Raising chickens continues to be an avocation laced with
travail. After the Grizzly Bears
destroyed the chicken pen and ate all but 3 of the 14 chickens summer before
last, my enthusiasm for hen fruit had diminished, but last winter I continued
to feed and water our remaining two hens (the rooster was picked off by another
predator) along with 4 hens given us by a friend. Only two of those made it all the way through
the winter. We came home from a few days
away to find a trail of feathers (or maybe 2 trails as the varmint came back for
seconds) leading from the chicken coop up the stairs and around to the front of
the house, disappearing in the more commonly traveled area. By late spring, I found the last headless hen with
the crop gone.
At that point, I had pretty much decided that chicken
ranching would not be my niche. My
daughter Carolyn, however, decided that it would be hers. She ordered some meat
hens along with a “Surprise Special” consisting of an unknown number of chicks
as well as geese, ducks and turkeys. All
told, she had upwards of 40 birds when a little girl she babysits killed some
of them. The mother was so apologetic
that she ordered another “Surprise Special” which booster her numbers to around
70 birds. The attrition rate was pretty
dramatic with all of the young children, dogs, and predator birds around, and
by the time they butchered the meat hens, they only had 35 or 40 left. A friendly fox would come visiting a couple
of times a week and carry away one bird on each trip, so their feed bill
decreased a bit, but they were still left with 2 geese, a turkey, a duck and a
flock of chickens.
Carolyn asked if I would like some of her birds and, after
careful consideration, began recouping the chicken pen. (OK, only a small chicken joke) I decided that to stand up to the bears, it
needed to be a sturdy pen, so I put an 8 foot chain link fence complete with a
top rail all the way around the coop and began to cover the roof of the pen
with chicken wire. Sadly, I ran out of
chicken wire and left a few holes in the top, but I judged that it should be sufficient
protection.
It actually takes from about April to November for hens to
mature enough to begin laying. The
investment in birds and pens and feed and water make it only attractive if you
aren’t concerned with the per-egg cost.
Buying 5 dozen eggs at a time from Costco is far cheaper than raising your
own, and you don’t even have to walk in the chicken poop, but since Carolyn had
already borne the expense of raising them almost to laying age, I gratefully accepted
5 hens and rooster from her and put them in my new safe-and-secure chicken
enclosure. A sweet lady at work had
grown tired of her declining flock, and gave me her last two hens, so all told
I had 7 birds.
Three nights ago I put on my snow boots to wade through the icy
accumulation and down the hill to the chicken pen to bring the anxiously
waiting chickens the kitchen scraps. I
opened the garage door and cackled to the silence, but got no answer which was
unusual. I looked down the hill to see a
large black shape in the corner of the pen.
I took a couple of steps in that direction, and a huge owl tried to fly
out of the pen through the unfinished roof.
He finally succeeded and landed in a Cottonwood tree, silhouetted in the
moonlight, and grudgingly watched me remove the two headless hens that he had
killed.
I locked the other chickens in the hen house and the next
day in 15 degrees and 10 inches of snow, finished the roof on the chicken pen.
I believe they are finally secure, but the owl has put a
little fear in them and they have only been coming out far enough to eat a
little snow before retreating to the safety of the hen house. The temperature is dropping and there were no
eggs tonight, so I had a serious talk with the girls. They need to do their part in all of this
effort.
