actually share the lawn with them.  Our property line runs right down the middle, so we are trying to be considerate.

We plan to have a fenced in run so that we can keep our chickens safe from predators and so that we can keep the chicken dropping mostly contained to one area.  Especially since Little Maiden and I are very fond of going barefoot in the summer.  So, my original thought was to build a small coop behind our garage.  There they would be out of the way and still have plenty of space.  A couple of concerns have popped up, though.  One is how much are materials for a coop going to cost and two is where are we going to put our swimming pool?  We’ve always put our little swimming pool behind the garage because it’s surrounded by trees and offers a lot of privacy.  There really isn’t anywhere else to put it that’s not out in the open.  We’d have to give up the swimming pool.  And then the other thing… Well, to say that our finances are tight would be an understatement.  We could probably scrounge enough scrap wood for a small coop.

I put these questions to my husband.  He asked if I thought the chickens would bother the gardens.  Last spring I experimented with Square Foot Gardening.  I have two 4×4 foot garden frames to the left of the house, close to the property line.  I think the chickens my trample the small plants.  GH (Geek Husband) said that he had thought of building the coop off of the small out building by the gardens.  The out building holds our riding lawn mower, our small collection of gardening tools and odd and ends of the kid’s summer toys.  The out building resembles a small barn so we’ve always called it the baby barn.  "Actually, the baby barn would be a perfect chicken coop," I said.  "Truthfully," GH returned, "we only need it for the lawn mower."  We discussed finding somewhere else to keep the lawn mower.  Then we’d have a ready-made coop.  All we’d have to do is add the fencing, nesting boxes, and perches.  So that’s what we’ve decided on.  We’ll get the baby barn chicken ready, park the lawn mower somewhere else and still keep our swimming pool.  Problem solved!