All Cooped Up

If you aren't familiar, there is an entire rearing period for raising chickens. Those sweet, fluffy, chirping little darlings that come through metered mail can't go hanging out in the frosty mornings and brisk afternoons of April in the Inland Northwest. We chose 3 Deleware's and 2 Speckled Sussex's for our first flock.

Really, it isn't until they are around 9 weeks old that they have enough feathers, and the weather is warm enough, for the fledglings to cope with the real world, and boy-o, it doesn't come fast enough!

The fluffy little fluff-puffs are pretty darned cute, until you hear their sad chirping of loneliness, or even worse, symptoms of pastey-butt. Pastey-butt, as I've learned to call it, is a terrible chick ailment where their poor fluffy bottoms get, well, pastey and clogged. Look it up. At any rate, it can be a deadly condition if not managed well, and really stressful to see these little babies sick. I was fortunate not to lose any of my chicks to this, but I certainly did my time of cleaning and caring. And by-gum, we made it!

We did our research and read about handling our new layers to help them become accustomed to us, and also to accustomize our dogs to them. We have two big-ish dogs, if you haven't tuned in. One is a German Shepard/boxer, the other a plott hound/boxer. Neither of them are good with cats, which led us to be concerned with chickens. Let's be honest, chickens are food animals. If cats look like food to our dogs... well... We worked pretty hard to establish that acknowledgement and overcome it. I remember there being a few moments in history where my personal confidence of my canines' relationship with our chickens was much higher than those of others. Call it foreboding. Call it a mother's love.

By week 4-6, baby chicks aren't as baby or sweet and cuddly anymore. They are kind of in that same world we were in during junior high, with our braces, first pair of glasses, and awkward haircuts. These 'chicks' (really though, let's call them what they are, Pullets, by now) are stinky, ugly, noisy, and really good at jumping out of the big rubber-maid container I call a brooder. I'd like to say I've made it through this phase and won't look back, but let's be realistic, chickens don't have an 18 year weening period. It'll happen again.

The SketchUp version.

I'm sure it was around this time that I started to get really enthusiastically serious (I'm sure John helped motivate) about setting up a chicken coop. We couldn't get it ready fast enough! Sure, I'd been planning it using Chief Architect, and conversely John and been planning it using SketchUp, as he is prone to do. I'm pretty sure mine came out better.

My goal was to build a chicken coop very cheaply, to buy the least amount of material possible, to use our various accumulation of skills and experience to make it happen. Was I successful? I'm not sure. I've read of people who have created coops for much less than we did (I think in the end, we spent over $150). I'm not sure if this means we aren't resourceful enough, we don't hoard enough, or if it just costs more that I would expect. I guess it is what is it is. I did get to be lead carpenter, laminate guy, roofing installer, and finish carpenter on this project though. I liked that.

We had some of the 2x framing materials on hand, but still needed to buy a few sticks for the roof and nesting box, I think. The most expensive components for us were the 4 concrete footings that we used for setting the floor framing. We also needed to buy the Pressure Treated lumber used for the floor framing of the coop. We wanted the coop to be easy to clean, so we used some leftover EPDM from the pond liner for the flooring, then found a remnant of laminate from a flooring center for the wall linings. We had rigid foam insulation left over from other projects, lap cedar siding from the house, asphalt roofing, and OSB for the doors too, so all that was left was the mesh for the windows/vents.

I'm pretty happy with the way that the coop turned out in general. I think that there is plenty of space [in the coop and nesting area] for 7 chickens (we've only maxed out at 5 so far). The one thing I wish we had done differently is the enclosure/run. If I had designed the coop to sit off the ground at least 24", it would have given me an add'l 10 square feet of enclosure space = free fresh air for chickens.

First night in the new coop.

Once those chickens hit the 9 week mark, we were almost ready to house them in a new coop. I put a red light inside to help offset the winter light and promote laying... in spite of the fact that you can't expect hens to lay their first egg until around the 21st week. Chicken rearing is a good exercise in patience and stewardship.

Have you built a coop of your own? Do you aspire to? How does it turn out?

Counting your Chickens After They Hatch

In the realm of our chicken adventures, I last left off at receiving our chicks via snail-mail.

Since that day, we've had epic failures but also overall success with our flock, which led us to "expanding" it the following spring... sound a bit vague? Probably because there are too many details to cover in an introductory sentence or two.

And away we go.
When our first batch of chicks arrived I was away on a business trip (I believe this was mid-April). This was a complication for obvious reasons, but I'll cover a few of them anyway. First off, the deal between John and I was that the chickens were MY deal, MY responsibility. He didn't want to get stuck doing all the work and worrying about these creatures that I insisted on obtaining... no matter how interesting and productive they were. This was the deal when he agreed that backyard chickening would in-fact occur. I thought it was a fair deal. The guy takes care of a lot around our house, I could understand why he wouldn't want to be saddled with one more thing. Deal.

So it was ON. I placed my order for chicks, and in doing so learned that the heritage breed that I'd been dreaming of (Delawares) were fairly rare, frequently back-ordered, and often unavailable. The only available date that would ensure them to get to our house as spring chickens would be to order them for an arrival date where I would be out of town on a business trip. After many guilty feelings and apologies, I asked John to receive the chicks and was terrified that the tiny little babies would be left on our doorstep in the cold and he would come home from work to find a box of chick-cicles.

My worries were unfounded, as it turned out. Also, my appreciation for the USPS was raised 10-fold. They handled the handling of our package wonderfully and were great about notifying us when the package arrived in not only a friendly but easy manner. John was able to retrieve them without any hassle and nursed them for their first week while I was away.

I didn't get to be there to see our next package of chick opened this year either (we hosted an order for 3 households). On both occasions John has been around to receive the box, for which I am thankful, but I am still intrigued to experience that first moment when you open your long anticipated box of chicks. It might not happen for me any time soon... our coop is full up.

Now, once you have a bunch of new chicks in your house, you are faced with a very real task... how will I house them and keep them safe, healthy, and happy?